Exit Wounds – John Cantwell
Book: Exit Wounds by John Cantwell
By @benjajajamiin
Background: We live a peaceful life here in Australia and owe it to the men and women our nation calls upon to defend our borders and interests.
Book: “This is my story, but it is also the story of thousands of Australian veterans from Iraq, East Timor, Afghanistan and other conflicts who bare similar emotional scars. This is what becomes of those men and women we send off to war, pay little attention to, then forget once they are home.” As a country boy from Queensland, John Cantwell signed up to the army as a Private and rose to the rank of Major General.
He was on the front line in 1991 as Coalition forces fitted bulldozer blades to tanks and buried alive Iraqi troops in their trenches. He fought in Baghdad in 2006 and saw what a car bomb does to a marketplace crowded with women and children. In 2010 he commanded the Australian forces in Afghanistan when ten of his soldiers were killed.
He returned to Australia in 2011 to be considered for the job of chief of the Australian Army. Instead, he ended up in a psychiatric hospital.
Book -
Exit Wounds is the compassionate and deeply human account of one man's tour of the War on Terror, the moving story of life on a modern battlefield: from the nightmare of cheating death in a minefield, to the poignancy of calling home while under rocket fire in Baghdad, to the utter despair of looking into the face of a dead soldier before sending him home to his mother.
He has hidden his post traumatic stress disorder for decades, fearing it will affect his career. Result: MAJGEN John Cantwell likens the result of a gunshot wound to that of PTSD.
The bullet, or in this case, traumatic event(s), upon impact tears through the person and blows out the other side leaving catastrophic and often irreparable damage.
Except for PTSD there is no visible wound. A greater understanding of war, sacrifice and vulnerability is gained by reading this book
