Veteran trained at Fort Bliss reflects on Iraq deployment in new book
EL PASO, Texas (KVIA) -- "Don't Let the Monsters Out" is a book by an Air Force Veteran who shares her experiences serving in Camp Bucca during the Iraq war.
"Hatred, it smells like adrenaline, it smells like sewage, and it just it smells like everybody wants to kill me."
Hatred was Airman Heather O'Brien's first impression of Camp Bucca, Iraq.
She was deployed there from January through October in 2007.
Before getting there, she trained at Camp McGregor Rang in Fort Bliss.
"It was good training," says O'Brien. "Like, we had long days, but the instructors were with us the whole time, and they did the best they could to prepare us for something that was constantly changing."
The book's title, "Don't Let the Monster's Out," came from a speech Chief Master Sergeant Mack gave the night she arrived.
"Part of the speech it ended with 'don't let the monsters out', says O'Brien. "I thought he meant the detainees, which was not something we were not going to do. It wasn't until much later I realized he meant 'don't let the monster inside of you out.'"
O'Brien explained that detainees would set fires and riot in the detention facility.
O'Brien recalls an especially violent rocket attack.
"There were the obvious dead detainees. It looked like a bomb had gone off, " she says.
That wasn't what scared O'Brien the most, however.
"I know it was grotesque," she said. "I don't know if my mind just shielded, I don't know. It was the silence; that prison is loud. At that point there was, like, over 20,000 inmates and it was dead silent. I had never heard that. That scared me more than I think the rockets, cause I was oh my God, if that scared them, what should we be afraid of."
O'Brien also hated the screams.
"It's a prison, they still rape each other, and you could hear screams that shouldn't come from a human being, and it's almost child-like.
In the sandstorms and the hatred, O'Brien admits in the book that her monsters came out.
The deployment ended and her personal battles began.
O'Brien said she began abusing alcohol and even tried to end her own life.
"I couldn't be around people anymore and I ended up attempting suicide. I want to sleep. I didn't want to hear anytime kids were having fun outside my apartment complex. I didn't want to hear screaming, I just wanted to rest."
Her relationships began to fail and she was intoxicated for years, O'Brien explained.
"Life before Bucca and life after Bucca are two different things. I don't remember our whole entire training trip."
In 2014, O'Brien said she got therapy at a VA hospital and it was there her counselor suggested she begin writing.
O'Brien got help for her drinking and mental issues. She found a community and she found God.
"The deepest part of that was, I thought of who I had been at Bucca, who I had become, a monster, an animal, and when I met [God], he wasn't even mad."
