“I sat up and said ‘Who in the hell is calling me at 5:47 in the morning!”
When he heard the voice of a medical staffer calling from an aid station in Afghanistan, he simply uttered: “Awwh (crap)!”
He said he was told there’d been an IED explosion and his son Ben “had some leg wounds and probably a concussion.”
His son was put on the line, but he was drugged and after a few brief exchanges, the line suddenly went dead.
Gibson sat there numb and lost and finally told his wife:
“Benny’s been hurt!”
Ben Gibson, who’d been a “tough as nails” defensive end for the Chaminade Julienne football team said coach Jim Place, was three months into his second U.S. Army deployment in the Middle East. The first had been to Iraq and had been mostly uneventful.
This was different.
As part of the 10th Mountain Division, 2-14th Infantry, he had ended up in Afghanistan’s remote Paktika Province.
“We were about four miles from Pakistan,” he said. “There were no real roads, we got there by helicopter. We were in a valley and we weren’t there even three hours and we were attacked.”
It was a Taliban-controlled area and after that initial assault they were continually targeted with rockets, ambushes and roadside bombs.
On May 15, he said he was part of a surveillance mission that planned to get near enemy hot spots and use drones to collect information.
“Yeah, that was our intention,” he said with a clipped laugh that was echoed by his dad, who sat on a nearby couch in Ben’s home just outside St. Paris.
The centerpiece of the room — hanging from the wall above the mantle — was a framed citation and his Purple Heart.
Gibson told how, on that fateful day, he was riding in the back seat of an Oshkosh M-ATV (all-terrain light utility vehicle) as they traversed a dried out river bed. He was directly behind the driver. His good friend, James Johnson, was sitting in the front passenger seat.
“We were the third vehicle in the order of movement and the first two vehicles took a route I didn’t like,” he said. “I told our vehicle commander about it and we decided to go a little farther so we wouldn’t have to go down such a steep grade.
“And then….We found a bomb with our truck.
“It was a doozy!”
They had gotten within five feet of a device packed with an estimated 250 to 300 pounds of explosives and detonated by an insurgent with a firing cable.
Gibson said he broke the heels of both feet, shattered a vertebra and suffered a traumatic brain injury (TBI) when his head slammed into the vehicle’s roof.
He stumbled out of the severely-damaged vehicle, as did the driver and another soldier in back, neither of them severely injured.
When no one had seen Johnson, Gibson ignored his injured feet and made his way back around the vehicle and found his pal slumped in his seat.
“At first I thought he was dead,” he said. “The explosion had blown the Blue Force Tracker (computer) into his chest. I got him out and he ended up with injuries similar to mine.”
They were evacuated by Blackhawk helicopter. And once he got his initial medical treatment and was sedated, Gibson was put in phone contact with his dad.
While Vernon was relieved his son had survived, he was at a loss once they hung up:
“I just sat there on the edge of the bed feeling helpless. When your son is across the world and he’s hurt and there’s nothing you can do, it’s the worst feeling in the world for a parent.”
‘I had to find something more’
Gibson grew up on Shull Road in Huber Heights, went to Saint Peter Elementary School and then went to CJ, where he not only played football, but stood out in field events for the Eagles track team.
“My bread and butter was the hammer throw in the outdoor season and the weight throw indoors,” he said. “I qualified for the Nike Indoor Nationals as a senior.”
After his 2007 graduation, he spent a semester at the University of Cincinnati and then returned home and ended up working at a mom and pop pizza place and living with his grandmother after his parents had split up.
“I was 19 and a part-time pizza cook,” he said. “I realized I had to find something…more.
“I knew I needed structure in my life and I figured the Army does that.”
His family has been tied to the Army for generations.
“It goes back to World War I,” Vernon said. “His grandfather was a medic in World War II. I was in the infantry. One uncle was in the Korean War. Another was a door gunner in Vietnam and another was a helicopter pilot.”
Gibson enlisted, trained at Fort Benning and Fort Lewis and by September of 2009 he was in Iraq, not far from Abu Gharaib. His was one of the last combat units sent in for Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Just before he’d left, he said he’s heard about his former CJ teammate, Sam Pera, who was with special forces and had been seriously wounded in Afghanistan.
“I was so nervous and scared when I first got there that it took me a couple of weeks to settle in,” he said. “That’s when I realized it wasn’t anything like the (action) movies. There was a lot of down time. I was there 12 months and the only time anything really happened was when they held elections.”
After he returned to the States, he reenlisted and decided to make the Army his career. He transferred to Fort Drum, New York, and was sent to Afghanistan in January of 2013.
He said he had a completely different mindset than he did when he went to Iraq:
“At that point everything was second nature. I’d been training for years and if your training is up to snuff and you’re up to snuff, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.
“Maybe that’s a little cocky, but I wasn’t nervous. I was confident. I knew I was better at what I did than they were.”
And while that was different than his first deployment, so was something else.
“Afghanistan was more like the movies,” he said. “The way I thought things were going to happen in Iraq — the fighting, fighting, fighting — that’s what happened in Afghanistan.”
