Chapter 1: What warnings are given before the episode starts?
Before we start today's show, we want to share a warning that this episode has explicit language, descriptions of violence, and includes mentions of suicide. Okay, here's the show. I'm Aisha Roscoe, and this is a Sunday Story. Veterans Day is coming up this week, so I wanted to invite NPR's Quill Lawrence onto the show to share a story he's been working on for 10 years.
Quill has covered vets in the Department of Veterans Affairs for NPR since 2012. And for almost that whole time, he's been following the story of one combat veteran's journey home. So, Quill, welcome. Oh, thank you, Aisha. Now, just to brag a little bit, NPR is the only mainstream national network that has consistently had a dedicated veterans reporter involved. And Quill, that started with you.
How did you get the job? Yeah, I was a war correspondent for about 15 years. In the end of that, I was working at NPR bureaus in both Iraq and Afghanistan. In the beginning of those wars, I could just cruise around either of those countries in a beat-up taxi and just sort of keep a low profile. As the wars got more intense, the only way I could get around was to embed with U.S. troops.
So that's when I started getting to know troops better. And so you're embedded with these troops, you're spending all this time with them.
Chapter 2: Who is David Carlson and why is his story significant?
What did you learn from that? Well, besides just seeing the war from their perspective, as the years passed on and they were doing deployment after deployment, I just started thinking, What the hell are these troops going to do when they get home? Really, just how are they going to relate to people who haven't been to war?
And how are they not going to resent the country that sent them to fight and possibly die at war and then kind of just stop paying attention to the wars? And honestly, I had the same questions for me. I could see that being a war correspondent was stressing out my relationships back at home. And sometimes being at home, I didn't feel like I had any real purpose until I could get back to the wars.
But I really wanted to come home. And so the beat for me for NPR covering veterans started out as a way to get home. But I thought it was important to chronicle the experiences of these veterans and what happens to them on the home front. And we've heard your reporting over the years covering a wide range of stories about vets.
In Paris Quo, Lawrence visits a family where a husband is the one who stays home and a mother goes off to war. A party at Jane Grimes' house outside Fort Worth means all the enchiladas you can eat, Coors Light, and real Texas hospitality. Dodson is the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the group Paralyzed Veterans of America.
Estimates vary about how many veterans have PTSD, but it's almost certainly a minority. More importantly to me right now is that we're all hanging off about 800 feet up, and we're looking out at the gorgeous view of Yosemite. But for all my coverage over the years, there is one story I've been following the longest and that isn't really over yet. And that's Dave Carlson.
I came across his story because a lot of my reporting, as you can hear, is about vets making the transition to civilian life. And the VA, the Department of Veterans Affairs, can be very helpful with this, with disability benefits, with health care, therapy, home loans, career counseling. But there's one group that doesn't really get those benefits. Vets in prison.
There are tens of thousands of veterans currently incarcerated in the United States. And when you go to prison, most of your VA benefits stop. And getting over PTSD in prison seems practically impossible. And I wanted to find out what that would be like for a combat vet. And I went looking for a vet to profile, and eventually I found Dave Carlson.
You have a call from an inmate at Waukesha County Jail. This week on The Sunday Story, Quill tells us about Dave Carlson and the challenges he faced over 10 years as he moved from war to desperation to incarceration. Jail is the least therapeutic atmosphere you could probably ever imagine. Jail is, you come in one way and you leave three times worse.
This is a Sunday Story, and today I'm handing the mic over to NPR's Quill Lawrence. He's been interviewing Iraq War veteran Dave Carlson over the past 10 years. So I first reached out to Dave Carlson in summer of 2015. I was interested in his individual story, but I was also trying to answer a question, and that is, can you ever really get past war? And maybe that was a question for me, too.
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Chapter 3: What challenges do veterans face when returning home from war?
Theft, drunk driving, battery. He'd done most of that stuff after returning home from his second tour in Iraq. but he'd gotten into more trouble in prison. And now the judge was going to have to decide whether to add even more time to his sentence.
And we talked on the phone a few times from jail, but the first time I actually laid eyes on Dave Carlson was September 3rd, 2015, at his sentencing hearing. All rise, please. I could see him from behind in a prison jumpsuit. You know, he stole a quick, glanced backwards toward all the family and friends who'd come, but then the bailiff told him to face front toward the judge.
He was the only black man in the dozens of people in court that I recall. Take your seats, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you. And I'm trying to square this thoughtful, decorated combat vet I've been on the phone with with this criminal defendant sitting in the dock. A lot of people had turned out to support him, though. His grandma took the stand.
I have loved David Carlson, my grandson, from the time he was born. And before the hearing, I talked to a bunch of his war buddies. Sergeant David Rock said he met Carlson in 2007 at the beginning of his second deployment. When it came to how to lead and how to kind of represent yourself, David was definitely on the list of people that I kind of held in an iconic standpoint.
His old friend Josh Fridgen, who is in Special Forces, he'd known Carlson since 2003 when they met in basic training. When I think of mental toughness, Dave's one of the people that come right to the forefront of my mind. Like, if he sets his mind on something and he believes he can do it, like, he's going to do it. Or he's, you know, pretty much he'll die trying.
