“My friend Kade was inches away from me when he was wounded. I was first to render aid, but his wounds were too great, and he passed away. I knew right then things would never be the same.”
They weren’t. For the next eight years, Dustin battled enemies he couldn’t see far more often than ones in plain sight, and no matter what he did, there was simply no escaping the wounds of war. Losing his best friend Kade was by far the deepest cut.
Dustin enlisted in the Army a few years after graduating high school. He had earned his associate’s degree, but wasn’t sold on the idea of working in criminal justice for the rest of his life. He decided to give the military a shot, and in 2010, he deployed with the 101st Airborne Division to Kunar Province, Afghanistan for a year-long tour of duty.
The terrain was tough and the missions were dangerous, but the unit managed to avoid casualties for months. In November of 2010, however, their luck ran out.
“We were tasked to lead a very large mission into the mountains to push back the enemy and gain dominance,” Dustin remembers. “This was normal work, but it turned out to be our most dangerous mission.”
