Spc. Kevin Pannell learned the power of forgiveness after he was injured in Iraq. Today, he shares his lessons.
Army Spc. Kevin Pannell grew up in Dierks, Ark., a town where a lot of people have never travelled more than 100 miles from home. They are good people, Pannell said – very strong, with hard opinions about things with which they have no experience.
But Pannell always felt he was different, and joining the Army was a way for him to serve his country and have experiences outside of his small community.
In that way, Pannell is much like many of the other veterans who left home to serve overseas. And like them, he returned a casualty of war.
He lost his lower legs in a grenade blast in Baghdad in 2004. But he stayed physically active, and on a kayaking trip fell in love with Portland. In 2008, Pannell moved to Portland, and two years later, moved into a home in Sandy built by the nonprofit Homes for our Troops. The organization builds adapted mortgage-free homes nationwide for severely injured Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans.
“Oregon is home now,” Pannell said.
Now, the former infantryman is celebrating another milestone. On Dec. 14, he was published in “War Stories 2015, an Anthology,” along with other members of American Legion Post 134’s writers’ group.
The group, also called War Stories, is a mix of veterans and civilians, and that’s the point: to read, write, reflect and share about their experiences and impressions of war. The group was launched after Pannell met Sean Davis, a fellow war veteran, writer and commander of Post 134.
“We are trying to bring civilians and vets together to meet face to face … to better understand the other’s perspective,” Pannell said.
That’s important because “you can’t expect society to totally re-adapt to you coming back into it,” Pannell said, “just like society can’t expect you to fully immerse yourself.”
The writers' group and the book, published by Blue Skirt Productions, was funded by a grant from Oregon Humanities.
For Pannell, the writers’ group is therapeutic. He has been writing most of his life, and when he was able to put pen to paper again after his injury, he wrote to deal with his emotions.
“There are only little pieces of me that struggle with adapting,” Pannell said, “not to society, but to my involvement in the war.”
The transition back from war is something Pannell said he has thought about a lot.
“I honestly feel like those of us who got what we call severely injured … I really feel like we have had it a little bit easier than (those who did not). We have to live with these injuries every day, and that’s a reminder, but I was at Walter Reed (National Military Medical Center) for a year and a half after my injury. I was spoon-fed back into society very, very gradually. ”
Service people who are not hospitalized have more of a culture shock, he said.
The emotions
Pannell’s writing is filled with riveting and often tragic experiences.
“My writing tends to be super emotional,” he said. “That is not necessarily how I live my life, but that’s my outlet to purge that every now and then.”
While stories about soldiers often focus on the action, Pannell said, he prefers to focus on the emotions that happen afterward.
“You can be trained to go out there and kill a bunch of people,” he said, “but what I want to know about is what do you think about when you go back to your bunk at night?”
Pannell said the most traumatic part of war isn’t necessarily the combat. Worse for him was losing the connection he built with the people he was assigned with. Pannell described those 12 to 20 people you live with, and can’t get away from, as being closer than family.
Imagine going into a field with guys who had been out there for two weeks, who were all sitting in a circle, washing one another’s backs with baby wipes, he said.
“You rely on that. It becomes part of who you are, and then that all goes away when you come back,” he said. “It never comes back.”
Pannell said he isn’t angry at the person who threw the grenade that injured him.
It helped that he was conscious the whole time, he said. He saw his attacker from about 50 feet away. He yelled to warn the rest of his patrol. He was awake with his head in the lap of Kevin Kelly, a friend from high school in Arkansas after the explosion. The two ended up in the same squad, and they did almost all of their patrols together.
Pannell woke up from a medically induced coma nine days later with more pain than he ever could have imagined.
“I would close my eyes and count to 60 because it was like one more minute,” he said. “It was unbelievable.
“I had survivor guilt like crazy. I felt I hadn’t done my job, and even though none of the other guys got hurt that day, if anything happened to them the rest of their time, it was going to be my fault because I wasn’t there,” Pannell said.
After about four days of this, Pannell was struck with what he described as lightning-bolt reality.
“No matter how much I disagree with this guy,” he said about the man who threw the grenade, “he believed in something enough to be there, putting himself out there. If I would have seen him first, the story would probably have changed. He was doing what he thought was the right thing. I couldn’t hate him for that. I begrudgingly respected him and saw myself in him.”
As soon as he came to that realization and he let his aggression and anger go, he said, his pain immediately diminished. Medical staff removed his feeding tube. He left the intensive care unit and was in the amputee ward the next day.
His perspective on the power of forgiveness is a gift he doesn’t want to waste, he said. He wants to help other people come to terms with their own tragedies by sharing his story.
Living proof
For a couple of years after he was injured, Pannell worked with a military blood donor program. He was part of a team that went to federal buildings and hospitals to recruit blood plasma donations from government employees to be sent overseas. Pannell was mainly a spokesperson, a reason to donate plasma and platelets. He had received 41 units of blood and 13 units of platelets and plasma. He was living proof of the value of those donations.
When asked about where the U.S. stands with mental health services for veterans, he took a deep breath and released an equally deep sigh. Taking the positive view, he conceded that the stigma of having PTSD has lessened. It was, in Pannell’s memory of a decade ago, shameful to come out as having PTSD. People would look at you like you were weak. But that is changing, he said.
According to a report published in 2014 in JAMA Psychiatry, about 25 percent of nearly 5,500 active-duty, non-deployed Army soldiers surveyed had a mental health disorder. The report, the Army Study to Assess Risk and Resilience in Service Members, was the largest mental-health-risk study conducted among U.S. military personnel.
Pannell noted the Returning Veterans Project’s role in helping with mental illness.
“It’s not just for vets,” Pannell said of the Oregon nonprofit, which is made up of health care practitioners who offer free and confidential services. “It’s for families, too, which is a big part. Families having to deal with your PTSD is almost as bad as you having to deal with your PTSD. I have certainly run into it in (my life).”
Although writing has always been good therapy for Pannell, it’s more than that.
He chuckled as he described his writing style: “Faction.” It’s got fictional elements, but it’s all based on factual experiences Pannell or people he knows have had.
Pannell maintains a writing discipline and reads regularly around town, including at American Legion Post 134.
“I’m able to put an emotion on paper that I have a hard time expressing verbally. There’s something to that that keeps drawing me back.”
American Legion writing program
Portland-area veterans, family members of veterans, and civilians may join a small group for the War Stories Reading, Writing and Discussion Group. The free, six-month workshop is an opportunity to explore the experience of military service, wartime, and the transition from active duty to civilian life.
The program is funded by a grant from Oregon Humanities. Meetings are from 6 to 8 p.m. the first Tuesday of each month, through May 3, at American Legion Post 134, 2104 NE Alberta St., Portland.