We're here today on the matter of State of Wisconsin versus David Carlson. And as the court proceedings begin, the judge almost immediately starts reading off a list of Dave Carlson's past run-ins with the justice system. And there were a lot. Felony operating under the influence. Arrested in Eau Claire. Loss of driving privileges. Bennett was convicted of at least four felonies.
Felony bail jumping. Each of them carried with them up to six years in the state prison system. So the max exposure here is 12 years today with six years of confinement. And so there I am in the back of the courtroom, and I'm just looking at his rock buddies, talking about how respected he was.
And I'm just thinking, what the hell happened to Dave Carlson that he could wind up sitting here in a prison jumpsuit? I've met a lot of combat vets, and Dave Carlson's not the first one I've met in prison. As I got to know him, I would find out how the war had affected him.
Carlson has diagnosed PTSD, and vets with PTSD are more likely than other vets to get in trouble with the law and wind up incarcerated. It's also true that vets with PTSD often had pre-existing trauma and psychological issues before they even joined the military. They come with a lot of baggage, and that was exactly the case for Dave Carlson. He had a rough upbringing. His mom is white.
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Chapter 4: How does PTSD affect veterans like Dave Carlson?
And then he refuses to get on the medevac until all his men are out. He gets on last, and he doesn't die of his wounds until over three weeks later at an Army hospital in Texas. Years later, he'll be recognized with the Medal of Honor, one of only eight people to receive the Medal of Honor in the whole Iraq War. It's the military's highest medal.
You get it for doing things that no one could ever reasonably ask of even a fellow soldier. Cash was the only black man to get this medal since Vietnam, by the way. But that's all years down the road. Right at that moment, all it means to Dave Carlson is... I should have been there. Like, why wasn't I there? Why did those guys die? Why did I survive?
And those questions, they still haunt Dave Carlson even all these years later when he retells the story. Uh, Bachum was an interpreter. Their interpreter for the ECP burned to death in that, in that, uh, Take a minute, don't worry about it. I'm good. Yeah, take a couple deep breaths, whatever, have a sip of something. You never know when that stuff's going to hit. I think there's water.
We're having this conversation almost 20 years after these men die. But I can see for a moment, he's back in that place, in Duluia, Iraq. And at the time, Carlson says, he's just supposed to move on. By November 2005, his tour is over, and he goes back to Wisconsin. You know, the regular army, they come home and they're still in the army and they're supposed to have some dwell time.
They're supposed to do a job back here in the States before they're deployed again or before they leave. And they're with their same unit. When you're in the Guard, everyone scatters to their towns and cities and goes back to their day job. And they're just back on the streets of the USA. When you came home, are you just... You're just home. You're done.
You're basically... One week in a month, two weeks a year.
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Chapter 5: What led Dave Carlson to be incarcerated?
And you're going to a school. Yeah. So it's like you're a civilian suddenly. Right back to being a civilian. It was bizarre. So not at war, but not really a civilian. And so I was just in a really bad headspace. So eventually I was like, I think part of the nightmares were about the fact that like I couldn't, like there was people still over there dying.
Like every day I was kind of like tormented, feeling like a coward, just not feeling like it was right. And so he just starts looking for ways to get back to war. So he volunteers for a second tour. And I didn't even tell my girlfriend at the time. I didn't tell her until I was headed to the first drill.
So after being home for about 20 months, Dave Carlson is back on the battlefield, back at war. And in his second tour, he's doing well in combat. But he's also clearly not right after his first deployment. He told me later it was like watching himself from the outside. He recalled this one battle where it was just like he stopped caring. I just sat there like, I just don't give a fuck.
Like, I just didn't care. Like, it was like complete calm. I'm seeing tracers everywhere. I'm fucking hearing gunshots. And I'm just calm as shit. There was no sense of urgency. There was nothing. It was like I was just, I'm watching this shit. And that came back to my mind. It was like, it's like a disco. Something is off about his behavior.
He's more and more disengaged on the battlefield, and then when he's not on the battlefield, he's just full of anger. Near the end of his tour, he's heading for some R&R, and he assaults an airport policeman. And he got out of the guard with an honorable discharge, barely. When he's released, his mom, Heidi Carlson, is there waiting. I picked him up at the airport airport.
And I could not believe, it was at that time that I coined, there were two phrases. It was the dark place and the Iraq laugh. And his eyes were just completely blank. And he had this craziest laugh. It was very forced and very shallow. And he's like, yeah, mom, didn't make it through this one so good. They really got your son this time. And he was just going on and on and on. And I was horrified.
And right away, he just starts spiraling out of control. He's getting drunk, he's fighting. Escalating, escalating, escalating, thinking that, like... Yeah. Like I'm like some kind of like Jason Bourne or some shit situation. But really, it's just like I'm like deteriorating psychologically. Like I'm like I'm losing my shit, basically.
He told me a story that at one point he was shooting out streetlights with a Glock and the police converge on him. The cops were up on the on the bridge in front of me. They're shining the spotlight down there on the sides. And they're just basically they're yelling, drop the weapon, drop the weapon. So I got it down on my side.
And I'm consciously sitting there like, I need to just raise it up and just fucking end this shit, right? And I was just scared to do it, I think. I just couldn't do it. Point the pistol at them and just basically suicide by cop. He is eventually taken to a VA psych ward. His mom was shocked by what she saw there.
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