Hiking To Heal by U.S. Army Sgt. Matthew Lucibello
December 15, 2022
For many, closing a chapter in their life
entails a party, a celebration, maybe a cake or a night out with
friends for drinks. Some favor something more private, maybe a solo
trip across Europe or a period of staying home to decompress and to
prepare for what’s next.
For U.S. Army Maj. (ret.) Rick Marshall,
conquering the Pacific Crest Trail, a 5 month, 2,650-mile-long trek
across multiple states from the Mexican border in Southern
California to the border of Canada would be his way of turning the
page on his military career and beginning his transition to becoming
a civilian.
Sunrise over LeConte Canyon, Kings Canyon National Park, California, June 13, 2021. (Courtesy photo by Rick Marshall)
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Marshall, originally from Vernon,
Connecticut, enlisted in the active component of the Army in 1989,
less than three months after graduating high school. Only one job
stood out to him: Infantryman.
“It didn’t even occur to me to
do anything else,” explained Marshall. “I want to be in the
Infantry, that is what the Army is all about.”
After
completing his basic and advanced training, Marshall signed out on
holiday block leave on December 10 and headed home to Connecticut
for Christmas. This was his only reprieve before heading to his
first unit of assignment, the 193rd Infantry Brigade stationed in
Panama.
Panama was “hot” as Marshall put it. The country had
been under Panamanian military control after a series of military
coups overthrew the presidency, deteriorating the relations between
Panama and the United States. Tensions boiled over on December 15,
1989 when four U.S. service members were detained by Panamanian
military forces and shot at as they attempted to flee. Of the four,
two were wounded in this incident, including U.S. Marine Corps 1st
Lt. Robert Paz, who died of his wounds as his comrades tried to rush
him to Gorgas Hospital. This incident sparked the U.S. to initiate
Operation Just Cause, a month-long campaign to safeguard U.S.
personnel and interests after Panama's declaration of war against
the country.
“I missed the start of Operation Just Cause by
eight days,” explained Marshall. “I flew back down to South Carolina
and I think that was on December 28th, or 29th, flew into Panama,
got assigned to my unit, was out on the streets patrolling Panama
City just before New Year’s.”
By the time Marshall had boots
on the ground, the majority of fighting was over. His unit was now
tasked with performing security missions.
“The combat part
was pretty quick,” explained Marshall. “We were pretty much at that
point doing security missions, and we were doing security for the
presidential palace for the new president of Panama.”
Following his time in Panama, Marshall would transfer to Fort Knox
in January of 1991 and then to South Korea in December of 1994.
Here, Marshall served with the 2nd Infantry Division out of Camp
Hovey, just south of the DMZ.
“I was a gunner on a Bradley,”
said Marshall. “I started off being the company commander’s gunner.”
Marshall would not be the CO’s gunner for long though as he was
soon transferred to second platoon. Here, he was mentored by a Sgt.
1st Class who had worked in and around Bradleys since the vehicle
entered service.
“He knew that Bradley front to back, inside
and out, he taught me everything, gunning and all that kind of
stuff,” Marshall continued. “We go on to company gunnery and I end
up shooting top gun out of the entire company.”
Despite
Marshall accumulating accolades in Korea, things took a sudden turn
for the worse. Marshall's stepfather suffered a brain aneurysm back
at home. It was not long past midnight when Marshall was woken up to
receive the news.
“So, knock on the door at two in the
morning, three in the morning, something like that, my time…walk
down there, sit in the SDO office with some officer who’s not in my
chain of command and I don’t know…and just verbatim reads this Red
Cross message,” explained Marshall. “It was horrible.”
This
incident weighed heavily on Marshall and directly influenced him to
decide to separate from the service in August 1995.
“I had
done my duty, I did my initial tour for my initial four years, I had
done a three-year extension, got all the awards and decorations, no
trouble or anything like that,” said Marshall. “I think it’s time
for me to go home.”
