Alaska Army National Guard officer surmounts combat trauma to command infantry battalion

JOINT BASE ELMENDORF-RICHARDSON, Alaska — “I wasn’t going to leave that fight unless it was in a body bag.”

Alaska Army National Guard Lt. Col. Luke Bushatz, 297th Regional Support Group operations officer and former 1st Battalion, 297th Infantry Regiment commander, made the stone-faced declaration while recollecting the aftermath of surviving a roadside bomb that eviscerated his Stryker in Afghanistan’s Arghandab Valley in 2009.

He was serving as an infantry rifle company executive officer determined to continue in the billet despite sustaining debilitating brain trauma during the attack.

“My commander was killed a few weeks into combat,” he said. “I stayed the company XO, and they sent a (Maneuver Captains Career Course qualified) captain, who was the assistant operations officer, down to take over the company.”

As the XO, Bushatz said he still often directed company operations in the field.

“I would say that I was the fighting XO because I was the one who understood the battlespace and the mission set at that point,” he said. “I continued to push the company until the new commander had a good grasp of the battle space.”

In addition to pressing the company, Bushatz pushed himself beyond healthy human limits, a choice that would jeopardize his mental health and his marriage, placing him on a path to realizing personal redemption and family wellness through faith and love of the outdoors.

The young lieutenant breached his personal limits following the company’s assignment to one of the most restive regions of the war-torn country.

“Shah Wali Kot, the district where our company was, is the district the Taliban came out of in the early 90s,” he said. “So, when we were there, it was very kinetic, and a lot of our guys got hurt mostly in [improvised explosive device] attacks followed by small arms ambushes.”

Despite riding in a Stryker equipped with special blast protection that replaced his infantry fighting vehicle variant, the armored eight-wheeled vehicle couldn’t protect Bushatz or the soldiers riding with him from the destructive force of the command-detonated bomb.

“That was the one that almost killed me,” he recalled. “I had been in three IED blasts. That was the one that ripped my vehicle in half, and it should have killed me except for the blast doors on the truck. We had so many Strykers destroyed that my truck was the mortar-carrying vehicle.”

The world-shattering explosion was only the beginning of the perils Bushatz and his team faced that day.

“Then we were in a small arms fight,” he said. “We were ambushed on our left flank. They tried to roll us up. But we had a convoy of infantry fighting vehicles, so 30 angry dudes rolled out the back and got in the gunfight. I was trying to manage the chaos that was right on top of me.”

A combat medic requested a dust-off medical evacuation helicopter, and he expected Bushatz to get on board.

“I told the medic to shut up and go deal with other Soldiers,” he said. “He’s not putting me on that bird.”

For three more months, Bushatz endured oppressive headaches while continuing to venture outside the wire with the company.

“You take some Advil, you throw up for the next three days, you can’t see straight for weeks, and you carry on and do your job,” he said. “I was an executive officer in a fighting company in the most kinetic area of Afghanistan in the summer of 2009. I wasn’t going to leave that fight unless it was in a body bag.”

Though he returned home where he was met with family and the safety inherent in exiting the battlefield, Bushatz was plagued with a natural human response from living through the horrors of war and the loss of dear comrades-in-arms.

“The trauma of war is real,” he said. “The vast majority of Soldiers who join the military are not going to actually see real combat. For the small percentage of us who have and who have come through it with all of the trauma that is experienced with it, there is an entire spectrum of emotions: survivor’s guilt, guilt over decisions you made, anger, frustration, shame, fear, feelings of worthlessness. All of these emotions can lead to action, which is doing things to either try and numb the pain of trauma or punish yourself for living.”

In seeking to numb the trauma of war, Bushatz said he pushed away his wife, Amy, and alienated others close to him. Despite hard weeks and months dealing with a spouse who changed for the worse, Bushatz said Amy and others close to him stuck by him.

“It took people who loved me to tell me I was being a knucklehead and to hold me accountable,” he said. “When those people stepped into my life and loved me enough, that made all of the difference. I didn’t get to where I am today without a bunch of people in my life sacrificing significant amounts of capital in their own lives to help me.”

The military couple’s shared faith also greatly helped to bind them together and provide a transcendent North Star to keep Luke’s recovery on track.

“My faith in God, having a support network that wouldn’t quit on me – specifically my wife when I was at my bottom – and having other veterans around me that weren’t going to let me quit on myself, were the things that were able to bastion me in the storm of hitting rock bottom with suicidal ideation and self-destructive addictive behavior,” Bushatz said. “Those people giving me grace as an extension of God’s grace is what pulled me through all of that.”

Bushatz also said leaders senior to him could have dismissed him from the service or told him to suck it up, but they recognized he was struggling and needed time to find his way.

“The people who were willing to let me have the space to be broken and then begin to heal are the leaders I have looked up to most during my career,” he said. “I am thankful they gave me that space.”

Bushatz said he has chosen to pay the care and generosity forward by recognizing signs of trauma in fellow soldiers and coming along side to help them through it.

“If you’re struggling with your marriage or your finances or anything outside of the uniform, I want to support you in getting the help you need to work through those issues so you can be the best person you are in uniform,” he said. “At the end of the day, the mission may be X, Y or Z, but that’s not the mission of life. Our job in the infantry is to close with and destroy the enemy in combat, but the job is not the mission. The mission is at the end of drill, you go home, and you have conversations with the people in your life you have core relationships with, and you’re a better husband, wife, leader, father, mother in your community. My mission is to facilitate that as a leader.”

 Despite never being in a running firefight or surviving the concussive blast of an IED, Amy said she has also suffered the toll of a war that found purchase back on home soil.

“I experienced military trauma by virtue of the fact that Luke has been in combat and by virtue of the fact that I have been to a whole lot of memorial services where I sat four rows back from a grieving widow who’s a friend,” Amy said. “That’s traumatic.”

Amy acknowledged that she and other loved ones had to hold Bushatz to account, often taking two steps forward and one step back struggling hand-in-hand with the recovering officer one day at a time.

“I needed to believe I was doing the right thing or that I had done the right thing even when it was really hard,” she said. “I had to establish boundaries and then work in partnership with Luke, and he had to respect those boundaries. In turn, I had to learn to be a person who had healthy boundaries and to keep them.”

Amy said though the couple have made their way to a good place, they will always have to stay vigilant.

“Healing and dealing with trauma is not a journey with a destination, it is a continuous process,” she said. “Every day we get up and make the decision to keep moving forward and to get better one day at a time. We need to actively be participating in our own healing.”

Today, a major outlet and medium for working through trauma comes by venturing into the Alaska outdoors, a venue Bushatz says is host to “cathedrals of the mind.” The fresh cool air blanketing the vast northern landscape stands in stark contrast to the suffocating, smoking confines of the stricken Stryker that threatened to become Bushatz’ tomb. Amy is a journalist who hosts a podcast, Humans Outside, that chronicles the couple’s adventures in healing through the Alaska outdoors.

The officer said anyone suffering the aftermath of life’s hardships needs to find a healthy outlet to work through the pain.

“There are good ways of dealing with your trauma and there are bad, and you’re probably going to have a mix of both as you’re working through the healing process,” he said.

Bushatz encourages anyone suffering through trauma to pursue wellness and to be diligent and hopeful despite inevitable setbacks.

“There is nothing that you experience in life that you can’t come through in terms of trauma,” he said. “Sometimes, things will be broken, and finding a way to pick up the pieces of that and continue to move on with life is what being a human is about.”

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