[M]ANCHESTER — Marine veteran turned Vermont National Guard trainer Justin Laramie, who participated last week in the Wounded Warriors Golf Tournament, knew that many people curious about military service aren’t sure whether they should ask questions.
Laramie, for the record, is happy to hear them. After an Iraq war explosion left him temporarily deaf, he’s happy to hear anything.
The 32-year-old Rutland resident rewinds back a decade to the day in 2006 he and his platoon were patrolling roads in the physically and politically hot Anbar province.
“They call that area the triangle of death,” Laramie says. “I was on the last Humvee at the end of a convoy, and we were headed back toward base when we went over a small bump.”
Or more specifically, an “improvised explosive device” soldiers call an IED.
“Six artillery shells blew up under the truck — this was an open Humvee before we had all the armor — lifted it off the ground, straight up in the air and back down in a ball of smoke and flames.”
Laramie yelled to see if the colleagues around him were still alive.
“They were answering me,” he says, “but I didn’t know it.”
That’s because the explosion robbed Laramie of his hearing for a month. Returning home, he received a Purple Heart — given to U.S. soldiers wounded or killed in service — and, this past Wednesday, an invitation to join nearly three dozen other Vermont veterans for a different kind of reward.
When volunteers launched the Vermont Wounded Warriors Golf Tournament at the Manchester Country Club in 2012, they figured they’d pair servicemen and women with members of the public as a way to promote conversation and camaraderie.
“The goal,” committee chairman Don Keelan says, “has always been to raise awareness.”
“We’re introducing veterans to the community,” adds fellow organizer Zachariah Fike, himself wounded in combat, “and vice versa.”
But when volunteers balanced their checkbook that first year, they learned they also had raised $20,000 — a figure that rose to another $40,000 in 2013, $60,000 in 2014 and more than $70,000 this month.
The money aids such organizations as the Vermont Veterans’ Home residents assistance fund, the Veterans Outreach and Family Resource Center, the Dodge House transitional housing program, Meals on Wheels of Bennington County and Purple Hearts Reunited, which returns lost or stolen military medals.
The golf tournament also pays off in other ways. At age 28, Erynn Hazlett seems young to be a veteran. But the Arlington woman enlisted in the Vermont National Guard in 2009 and served nine months at Camp Phoenix in Kabul, Afghanistan, in 2010.
Hazlett, uninjured during her deployment, is now a Vermont guard recruiter. She’s an expert at communicating military life with the public. But she understands many of her peers aren’t.
“It’s so important for vets,” she says, “to have the opportunity to talk about their experiences.”
More than 3,000 Vermonters have served in Iraq or Afghanistan in the years since Sept. 11, 2001, according to state statistics. Many people associate such tours of duty with the threat of physical injuries, post-traumatic stress disorder or, as experienced by 41 Green Mountain soldiers, the loss of life.
But veterans don’t have to face harm to come home with issues.
“We see the extreme problems of the world — from poverty to crumbling infrastructure to death,” Hazlett says. “One of the greatest challenges we have is coming to terms again with society and the American way of life.”
Consider her trip to Walmart shortly after returning to buy a shower curtain.
“I just wanted to get in and out,” she recalls.
Then Hazlett remembered the makeshift stall where she washed in the scorching, smoggy Afghan capital.
“I was fortunate to have running water there, so the idea of having 25 different patterns to choose from here …”
Not that Hazlett’s complaining. Instead, she’s simply communicating some of the conflicting emotions soldiers can face. She learned about others this past week when she met 87-year-old Congressional Gold Medal winner Nate Boone of Manchester (“Thank you so much, sir,” she said by way of introduction) before going on to golf with a Vietnam-era soldier.
“It really opened my eyes,” Hazlett says, “to see how some vets are handling aging.”
The tournament — which offers more information on its website, www.vtww.org — hopes to continue to raise both money and awareness.
“Every veteran has trials and successes, and it helps to be able to share them,” Hazlett says. “Giving us the opportunity to talk is a really great start. If we don’t want to answer a question, we’ll tell you. And don’t assume it’s all bad. We generally can take a negative situation and pull out the positive.”
Just ask Laramie.
“The ringing in my ear is still there to this day,” he says.
Then again, that means he can hear.
“That’s the way I look at everything,” Laramie says. “Not to tell the story is not honoring the guys who turned around to come get their brothers. They very easily could have kept going and got themselves out of danger. When I tell the story, it’s not my story, it’s our story.”
Kevin O’Connor, a former staffer of the Rutland Herald and Barre-Montpelier Times Argus, is a Brattleboro-based writer. Email: kevinoconnorvt@gmail.com