Terry Steward

“It’s very interesting—to know how it’s working in the brain.
It opens up a lot of different options for treatment.”

Terry Steward, 54
Trucker, KBR
Worked in Iraq September 2004-September 2005
Gunshots, PTSD after attack on truck convoy

Terry Steward doesn’t know how many times he was shot when his truck convoy was attacked—seven times, maybe in the leg and groin where the bullets got through. A few more times in his bulletproof vest.

He was driving the number-two truck, ahead of Preston Wheeler and Art Faust in that same truck convoy attacked between Anaconda and Spycher. After he was shot, he remembers leaning hard on the gas pedal to keep his truck moving, to be sure he didn’t trap the rest of the convoy behind him—he had to leave them a way out.

Terry is a soft-spoken man from rural Idaho, and as he tells the story of the attack, it’s surprising to hear how matter-of-factly he recalls the experience. But Steward was in the Marines, and says that training is what helped him stay focused after he’d been shot, to be sure he did everything he could to give his fellow drivers a way out.

Terry was airlifted out of Iraq alongside Preston, and the two became good friends during their recovery in Ramstein together. Though they spoke often on the phone, the contractors’ conference in Houston Art Faust hosted was the first time they’d seen one another since their Medevac flight back home.

Steward says his gunshot injuries have been well taken care of by AIG, and while he resents the company’s treatment of other drivers he’s gotten to know, he says he’s been happy with how well they’ve covered his psychiatric care too. The biggest inconvenience is the 75-mile drive from his home along the Idaho-Oregon border into Boise for appointments.

Even with the legal support he’s entitled to, coping with PTSD been difficult for Terry and his wife Darlene since his return.

The flashbacks began in the German hospital—gunshots from drilling soldiers outside his window one day, and at night the sense that attackers were approaching in his bed in the shadows.

The flashbacks continued at home, and his wife Darlene struggled to cope with the extra distance that had developed in their relationship—especially difficult because it was just the two of them at home. Terry couldn’t drive a truck for a living anymore, but he could handle their motor home. The two took long trips to get away from the house and visit family. After a few weeks of dog-sitting for their daughter, the two realized that having a puppy around was therapeutic for them both, and they decided to adopt one of their own. They named her Abby, and in the darkest times for either of them, they took comfort in having her around.

Terry also began seeing an EMDR therapist in early 2008, and has been enthusiastic about its effects on his personality. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing is a therapy designed to help patients get over traumatic experiences by revisiting the memories and enforcing connections across the two hemispheres of the brain. Terry says he’s the therapy has is helping him recover from the PTSD better than anything else he’s tried. While EMDR can involve directed eye movements from side-to-side, or even music fading from one side of the headphones to another, other side-to-side movements can trigger the same effect. On a road trip down to visit family in the San Francisco Bay Area, Steward says he can calm his nerves by crossing his arms and tapping his fingers on his arms, first the left, then the right.

With help getting over his PTSD, Terry has also enrolled in vocational classes, learning computer skills that will help him eventually work from home, he hopes, and find a new career and move on to a life without trucking.