After coming home, Marshall went to
college. Despite making headway on his education, he felt like he
was not getting anywhere. He stopped going to school and started
working as a sports and camping counselor at the Vernon YMCA in the
spring of 1999, running the sports and camping programs for two
years. Here, he would get the idea to join the Connecticut Army
National Guard and use his college credits to attend Officer
Candidate School.
“A few people that I met were like you
should go to OCS,” said Marshall. “And, I’m like, really, I can do
that?”
Marshall walked back into uniform as a sergeant and
once again took on the role of an infantryman in the interim. He
would start OCS, going from phase zero to phase three, and graduate
as an Infantry officer in July 2001.
Two months later,
Al-Qaeda hijacked four commercial airliners, crashing one into the
Pentagon, and two into the World Trade Center. The fourth plane
crashed into a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, after
passengers on board struggled with their hijackers in an attempt to
regain control of the plane. It would be the deadliest attack on the
United States since Pearl Harbor.
Marshall worked in the
Operations and Plans section, also known as the G-3, inside
Connecticut’s Joint Force Headquarters at the time.
“It was
my second or first day there,” explained Marshall. “So, a woman came
up, was like can you turn on the radio, we just heard something
about a plane flying into a building.”
The building came
alive as everyone scrambled to get as much information as they could
about what was going on.
“Nobody really knew what to do,”
said Marshall. “What can you do, you don’t have orders to do
anything, I was watching it live on tv when both buildings came down
with a bunch of other people that a year to two years later would
all be in combat.”
Despite the absence of orders from higher
headquarters immediately following the attacks, local leaders
immediately went to work putting plans into action to safeguard
Connecticut’s military infrastructure. Some members of the Joint
Force Headquarters drew weapons out of the arms room and took up
positions as armed guards. In the days that followed, Marshall and
members of his unit, the 102nd Infantry Regiment, plus other
Connecticut National Guard units, took up positions guarding
critical infrastructure across the state, such as the Millstone
nuclear power plant, the Gold Star Memorial Bridge and various train
stations.
Marshall spent weeks guarding the Millstone
nuclear power plant. He never encountered any foreign adversaries,
but consistently ran into people who had reservations on how he
secured the facility.
“I got yelled at because I had this M60
pointed down this long road, which is what you should do,” said
Marshall. “And then was told, please don’t do that.”
Marshall
even requested a tube-launched, optically tracked, wirelessly
guided, or TOW, missile system to defend the plant against possible
vehicle borne threats, like vehicle borne improvised explosive
devices, or VBIEDs, commonly found later in the war on terror. That
request would be denied.
The mission went on for several
weeks with each company in the 102nd rotating in and out protecting
these sites. After that, Marshall was sent to West Point to perform
security operations as part of Operation Noble Eagle III.
Marshall’s next chapter in the Global War on Terror didn’t start
until 2004. Marshall was sent overseas to Iraq in support of
Operation Iraqi Freedom II with members of 3rd Platoon, Charlie
Company, 1st Battalion, 102nd Infantry Regiment, as part of an
all-volunteer platoon sent to bolster Arkansas's 39th Infantry
Brigade Combat Team. Marshall and his men fell in with Echo troop,
151st Cavalry Regiment. Their mission was to conduct stability
operations in and around Baghdad.
The tone for the deployment
was set almost immediately upon arriving in country. Following a
two-day vehicle convoy from Kuwait up to Camp Taji, a former Iraqi
Republican Guard installation, now the operating base for Marshall
and his unit, Marshall and his men found themselves on the receiving
end of a rocket attack on April 7, 2004.
“I think it was
about maybe midday,” said Marshall. “We weren’t even on that camp 12
hours and we got our first rocket attack and first KIA (Killed in
action).”
Sgt. 1st Class William Labadie, an Arkansas
National Guard soldier with Echo troop, was killed after shrapnel
from the rocket attack struck him as he was attempting to run to one
of the reinforced bunkers used by coalition forces for cover in the
event of such an attack.
“Some of my guys and a couple of
Arkansas guys dragged Sergeant Labadie in at the other end of the
bunker,” recalled Marshall. “They were trying to do some CPR on him
but he had taken a piece of shrapnel.” “We thought he was dead,
instantly, but by the time they got to the bunker he wasn’t coming
back.”
