LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – Denny Salisbury's best friend is his bicycle, the one the former Marine corporal will ride to encircle Clear Lake – a distance of about 100 miles – on Sunday, June 9, in honor of his compatriots in arms who were fatalities of the war on terror in Iraq.
The distance is no big deal for Salisbury, who will be joined by other members of Ride 2 Recovery Patriot Guard Riders on his ride. He is a regional rider for his Northern California project team.
Bicycling for an infinite number of miles has been the one true aid in Salisbury's five-year quest to rehabilitate himself from the wounds and agony he suffered in Iraq and since then.
Along with other program members in October of last year, he completed a “challenge” ride of 477 miles from San Francisco to Santa Monica and a 100-mile challenge ride in one day in the Las Vegas area.
“I remember when I first started riding 10 miles it beat the crap out of me,” he confided. “I would be physically just drained. My clothes would be soaking wet. Now if I do 10 miles I'm not even warmed up.
“What we do is help veterans recover,” Salisbury said regarding Ride 2 Recovery's mission. “Getting on a bike not only improves your health, it helps your mind. You're focusing on a whole 'nother thing. So you're not depressed or feeling anxiety or any of that. When you're on a bike you can communicate with your body and your friends.”
So the bike is a most integral part of this just-turned-26 native of Kelseyville's recovery process?
“Absolutely. Bicycling has changed my life around. I would be lost still without riding. With the fitness you get from it your mind is a lot healthier,” said Salisbury, who was awarded the Purple Heart and medically discharged from active duty in 2008 just three years after being awarded his high school diploma.
He was not yet 21 years old at the time he was designated 100-percent disabled. For a long time he experienced migraines and memory loss.
Indeed Salisbury was disabled, first from an incident involving an improvised explosive device – or IED – then post-traumatic stress disorder and later from addiction to prescribed drugs, which cost him a marriage (he has a daughter, Versailee), temporary discontinuance of his pursuit of a college degree and the mental process needed to hold a job.
Consequently, Salisbury is reluctant to seek the aid of doctors.
“My drug addiction caused me to get emotionally detached from my family and friends,” he said. “I wasn't told how to come back to the U.S. From Iraq. It wasn't like 'Oh, you're going to have all these problems and nightmares. You're going to be wishing you still had your gun.' Sometimes I feel like I'm still back there. But after a (PTSD) program I graduated from last year I'm at peace with it all. I think about it, but it doesn't bother me as much as it used to.”
What happened to Salisbury in Iraq he may never forget.
“We were just doing a regular patrol and we got ambushed by a car with a guy with a gun,” he said. “So we ran back to our truck, but then an IED got our truck. They (the terrorists) wanted to run us back to our vehicles so that they could set us up for the IED. We got in our truck and started pursuing and that's how I got it.
“Two of my friends – my lieutenant and my driver, a lance corporal – were killed. My gunner broke both his ankles, his leg and his back. The guy sitting next to me was busted up and bloody. I had a hole and in my leg and second degree burns on my face. Of the five people in the vehicle I was the only one to walk out of the situation.”
While he was recovering from his injuries, a third of his friends was shot by a sniper.
“I was back at the base listening to our radio and heard that he got shot,” Salisbury said.
An executive officer confirmed that his friend was a sniper's victim, he recalled.
Salisbury's initial gung ho motivation for enlisting in the Marine Corps and disillusionment after going off to war is doubtlessly not unique for a teenager, especially a rough and tumble one who was a tight end and a defensive end on the Kelseyville football team.
But such patriotic fervor is not restricted to the very young.
A decade ago, Pat Tillman of San Jose turned down a $3.6 million contract offer by the St. Louis Rams to enlist in the U.S. Army only to be killed by “friendly fire” in Iraq.
Salisbury's Marine Corps entrance test scores were high, which qualified him for virtually any specialty of his choosing.
“But I wanted to go into the infantry,” he said, “because I wanted to fight. I just felt like it needed to be done.
“When I went in I was going to fight for freedom, I was going to defend this country from the Iraqis, the Taliban and al-Qaida,” he said. “The thing with this war, not all the enemy was Iraqi. From what I saw it was 'If you want to fight Americans just drop down to Iraq and have a war,' which brought in all these mercenaries from other countries. Syrian snipers were big in our area.
Regarding the continued presence of U.S. Troops in the Mideast, Salisbury added,”We are fighting 1 percent of 1 percent of their population. After 10 years we are sending our best men and women over there to fight this war and what really did we do over there? I'm failing to see the benefit of this war. I don't want to get all vertical, but it frustrates the **** out of me that I've lost friends over there and I can't see a ******* cause. What did we gain from it? I don't think that we helped anyone.
“What really hurt me was going over there and kicking innocent families out of their houses and then coming back here and seeing the same ******** happening to our U.S. citizens. If America is struggling right now and trying to survive, what the **** are we doing in other countries?”
Salisbury still hopes to complete his college education. His initial effort ended after he continuously fell asleep in class and crashed three cars while in school, he says, because of his medication. Consequently, he lost the financial aid of the GI bill.
“I don't want to bash the VA or the government,” he added. “But to survive you had to go to college so you get paid, but if you're addicted to all this medication and falling asleep in class and crashing cars trying to get to school, what the hell's the point?
“Sometimes I feel that the doctors – I don't know how to phrase it – don't understand every situation. When you focus on different veterans, each one has different problems. You have to really get specific ... That's probably why I haven't gone to doctors and kind of detached myself from them. I know it's not the case, but I personally feel that they haven't helped me in the way I wanted to be helped. I kind of feel like they medicated me and pushed me aside.”
Salisbury believes he will eventually get a job. For the moment, though, he wants to help other veterans, possibly through motivational speaking.
Deb Ingalls, who teaches art and physical education at KHS as she did while Salisbury was in high school, sees him as getting progressively stronger.
“He is an awesome young man and he worked really hard all the time and was very positive. I saw him when he came back from Iraq and he was having a really hard time,” she said. “Now when I see him he looks fantastic. I'm proud of him.”
Through it all, Salisbury still loves the Marines and is a member of an honors team that fires 21-gun salutes at military funerals.
Said Salisbury: “I'm sure that there are people out there who have had it worse than me. The way I look at it, I'm not a victim; I'm a survivor. Bring on the next thing.”
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