This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
Coming Home: Part Two - More than 1.4 million service members, including nearly 10,000 Utahns, have deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. In a continuing series of personal profiles, The Salt Lake Tribune features those whose lives have been forever changed by their wartime experiences.
The garage is dark, cold and quiet as Justin Youse rolls up a bay door. Sunlight pours in, revealing the pained grimace on his face.
It's been nearly four years since the young diesel mechanic injured his back in Iraq. But in his line of work, reminders like this are all too common.
He fires up an old space heater and tunes a small boombox to a country music station. The West Valley City garage is filled with songs about lost women, broken lives and love for country.
Between cigarettes, he sings along.
- - -
Youse was 17 when he walked into the Army recruiter's office in Mansfield, Texas - just a punk kid, he'd later say, more interested in blowing things up than going to college.
Years would pass before he'd face what that decision meant. He was 23 years old by then - with a wife and a little girl, but thousands of miles away from them both, in a crowded tent on Kuwait's northern border.
It was spring 2003. Huddled over a world-band radio with a dozen other soldiers, Youse heard the president declare war. The commander in chief's confidence sent chills down his spine.
Maybe he'd joined to get out of Mansfield, or to avoid college or because he was just a punk kid. But at that moment he knew he'd been chosen to do something important. And he had no regrets.
Less than an hour later, Youse crossed into Iraq's southern desert.
- - -
There would be others to come - each one lost in a blur of fear and fury - but Youse remembers the first one clearly. That's the one he just can't shake.
The soldiers were still in chemical suits, unsure when Saddam Hussein would finally unleash his promised arsenal of biological and chemical weapons. In a rugged, rural village on the Euphrates River in southern Iraq, a young man and his son rushed up to Youse and his unit.
"The guy kept running toward us," Youse says. "We told him to stop, but he wouldn't until he got right up on us . . . ''
A fellow soldier shot the man dead.
"His little boy, he couldn't have been more than 12, he was of course upset, he came running toward us and we told him to stop, and we'd heard all these stories about how they might try to strap explosives onto little kids . . . "
"And that was - that was the first."
It's been nearly four years. Youse still dreams about the little boy he killed.
- - -
Youse's tour of duty lasted just a few months longer, ending on a blistering desert day as he was riding in the back of an unarmored troop truck just outside the southern city of Nasariyah.
Gunfire split the air, sending him and several other soldiers diving out the back. It was a leap he'd made many times before, but this time as he hit the ground he felt a sharp pain in his spine - the sensation of a vertebra being crushed.
Youse lay in a roadside ditch as the firefight continued overhead. When the desert fell quiet, he couldn't move his legs.
He was ferried by Humvee, helicopter and airplane, stuck in a stretcher from Iraq to Kuwait to Germany. Sometime in the middle of a morphine haze, he heard a doctor tell him he might not walk again.
"All I could think at that moment was that I wouldn't be able to play with my daughter," Youse says. "We have this game - rodeo - where she gets on my back and I buck up and down like a bull. I thought I might never be able to play that game with her again."
- - -
A few days after arriving at Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center in Germany, Youse felt, faintly, the nurses stroking his feet. A few days later he was walking again.
Weeks later, he was home.
He'd been gone less than a year, but upon landing in Dallas he hardly recognized the tiny girl who ran up and hugged his leg. The woman with her didn't look any different, but she had changed, too.
Within a few days, both were gone.
It broke his heart, but he wasn't surprised. He hadn't heard from his wife for months.
"We'd had problems before it all," he says. "I think the war was just the last straw - it's not uncommon, you know."
He started drinking. Hard. A fifth of Jack Daniel's every night, sometimes more. Anything not to think of what he'd lost.
He was working, but not enough to get by.
"It got to the point where I couldn't pay my bills," says Youse, now 26. "I had to ask my father for help. That was it for me. I said, 'This has got to stop.' I never wanted to have to ask anyone for that kind of help."
He followed a girl to Oklahoma. When that relationship ended, he took a job in Utah.
- - -
The Army had trained him to be a diesel mechanic - not bad work if your back is in good shape - but the injuries he suffered in Iraq complicated matters.
His pain mounts from month to month, edging into the intolerable, which is when he heads to the Veteran's Affairs Medical Center in Salt Lake City for another steroid injection.
"If I'd been trained in computers or some other desk job, it would be no problem," he says. "But this - it's the only thing I know how to do, besides killing people and blowing stuff up."
And since it pays a lot better than a VA disability paycheck, Youse says, he'll be at it as long as his body allows. That's why he hasn't acted on a VA doctor's recommendation for spinal fusion surgery.
"They don't know if it will help, but it's supposed to keep things from getting worse," he says. "I know I'll have to do it eventually, but I just can't right now."
Right now there are bills, child support, rent. And a home to build in Eagle Mountain for the woman he credits with helping him feel he is finally home from the war.
Courtney Sorensen sits by his side each night as he phones his daughter in Virginia. He tells her about the weather, asks about her day at school, makes plans for what they'll do next time they're together, then passes the phone to her future stepmother.
"Here's Miss Courtney," he tells the little girl, smiling and leaning over to listen in.
- - -
Maybe he'd lost his innocence, his family, and even his way, for a time.
But on a shelf in his apartment is a DVD of President Bush declaring war on Iraq. Youse still pulls it out to watch sometimes. It still sends chills down his spine.
He still dreams about the boy he killed. He still pines for his little girl. And he still grimaces every time he opens the bay door at the garage where he works.
But there are other things he remembers from Iraq. Other things he just can't shake.
Little barefoot boys running alongside his truck, flashing peace signs and toothless smiles. Men on the side of the road, unfurling American flags they'd sewn from old rags. People living, for the first time, with the promise of a future out from under the tyranny of Saddam's rule.
He still believes he was chosen to do something important. He still says he has no regrets.
"If I didn't feel that way, it would be awful depressing," he says. "I don't think you could say it was worth it - I mean, what is worth losing your family over?
"But if you asked me to do it all over again, I would."