Two days later, on April 9, 2004, Marshall’s unit
suffered another casualty.
While conducting combat patrols
in response to the rocket attack days prior, a convoy of five
vehicles from the 102nd were hit by a complex and effective ambush.
Insurgents drilled under the road the convoy traveled over and
pushed an artillery shell into a hole which was used to initiate the
attack. Following the explosion, PKC machine guns, RPK machine guns
and RPG-7 rocket propelled grenade launchers opened up on the
soldiers. Here, 22-year-old Simsbury native Sgt. Felix DelGreco
would be killed after being shot. He would be the first Connecticut
National Guardsmen to die in Iraq.
“I had to walk down the
line [of his platoon] and just tell them Sgt. DelGreco is dead, you
have five minutes to absorb that and then I want all squad leaders
and the platoon sergeant at the hood of my truck, and that…sucked,”
Marshall recalled, thinking back on his immediate decisions after
the aftermath of the ambush. “How do you do it, especially when I
gotta tell them we’re not done, we’re working this afternoon, we
could be out here for days…so I guess my approach was doing the cold
water treatment, we’ll deal with this later.”
Marshall
believed there to be a time and a place for everything, and now,
especially at the onset of the deployment, he could not have his
soldiers break down and be unable to conduct operations.
“It’s not now, we have to get out of here,” Marshall recalled. “It
happened right at the beginning of our tour, we’ve got 12 more
months of this, we have no idea what is going to happen and so we
figured it’s gonna be like this from here on out, who else is going
to get killed.”
U.S. Army soldiers from 3rd Platoon, Charlie Company, 1st Battalion, 102nd Infantry Regiment (Forward), Connecticut Army National Guard, conduct a mounted patrol in Iraq, October, 2004. Soldiers from the 102nd Infantry Regiment augmented Echo troop, 151st Cavalry Regiment, part of Arkansas's 39th Infantry Brigade Combat Team, and conducted stability operations in and around Baghdad as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom II. (Courtesy photo by Rick Marshall)
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Unfortunately for Marshall and the 102nd, it
would indeed be like this from here on out. Months later, on
December 11, 2004, another soldier, 21-year-old Spc. Robert Hoyt of
Ashford, Connecticut, was killed while out on an ammo convoy escort
mission. His vehicle was hit by an explosively formed penetrator, or
EFP, a shaped charge designed to penetrate vehicle armor. The blast
was so powerful it blew Hoyt out of his vehicle and he was struck by
a truck that was part of the convoy.
Hoyt was medevac'd out
by helicopter and taken to a hospital. Some time later, Marshall
received a call from the hospital informing him that Hoyt didn’t
make it.
“So, after a while third platoon comes wheeling in,
I’m standing outside the TOC (Tactical Operations Center), because
obviously they want to know what’s happening, we didn't tell them on
the radio, we will update them verbally when they get back up to
Taji,” said Marshall. “Montes jumps out of his truck and he’s
looking at me and I just remember looking right at his eyes and I’m
like, we lost him, and Montes just kind of lost his shit right in
front of me, so did a lot of the other guys. Come to find why it
struck them so badly was because they had gotten him on the litter,
they were moving him to the helicopter, he was talking, and I
remember Montes said as they were loading him on he kept saying, I
love you guys, I love you guys. He said it three times or so as they
were putting him onto the helicopter. Those end up being the last
thing he says to them before he succumbed to his injuries.”
Hoyt would be the last soldier from the 102nd to be killed during
Marshall’s tour. By the end of the deployment in March 2005, the men
of the 102nd would receive six Bronze Star Medals, two posthumously,
six Army Commendation Medals with V device for valor, 33 Army
Commendation Medals and four Purple Hearts, two posthumously. The
awards would never be able to make up for the loss of DelGreco and
Hoyt, and the emotional toll of the deployment weighed heavily on
Marshall and other members of the 102nd to the point that a year
later Marshall organized the entire platoon to go together to group
therapy.
