Rita Maldonado remembers the sensation of flying through the air.
“It was slow motion, like the movie ‘The Matrix’ slow motion. I remember thinking ‘If the sides of the truck hold up, I’ll live. If the sides get crushed, we’ll die.’”
Maldonado, 27, is a river guide in Haines. Last October she was an Army sergeant traveling in a convoy 17 miles south of Kabul, Afghanistan where U.S. forces had taken a highway from the Taliban. The armored truck she was riding in hit a roadside bomb.
The blast sent the truck more than 200 feet, flipping it four times. Maldonado suffered nerve damage in her face and sciatic nerve and injured her right hand clinging to her seat belt. All eight soldiers in the vehicle survived.
They were fortunate, she said. A week earlier a fire that engulfed the cab of an armored vehicle in a similar explosion on the same road killed everyone inside.
Maldonado is working out memories and “what-if” scenarios as she runs the roads and trails of Haines, speaking thoughts into a voice recorder. Later, she edits the recordings as part of her recovery, work she hopes to publish in a book about coping with post traumatic stress disorder by running.
Maldonado was honorably discharged in January. Responding to an Internet ad, she came to Haines for her first guiding job. “Being on the river is very calming. It’s very mellow. It’s perfect.”
The Fourth of July fireworks, however, rattled her, and on the day of her interview this week, she had slept fewer than two hours.
She said she has recurring nightmares about bleeding to death, getting shot in the face or accidentally shooting comrades. “These are the things I dream about, the things that didn’t happen, but could have.”
Maldonado said she was in numerous firefights in Afghanistan, including being pinned down 36 hours on a mountaintop in one skirmish, and in another where three bullets pierced the iced-tea bottle in her backpack. During a tour in Iraq, the building where she worked was hit by a mortar that failed to explode.
Maldonado served one tour in Iraq, 2004-05, with the 1st Cavalry Division, and one in Afghanistan, 2008-09, with the 10th Mountain Division. She has a Purple Heart for injuries suffered in Afghanistan.
Maldonado grew up in Pennsylvania. She won a scholarship to attend the University of Chicago, but instead joined the Army six days after the Sept. 11 attacks. She had previously considered the military for the challenges it posed, and the terrorist attacks helped make up her mind. “I thought I could save the world, but I didn’t think I was G.I. Joe.”
The challenges she expected weren’t there and boot camp was easy, she said. “I was just really super disappointed when I joined,” she said, describing what she and other troops joke is “the kinder, gentler Army,” different from the Hollywood portrayals that had influenced her in high school.
“G.I. Jane (a movie starring Demi Moore) is a funny thing because it set me up to think I was going to do all this cool stuff.”
After training as a Korean linguist, Maldonado shipped to Iraq in 2004, where her year-long deployment was split between intelligence and searching female Iraqis. “I did exactly what every other private does. I said, ‘I want to be in combat.’ And then when you get there, you realize that it’s miserable. That wasn’t like the movies.”
Between searching the body cavities of Iraqi women for weapons, mourning the deaths of friends and witnessing the corruption and treachery of Iraqi “allies,” Maldonado was ready to leave the Army.
“You see one young person die, and you’re done,” she said. A mechanic friend killed two weeks before a scheduled visit home to see his son was particularly hard, she said.
In Iraq, civilians on a building project didn’t show up for work the same day the building was mortared. In Afghanistan, soldiers in the national army deliberately missed while shooting at Taliban insurgents.
Military policy designed to prevent a decline in numbers prevented Maldonado from leaving the Army when her date came up in 2005. She re-enlisted and headed to California to train as a Chinese linguist, hoping that would keep her away from the battlefield.
But in 2008 she was sent to Afghanistan, and ended up on demanding missions with infantry units and special forces teams. She was chosen because they needed a woman, and she could keep pace with them. The teams traveled at 8,000 feet in the mountains, often out for weeks at a time, carrying 80 pounds of gear and body armor and regularly drawing enemy fire, she said.
Soldiers questioned assignments and officers sent them into the field pointlessly, she said. “When we rejected his ideas, (the commanding officer) said, ‘At least we’re doing something.’”
It was on such a mission that she recalls searching a home in a remote valley and seeing hatred in a young boy’s eyes. She turned to another soldier and asked, “Damn, do you think he’s going to shoot at me later?”
A few days later, the team was fired upon while walking. That was when her backpack was hit by the bullets.
Maldonado didn’t sleep that night, and later that week, on a different assignment, her vehicle was blown up. She was sent home less than two months later. As soon as she was back in the United States, she started her paperwork to be discharged.
Still, she wouldn’t dissuade others from joining the military and she wouldn’t change her history if she could. “Everyone should do some kind of service, not necessarily war or the military. If you want to do something, do it. (But) I don’t recommend war to anybody.”
Since discharge, Maldonado has filled her life with travel, running and adventure. She went to Copper Canyon in Mexico to help a friend run a 50-mile foot race. On arriving, she decided to compete and placed seventh among women, finishing in 11 hours.
Running has been her therapy. And it’s helped. Upon her discharge, she said she found herself getting angry quickly and drinking every night to help her sleep. Fellow soldiers she’s stayed in touch with have struggled with drinking, violence and arrests.
A military counselor didn’t help, she said. “All she wanted to do was hug me.”
But a fellow soldier and friend, from whom she pulled shrapnel, has been coping successfully with his trauma. Through meditation and focus, he’s been processing his emotions. He can sleep at night, she said, but he works all day sorting out his experience.
Maldonado is hoping running will do the same thing for her. She registered to run a marathon in Maui this fall and will attend an outdoor recreation school. Then she’ll return to Haines.
“This is one of the most incredible places I’ve been in my life. It’s the most mellow, amazing place.”