In Boston blasts, veterans shift into combat mode

In Boston blasts, veterans shift into combat mode
Washington Post
By Vernon Loeb
Published: April 17, 2013

When the bombs went off near the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday, Brennan Mullaney and Eusebio Collazo were together on the course at mile 25.

Mullaney, now a captain in the Army Reserve, served 15 months during the “surge” in Iraq. Collazo of Humble, Tex., a former Marine corporal, was wounded in Iraq’s Anbar province by mortar shrapnel and suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder.

They were approaching Boylston Street as members of a national nonprofit group that promotes healing among veterans, Team Red, White and Blue. And then suddenly the tables turned, and they found themselves helping to heal and comfort a city that had never experienced a roadside bomb.

“The real crazy symbolism here is that this was essentially an IED, an improvised explosive device,” said Army Maj. Mike Erwin, who founded the team in 2010 to help veterans heal and re-integrate into their communities through running and other physical activities. “What runners and the community experienced in Boston is the exact same thing that hundreds of thousands of service members have experienced since 2002, when they started using IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

As smoke wafted across Boylston Street and maimed marathon spectators lay across a bloody sidewalk, one veteran, an Army colonel and runner, shifted into combat mode as he crossed the finish line. He turned back into the chaos, peeled off his Team Red, White & Blue T-shirt and tied it as a tourniquet on the limb of a bombing victim.

A combat veteran who served in Iraq and was awarded a Purple Heart, the colonel later refused to allow a team spokesman to release his name after snippets of his actions were caught on video.

Turning T-shirts into tourniquets is not something most spectators along the marathon course would have had much experience with. “When we’re deployed, we all carry tourniquets — nice ones,” said Mullaney, 30, of Cumberland, Md., now a graduate student at Tufts University.

“When you see missing limbs, the first thing all of us know is to tie a tourniquet.”
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