“One day, we had been back for a year, a couple of
the guys called me and they’re like, hey Sir, we got some real
problems going on here, I’m like okay, well, what happened…they’re
like, well, this one guy wrecked his car, it caught on fire, he’s
fine, he walked away…okay, but I think we need some help,” recalled
Marshall. “We ended up connecting with this guy at the Newington Vet
Center and we arranged with him, but me saying I would go to
counseling got everybody else to go too.”
Marshall and his
platoon would go to counseling once a month. According to the
counselor, their group was the only group of veterans who served
together in combat and received counseling through a veteran center
as a unit across the country.
“There, that started the
process,” said Marshall. “It’s like okay, now, we can talk about
this, we had all these things, different things, that we had to work
through just to get ourselves right in the head and bring us back to
a certain level of normality.”
What happened next was
anything but normal.
Six years later, on May 4, 2012,
Marshall received a call from his daughter’s step grandfather, Dave,
while training out at the National Training Center for another
upcoming deployment. Katelyn, his 18- year-old daughter, who was
living in Kentucky, had passed away. She had overdosed on heroin and
then drowned in a bathtub.
Marshall initially thought she ran
away or disappeared upon hearing that Katelyn was gone. Dave had to
explain she wasn't missing, and that she had overdosed. Marshall
didn’t believe he was serious at first but after continuing to talk
to Dave the reality of the situation hit him.
Marshall had no
idea she was using drugs, it completely blindsided him.
“Looking back in hindsight, there were some clues,” said Marshall.
“She lived with her mom, so I didn’t have that kind of day-to-day
interaction with her, sometimes you don’t know until something bad
happens…and I certainly am not nominating myself as parent of the
year anytime soon.”
Marshall immediately began working to
fly out to meet with his family and deal with this head on. He
pulled out his tablet while in the training area and booked a flight
from Las Vegas to Connecticut. At first, his unit insisted he wait
for a Red Cross message, like the one that he received when his
stepfather was gravely ill, but as he now was working as an Active
Guard Reserve Captain, he had “plenty of dough” and figured it would
be quicker to buy his own flight instead. The unit relented,
authorized the trip and Marshall was ferried three hours down to
McCarran International Airport, now Harry Reid International
Airport, for his flight.
Marshall landed in Connecticut and
traveled by car down to Kentucky. He attended his daughter’s funeral
and afterwards spent a week at his house in Oregon. He traveled back
to Connecticut from Oregon in three days, never stopping to process
the whirlwind of trauma he had just gone through and immediately
went back to work.
Marshall, consciously or not, chose to
ignore his grief. At the time, although he didn’t know it yet, a
blood clot was forming in his leg. It wasn’t until he went for a
hike on a section of the Pacific Crest Trail, also known as the PCT,
the following month with longtime friend U.S. Army Command Sgt. Maj.
William Kenyon, now retired, that he would realize just how much he
needed help.
The pair started their hike in Oregon at the end
of July. The trip was originally intended as a vacation for Kenyon,
together they would do a multi-day hike and tackle part of the PCT.
Marshal’s calf was swollen and it hurt to walk but he carried on
like he always had. The only problem was their vehicle was dropped
off at their planned stopping point ... 36 miles away.
“I know
something is wrong, this is bad, I can’t walk,” recalled Marshall.
“We get to the first campsite, I set up my tent, Will starts the
fire and he’s thinking we’re gonna be sitting around the fire,
kumbaya, and all this kind of stuff, and I just get in my tent and
lay down, I can’t stand, I can’t sit, the only thing that feels good
is laying down…I have to do that for two more days.”
The pair
eventually made it back to the truck and drove back to Marshall’s
residence. The next morning, Kenyon discovered Marshall sitting
downstairs with a block of ice on his leg. The pair locked eyes with
each other, “Dude, take me to the hospital.”
Kenyon drove
Marshall to a nearby clinic where a doctor examined Marshall’s leg.
The doctor immediately demanded that Marshall go to the hospital.
The hospital staff performed some tests and informed Marshall there
was a blood clot that ran from his upper thigh to the bottom of his
left leg.
