Facebook helps bring paratroopers back together for common purpose

In 1991, Jason Auld was a kid from McPherson, Kan., who became an 82nd Airborne paratrooper and fought in close-up combat in the Persian Gulf War.

He took two compact Nikon cameras with him, including when he and the paratroopers went deep into Iraq and fought battles. He was a paratrooper specializing in radio intercepts and military intelligence who wanted to become a combat photographer.

Sometimes Auld heard bullets cracking inches overhead when he shot pictures during firefights.

He’s 46 now, disabled by post-traumatic stress disorder and mostly alone. He takes several prescribed medications and every so often sucks in and blows out big, billowing clouds of white, nicotine-laced vapor.

He was 21 when he fought in that war, and the buddies who fought beside him were 20 or 21 or not much older.

Jason Auld will spend this Memorial Day in Wichita like many other Memorial Days in recent years. He’s got no money and no place to go, except once in a while to the Robert J. Dole VA Medical Center.

The only soldier thing he might do on this Memorial Day is get on Facebook and chat with paratroopers who he says saved his life.

Losing everything

Those soldiers are all in their mid-40s, some of them healthy and happy, some not. They are like brothers, most of them fellow paratroopers from C&J Platoon, Bravo Company, 313th Military Intelligence Battalion, 82nd Airborne. Steve Nall. Ralph Richmond. Two dozen or more other men.

They call Auld “Jake,” not Jason; they don’t remember why. The only other person who calls him Jake is his mother, Auld said.

Jake Auld and his paratrooper buddies were together four years before and after the war.

They trained together, jumped out of planes together. They’d gone to language school, learned how to intercept enemy radio transmissions and gather military intelligence and call in air strikes. They lived and ate and laughed together, played pranks, played cards, slept in the same rooms together. Fought together.

“That bond between soldiers ... you can’t compare it to anything else,” Richmond said. “You are sitting in the sand. And there’s that threat, that continuous threat, that some of us might not make it. And you end up not just knowing these guys on a deep level, but ... you know their souls.”

After the war, they lost touch.

And Jake Auld lost nearly everything else.

One by one

PTSD is an affliction not entirely understood.

Richmond has it – he can’t hold down a job, gets angry sometimes for no reason, isolates himself sometimes.

But many combat survivors don’t have it. Nall shot at people and got shot at – and lives a healthy life. He makes custom guitars at Collings Guitars in Austin. He loves guitars and music and lives free of anxiety and sleepless nights.

“Combat didn’t affect me like it did Jake and some other guys,” he said. “Not because I’m tougher than him – I’m not. It’s probably how I’m wired differently.”

PTSD took away Jake Auld’s sleep, his job, his sobriety, his marriage, his four kids and his health. It eroded his desire to live.

After Desert Storm ended, the photographs he shot of Nall, Richmond and all his other buddies stayed in a box in his basement, mostly unlooked-at.

Richmond, Nall and the other guys told him during the war that he was a great photographer.

He’d worked hard at it, packing two Nikons and three lenses, along with all his other gear.

“He shot these incredible pictures, always all black and white and gritty and real,” Richmond said. “There’s something about black and white and gritty that stops you cold, and Jake always shot black and white.”

But for most of the past 25 years since that war, the only time Auld could look at those images was after a few smokes and 18 or more Miller Lite beers.

About two years ago, maybe three (“I have trouble keeping track of time”), Auld began scrolling through Facebook, sitting alone in his studio apartment in west Wichita. He looked for his buddies. One by one, he found them, or they found him.

He says they saved his life.

Waiting for enemies

In Desert Storm, they saw bad things.

“Everybody in the public remembers Desert Storm as airplanes dropping smart bombs on buildings, followed by thousands of Iraqis throwing their hands in the air and surrendering,” Auld said.

“But where we were, on the far left flank of the Allied lines, that was not how it was. We fought bad guys shooting back at us, for weeks.”

They’d watch through binoculars as Allied artillery or airstrikes obliterated entire units of the Iraqi Army.

They lost fellow soldiers on the first day of Desert Storm combat. A man in a truck full of soldiers accidentally pulled the pin out of one of his own grenades; the explosion mortally wounded him, and wounded two others.

Auld heard the bang of the grenade and watched stunned soldiers falling out of the truck. He shot photos of the dying soldier being carried to a helicopter.

Sixteen French soldiers in a unit fighting alongside the 82nd Airborne got killed later that day.

Auld shot everything war can show.

He came upon dead Iraqi soldiers. He pulled out his camera and shot photos. “I felt ghoulish afterward.” He never shot dead soldiers again. “I turned my cameras around after that and shot only the soldiers with me.”

In a unit full of elite soldiers, Auld “was one of the guys we all wanted on our team,” Richmond said.

