FINDING HIS
PLACE A USU Vet’s Journey from Combat to Classroom By Jackson Wilde
August 15, 2008, Sergeant Kenneth Christian Ray Anderson found himself lying on the ground in the city of Samarra, Iraq. He held his aching hands up to the moon’s effulgence — all he saw was bone. “I literally had no skin on my hands,” Anderson recalls. There were no warning signs, no firefight prior to the explosion and no retribution. Anderson and four other U.S. Army servicemen, along with an Iraqi interpreter, had been heading back to base from a census operation in Samarra when a rocketpropelled grenade — an RPG-4 or RPG-7, by Anderson’s estimation — blasted through the sidewall of the group’s Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) truck. The assailed MRAP caught fire with Anderson inside and unconscious. “When I woke up, we had to get out of the truck,” he says. “When I touched the metal to these doors my hands literally just melted off.” The blast from RPG had all but sheared off his right leg near the knee and severed his femoral artery near the hip. He had third-degree burns on his scalp and face, but only noticed his grievously burned extremities. “I remember a platoon sergeant coming up, ‘Anderson, how you doing,’” he recalls. “I think I f***ed up my hands sergeant.” Aided by the embrace of a sugar-coated fentanyl lollipop, Anderson was trucked out to a helicopter zone. Soon thereafter, he began refusing pain medication. “The fact that I felt pain, I knew that I was alive,” he says. “When you give morphine to guys sometimes, they basically die because the pain goes away and they stop fighting.” Anderson woke from a medically induced coma in Texas nearly a month later. “I freaked out,” he recalls. “The last thing I remember, I was in a combat zone.” He immediately asked his wife for his weapon. She gazed back and explained it had melted in Iraq. For the next four months, Anderson completed a grueling series of physical therapy for his injuries, skin grafts for his hands and chemical peels for the burns on his head. 14 UTAHSTATE I FALL 2017
He was medically discharged from the army and awarded the Purple Heart for his service — a depiction of which is tattooed on his inner bicep. During the hospital stay, Anderson made a pact between his father to use his GI Bill for college — and that’s precisely what he did. “I made a promise,” he says. “Now, if I can quit smoking that easily.” He began pursuing a bachelor’s in history at Hopkinsville Community College in Kentucky before transferring to — and graduating from — Utah State University. While striving toward his degree, and handling his transition to civilian life, a serious health crisis struck his family. On Feb. 27, 2014 — three days after their wedding anniversary — Anderson’s wife suffered an overdose of prescription medications. The brain damage she suffered was severe. “I have a wife that I can’t really even carry on a conversation with anymore,”