“I should have died,” said Marshall. “I should have
had about 20 different embolisms, but nothing ever broke off, it
just stayed in there and just clotted.”
Marshall was
immediately put on blood thinners. He eventually flew back to
Connecticut but was dropped from an upcoming deployment due to the
clot. Here, he would have a lot of time to think about how close he
came to dying and he began the process of coming to terms with
losing his daughter.
“I hit that point,” explained Marshall.
“My grief was so intense that part of me with that blood clot was
like, let’s just get it over with, it won’t be suicide if the blood
clot gets me because it’s not like I put the gun in my mouth or
swallowed a bunch of pills, it wasn’t an intentional plan, but my
subconscious was like, you know what, we can all make this go away
right now, we can just end this.”
Thankfully, Marshall had no
complications with his recovery. The blood clot never broke loose,
he never suffered an embolism. The infantryman who had dealt with
everything life had thrown at him had finally met his match.
Marshall decided it was time to get help. He began counseling in
November.
“I finally was like, okay, if I don’t get any help
for my mental health, I’m either going to drink myself to death or
I’m putting a gun in my mouth, one of the two,” said Marshall. “It
was just headed that direction, something needed to change.”
Marshall called up Army OneSource, now Military OneSource, which
provides a network of services to active and reserve personnel and
their families, including therapy, and spoke with a representative
who aided him in getting the help he needed. The representative
highly recommended a therapist named Gary, working in Manchester.
Marshall met with him and began Eye movement desensitization and
reprocessing therapy, or EMDR.
“To this day, I have talked
about it openly, even when I was still in the Guard, about going to
therapy and doing that treatment stuff, I can’t explain how that
shit works, but it works,” explained Marshall. “[If] anybody that is
suffering from PTSD can find somebody that has been trained in EMDR,
they should do it.”
Marshall continued EMDR therapy and
counseling for a year and a half. In early 2014, he was finally
cleared by a medical board for the blood clot in his leg. He
deployed to Afghanistan in 2015, here he hatched the idea of taking
on the Pacific Crest Trail from start to finish as his way of
closing the book on his military career after discovering a website
of a computer engineer who recorded every day of his journey.
Starting in April 2015, Marshall would log onto the site and read
the corresponding entry for that date from the hiker’s journey a
year prior.
“I decided I was going to read his website every
single morning when I got into my office for that day that he was on
the trail,” said Marshall. “I was vicariously hiking, virtually
hiking, the trail through his stuff the year before…and that’s when
I was like, really okay, I can do this.”
Marshall set the
date. After he hit his twenty years and retired from the Army, he
decided he would begin his trek.
In February 2017, Marshall
retired from the Army as a Major. Two months later he started his
hike down in Campo, California. The journey took him over the Sierra
Nevada mountain range, for 33 days of his trip he trudged through
snow at differing elevations between 8,000 and 13,000 feet. The
freezing mountains would soon turn to a fiery hellscape as he got
closer to Bend, Oregon, as forest fires had engulfed the trail
sporadically up across Pacific Northwest up until the border of
Canada. Marshall was forced to turn around.
“I got to just
south of Bend and everything in front of me was on fire,” recalled
Marshall. “I guess this trip is over.”
Next year, Marshall
tried again. He would not be on the trail for too long. After making
it back to the Sierras, Marshall drank non-treated water from a
creek, causing him to contract giardia, a tiny parasite that causes
the diarrheal disease giardiasis. The next morning, he felt he had
come down with the flu.
Marshall hiked two and a half more
days while ill to reach Vermillion Valley Resort, a campground at
Edison Lake. He hitched a ride with the owner of the property and
traveled down to Fresno to head home. Marshall was on antibiotics
for a week, and in recovery for three weeks, before he felt better.
By the time he recovered, he was 160 pounds. As he put it, “I looked
like I walked out of a POW camp.”
It would not be until 2021,
after a brief two-week hike on the PCT and after climbing Mount
Whitney, the highest point in the lower 48 states at 14,505 feet,
with Kenyon in 2020, that Marshall would return with his best friend
to conquer the PCT from start to finish. This time Marshall was
ready. He had made all the preparations, he looked into the weather,
he calculated the pace they would have to hike at and sent out their
resupplies so they would be equipped as they got farther down the
trail.