Recovery
Even though he said “it felt like I’d be blown up,” he told the first people who treated him: “I don’t want morphine. I don’t want to be loopy.”
He said they agreed and gave him something else: “They called them lollipops. They put it between your fingers, then taped those fingers together and you just sat there with (those fingers) in your cheek.
“I remember we all were wiggling those things around in our mouths and we were getting loopy and talking.
“And I said to somebody, ‘How good are these things?’
“I asked what it was and they said ‘Fentanyl.’ I had no idea what fentanyl was.
“I remember when they brought the phone with my dad on the line, I sat there on the bunk, crisscross, applesauce, bare-butt naked in front of God and everybody and just talked away.”
The next day they took him by wheelchair to meet with Army brass and receive his Purple Heart.
After three days, he was flown to Ramstein Air Base in Germany and in another 10 days was sent back to Fort Belvoir in Virginia, where he would spend the next two years in treatment, some of it at nearby Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
The explosion had left him with a stutter that prevented him from saying what he wanted. That required considerable therapy and soon it was discovered his constant back pain came from a shattered vertebra that had grown back improperly and slid a disc out of place. He had surgery to fuse two lumbar vertebra, but said he still needs two more procedures to fully correct that.
The most challenging thing has been his brain injury and the PTSD that followed.
Vernon took a leave from his work and spent six months with his son in Virginia. They lived together, went to myriad medical appointments and rehab sessions together and spent a lot of down time fishing side by side.
“We toured the Pentagon too and that was insane,” Ben said. “They walked us around and all the workers came out in the hallway and clapped for us. I believe there was a band, too.”
Vernon said it was “overwhelming. There were generals standing there applauding.”
Ben nodded: “I got to meet President Obama at the White House. And I watched the Fourth of July fireworks from the Speaker of the House’s balcony at the Capitol.”
Vernon said the national chapter of Vietnam Veterans invited them to a big dinner at the Hilton:
“People did a lot of neat stuff for us.”
‘What am I going to do now?’
The other day Place, who coached Ben as a sophomore and junior before he took the job at Hamilton High, was going through some of the many memorable football players he had in 16 years at CJ.
He mentioned Barrett Robinson, now based in Chicago, where he’s one of the top prenatal surgeons in the nation, and Javon Ringer, who became a Michigan State All American running back and then a Tennessee Titan.
“There are so many kids I’m proud of, but none any more so than Ben Gibson,” Place said. “He’s a real American hero.”
Often though the 33 year-old Gibson has not felt like it. Although he eventually learned that U.S troops killed the guy who detonated the explosion that injured him — “I actually saw the video, " Vernon said, “they obliterated him in his car with a 500 pound (bomb),” — that brought little consolation.
Not only has he continually had to deal with the effects of a TBI, but when he was retired from the Army in 2015, he once again found himself wondering: “What am I going to do now?”
“When I came back, I was bitter, real bitter. Instead of the Army being my career, I was 26 and back where I was when I was 19 and not knowing what was next.”
He shared how he could be at a social gathering with people he knew and “feel completely alone. I felt I had nothing in common with them.”
Things bubbled over on Thanksgiving Eve in 2013 at the informal reunion held each year at Jimmie’s Ladder 11 for CJ grads of all ages. Just six months earlier he had been blown up in Afghanistan.
When yet another person made small talk and asked what he’d been up to, he said he suddenly exploded, saying: “Hey, what the (expletive) are we doing here anyway? You don’t really care what I’m doing and I don’t give (an expletive) what you’re doing.”
He shook his head at that memory: “The guy said, ‘Geez, man. I’m sorry. I was just…’
“I immediately felt bad and said, ‘It’s not your fault. I just don’t want to be here.’”
He’s worked on those issues over the years and also said he has embraced a philosophy that helps: “I fake it, ‘til I make it.
“And I figure that’s not bad.”
He bought his home outside St. Paris and now teaches welding at Hobart in Troy. And when he looks back, he sees some good things that have come since his injuries:
“The bond with my dad absolutely has gotten stronger. When I got hurt, my dad was right there. I was 24 and had the opportunity to live with him for six months and it wasn’t because I’d gotten fired from a part-time job at a convenience store and had to live with him.”
And he thinks all the experiences he’s had — “not only in combat, but trying to navigate life after the Army,” — are something he can draw on to help his students and other young people facing challenges.
As for his hopes for the future, he sat quietly a few moments, stroked his long, dark beard and then shrugged and smiled:
“I just hope I’m leading a boring life…Maybe add a fence and a dog.”
“We’re hoping for vanilla,” agreed Vernon.
Ben nodded: “Just a little peace. Maybe I’ll be married, maybe not.”
While Vernon admits his son “came back different; he’s not the same Benny,” he said he admires his fortitude: “I know he’s tough. I’ve seen him push through a lot of pain, not just the physical stuff, but also the mental pain.”
Ben said: “I feel like I’m in an OK place now as far as my head goes. I’m at peace with a lot of it. And if I went back, I’d do it all over again.
“Well, except one thing.
“I’d follow the other damned trucks and not go off on my own!”
And if that had happened, neither he, nor his dad, would likely remember May 15, 2013 at all.
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