They often moved against the enemy at night.

“I was on guard duty, walking the perimeter one night,” Richmond said. “I felt a whiz, followed by the crack of the gunshot; I did not just hear the bullet, I felt it go right by my ear. It was a sniper, but he missed me. God shines his light on idiots sometimes.”

Since then, Auld could never sleep at night. He’d lay awake and alert, waiting for enemies who did not exist.

Only soldiers understand

Richmond and Auld eventually got diagnosed with PTSD.

In 2009, Richmond endured a 30-day in-patient hospitalization in what he jokingly calls “Uncle Sam’s nuthouse” – a VA hospital. He and Auld had not been in touch with each other for many years, but both suffered from the same afflictions: anxiety, sleeplessness, anger, an intense desire for isolation.

Talking with counselors didn’t do much for either of them.

But then they all found each other. And they began to talk to each other, like they’d never talked to anyone else.

It did more good than any VA counseling, Richmond said.

“Hands down, the guys were better for me. I could talk about things. I could laugh again.

“We became so obsessed to find the others that one of the other guys actually hired a private investigator to find our buddies,” Richmond said. “That’s how we found Steve Nall.”

Nall was free of PTSD but soon realized how much some of his friends were suffering.

Only a combat soldier can truly understand tormented combat soldiers, Nall said.

“In the movies, war is always a nonstop firefight, with strong, handsome dudes doing the shooting,” Nall said. “But the reality is it’s months of boredom, followed by a huge adrenaline rush from combat, followed by weeks of boredom. The soldiers who lived through all that are really the only people who can understand guys having problems.”

After Auld found them on Facebook, he felt instantly better. About everything.

They all volunteered

After he found Nall, Richmond and the others, Auld did something he hadn’t done in years. He opened his boxes of photographs, this time while sober.

He sent a few of the images to his Airborne friends.

“I was just stunned,” Richmond said. “I told him: ‘Dude, holy crap. You gotta do something with these photos. Make a book, man. Get going.’ ”

His other friends chimed in quickly, gushing about the images, urging him to publish.

But how?

He had no money. He couldn’t afford to scan the old photos, let alone invest in getting a book published. But how do you tell your friends that?

“Jake hides things very well,” Richmond said. “A lot of PTSD guys, they’re hurting, but you have no clue about the demons in their head – unless they open up to you.

“He was guarded at first. If you’re an Airborne guy, you don’t show weakness.”

But a few weeks after he found the men on Facebook, they were chatting in a group together at all hours of the day. And the men who suffered, including Auld and Richmond, for the first time ever were telling the truth out loud – about isolation, anger, sleeplessness, nightmares.

Auld told them about his suffering, his sleeplessness.

And he told them he had no money to do a book.

Every paratrooper in that Facebook chat group immediately volunteered to help.

A unit once again

But help him do what?

Should he try to get a publisher and market the book as a best seller? Who would be the audience that might buy such a book?

“I have seen many, many photographs of Desert Shield and Desert Storm, but I have never seen any photographs of the war as good as Jake’s,” Richmond said.

But Auld had no experience in learning how to find a publisher or how to organize a book proposal.

So Auld and the other paratrooper decided to start small. Someone suggested they put together a Kickstarter effort, in which Auld proposed online what he wanted to do, and the public could kick in contributions if they liked his proposal.

The effort failed.

So the paratroopers talked it over. Most of them kicked in something, including jobless PTSD victims like Richmond. “I sent him a couple hundred dollars,” Richmond said.

“They bought me a scanner, so I could scan the photos,” Auld said.

And while they helped him, they realized that after years and even decades of losing touch with each other, the paratroopers of C&J Platoon, Bravo Company, 313th Military Intelligence Battalion, 82nd Airborne, were acting as a unit again. Getting things done.

‘Every one of us’

And so Jason “Jake” Auld last year self-published a hardback book, “Always Out Front: The Photo History of an Airborne Company.”

It has sold 65 copies so far. The publishing costs were paid by his friends.

He has hundreds more photographs he hasn’t published yet. There might be another, bigger book someday, he said.

He feels better.

“Things are going pretty good for me, post-book,” he said. “I’m shooting again. I’m in touch with a lot of people – photographers, friends and other vets. I have issues from time to time, but it’s nothing like it was four years or so ago.

“Those guys were life-savers,” he said.

His paratrooper buddies got plenty of payback, Richmond said.

“Every paratrooper in that chat group has an ‘I-Love-Me’ wall in their homes, where we hang up something,” Richmond said.

“And every one of us on our ‘I-Love-Me’ wall has a great black and white photograph of ourselves.

“Every one of us has a photograph shot by Jake.”

This story was originally published May 29, 2016 at 4:14 PM with the headline "Facebook helps bring paratroopers back together for common purpose."