“After all those miles I had put on between ‘17 and
‘19, I had the trail dialed in,” said Marshall. “I told Will
(Kenyon), this is exactly how we are going to do this, and I said,
this will get us to the finish line.”
Marshall and Kenyon started out back down
in California and steadily made great time, narrowly avoiding being
stopped by forest fires that now engulfed the trail behind them.
This time around the biggest thorn in the pair’s side was not a
direct part of nature, it was Kenyon’s footwear. Kenyon was unable
to find a pair of properly fitting hiking shoes, his feet were sore
and ached the entire time to the point he would try a new pair of
boots at every resupply they came across. He never found a pair that
truly were comfortable, but, nevertheless, the pain in his feet
never stopped him. For the first half of the hike, they averaged 16
miles per day, eventually hiking approximately 19 miles a day when
the terrain was not as steep and more forgiving.
U.S. Army Maj. (Retired) Rick Marshall and U.S. Army Command Sgt. Maj. (Retired) William Kenyon at the start of the Pacific Crest Trail in Campo, California, April 17, 2021, left, and at the end of the trail at the U.S. and Canadian border in Washington, Sept. 17, 2021, right. (Courtesy photo by Rick Marshall)
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During their 154 days on the trail, the
pair found themselves trapped in multiple windstorms, out walking
wildfires, climbing into the mountains, fording through rivers and
creeks laden with their 30 pound rucksacks, fighting off deer
attempting to steal their supplies and trying to stay ahead of a
large group of hikers that they affectionately referred to as “the
hoard”. Each day brought a new beautiful vista and with every step
their confidence grew. As they neared Washington, the last state on
their journey, they believed this time they were going to make it.
“If anything was gonna stop us, it was we just quit,” explained
Marshall. “Once we got to Washington too, since that was the last
state, and there really weren’t any fires affecting the trail
directly at that point, I’m thinking alright, we’re gonna get this
done.”
The final days of the hike as the pair approached the
Canadian border were “gorgeous.” The weather was about 55 degrees,
there were no clouds in the sky. The pair hiked about 20 miles and
set up camp three miles from the border. As they steadily approached
the final leg of their trek they encountered hikers traveling
opposite of them, victorious and on their way back home to the lives
they put on hold as they embarked on this journey. Some faces were
familiar to Marshall and Kenyon, others they had never seen before.
“We ran into this couple, we hadn’t seen them since the Sierras,
we hadn’t seen them in almost three months, in the beginning we were
hiking around them for a long time,” said Marshall. “You’re like
there you are, this is awesome, so we got held up quite a bit
because we ended up talking to so many people.”
Some people
were upset. The lives they left behind they would soon have to
return to, for some it was an escape, all they had to do at the end
of the day was setup their tent and go to sleep. Marshall didn’t
dwell on it for too long. As more hikers filtered through, Marshall
and Kenyon hatched a plan to wake up early at daybreak to finish the
hike before everyone hit the trail during the day.
It took
them about an hour to hike the last 3 miles to the Canadian border.
The pair signed the logbook at the border and took photos to
commemorate their journey. Finally, four years after first
attempting to complete the hike from start to finish, Marshall would
have his win.
“You feel accomplished, you did it, it’s
amazing,” recalled Marshall. “No one can take this away from you.”
The pair turned around and headed back past the campsite they
stayed at the night before to head off the trail. From first
stepping foot on the trail in 2017 to finishing the journey from
start to finish in 2021, Marshall hiked approximately 6,500 miles on
the Pacific Crest Trail. During this time, he did a lot of soul
searching and found that hiking was able to ease his mind and help
him come to terms with the trauma he had endured and bottled up.
“I found that hiking as a whole is my own version of therapy, I
can use it almost as a walking meditation.” said Marshall. “When I’m
walking or hiking like that, you got nothing but time to think about
stuff and that really helps a lot, for my mental health hiking has
been amazing.”
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