They say ‘college isn’t for everyone’ but they’ll pressure you to go anyways. This was true for Michael White who was an average 18 year old freshman unsure about whether college was for him. He attended Johnson State in Vermont for a few years, getting into the “no good partying things” as his now fiancé Sarah Simmons put it.
Deciding college really wasn’t for him, White dropped out. After about half a year at home, he began expressing interest in the Marine Corps. No one could talk him into thinking about another branch, and so he enlisted.
“I felt pressure from everybody to go to college…there was a stigma to go into the military…that’s what it felt like for me personally…I went to college and just decided that I didn’t want to be there right now, so I enlisted in the Marine Corps.” White said on his decision to enlist.
White spent some time in the POOLE program, which met once a week to prepare the recruits for basic training. On the 12 of October in 2010, he went to Parris Island in South Carolina for three months of bootcamp. It was a whirlwind of training after that.
White was home for a month, then infantry school in North Carolina for two months, home again for four weeks, then left for California to train in the Mohave desert for four months to train for Afghanistan. After all that training and a unit assignment White arrived in Afghanistan in early May of 2011.
“The doors to the plane open down, and it feels like you’re walking on the moon. The dust is so dry and so fine….it felt like another planet almost…” White said about his arrival to Afghanistan.
During his six and a half months in Delaram, White and his unit served as security for their area of operation there. Their main objective was to stop the terrorist cells that were in operation in the area.
“What they would do is they would get these vehicles and they would load them up with bombs and they would set them off in the market place in the city…” White said about one of the things the terrorists would do.
They were there to protect the civilians, White says, but the civilians protected the Marines as well. At night, when the terrorists set out the IEDs, the civilians would remember where they were and tell the Marines. White and his unit would then avoid them entirely or blow them up safely.
For Sarah, being apart was hard. Communication was weird and spotty at best. While White was in bootcamp, she wrote him two letters a day.
It was different when he went to Afghanistan. White would go into the city for a month, and during that time they would have no communication. Sarah sent him two care packages a month, and letters via MotoMail, a service that emailed letters to the base where they were printed off and distributed to the Marines.
Sarah’s mother, Deb Simmons, supported her daughter throughout the six and a half months White was away. She too, worried about what he was doing. Being such a low rank, White was the one out looking for mines and pushing in the doors when they would clear rooms.
Sarah finished out her junior year of college waiting for the boy she met at Sargent Camp in 5th grade to come home.
When White finally came home, Deb was surprised by how much he talked about what had happened.
“I think he needed to” she said. Both Deb and Sarah agreed that White grew up a lot while he was away. He saw things he never thought he would, and that stayed with him even after he was home.
It was an adjustment for everyone. White described it as “culture shock” going from the extreme of Afghanistan to the suburban life. He did miss the pine-y smell of New England. In the time he was away, he had forgotten what real plants smelt like.
Sarah didn’t believe he was home at first. In the past year they had only seen each other for short periods of time between trainings, so it took some time for the reality to sink in.
During White’s first week back, he and Sarah went to Boston to celebrate their anniversary. In the restaurant, White didn’t want to sit with his back to the restaurant. Sarah didn’t question this, and was later surprised by his behavior while walking down the street.
White would duck and look around the crowd as if something bad would happen. He described himself as feeling uncomfortable, like he wasn’t supposed to be home. It was a bigger adjustment back into normality than anyone expected, including White himself.
Now, White is in school to become a nurse, a decision he says was prompted by his time in Afghanistan.
“When vehicle bombs or IEDs would go off and there were civilian casualties, which most of the time there were, we would be the first responders on the situation. So there were a lot of times where there were a lot of people who needed immediate attention but I couldn’t do a single thing cause I had to cover my sectors. The Taliban would set off a bomb and then they would ambush us when we responded to help people.”
After talking with Sarah about it, he went back to school. Sarah agrees that it is a good fit for him, because the fast pace of it, which is something he responds well to. White knew that he wanted to help people in a way he was unable to in Afghanistan.
Abbi Matheson 