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Building a life after escaping death

Staff Sgt. Ian Newland promised after Pfc. Ross McGinnis died to save his life that he would never waste the gift.

“I very easily could have died that day,” Newland said. “But my children still have a father. I try to live each day to its fullest potential because of what he did for me.”

On Dec. 4, 2006, an insurgent tossed a hand grenade through the turret of the Humvee in which McGinnis, 19, was manning the .50-caliber machine gun. McGinnis could have followed training procedures and jumped from the turret and saved himself. Instead, he threw himself on the grenade and absorbed the blast, saving four men, including Newland. For his heroic actions, McGinnis has been nominated for the Medal of Honor.

But Newland said that though his friend’s sacrifice allowed him to live, he does so with guilt and pain that have made it difficult to honor his promise.

“I thought I could have done more,” Newland said during an interview at his Colorado home. “Every second, I was reliving it. All of a sudden, I’m in the Humvee again and the grenade goes off.”

He traveled to Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia outside Washington, D.C., for McGinnis’ funeral services, and there he met McGinnis’ family.

“They were so loving and so compassionate,” Newland said. “I thought it was hard losing my soldier — this was just too much. But his dad grabbed me and said, ‘You don’t owe my son anything.’”

Growing up in Ohio, Newland had the sort of tough life that leads many to military service as a way out. He came from an alcoholic family and was ashamed of the welfare-status existence he led before he joined the Army even though he was working two jobs. He excelled as an infantryman and loved the soldier’s life. But after the grenade embedded hundreds of pieces of shrapnel throughout his limbs, causing nerve damage that forces him to walk with a cane and leaving him without the use of three fingers, he found himself at the bottom again.

“After I was wounded, I had nowhere to turn,” he said. No one told him about the Wounded Warriors program. He had been booted out of Landstuhl Army Medical Center in Germany, still heavily medicated and with no instructions about future treatment. And no one bothered to tell him he had been diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury. he fought for benefits and treatment; he worked to make sure the other wounded soldiers living in the barracks made their appointments and got what they needed. And he started to fall apart. So did his marriage as he tried to deal with his problems with alcohol.

“I was messing with her really bad,” Newland said. “I’d been battling every day, screaming at officers, and then I’d come home to Erin.”

“I said, ‘I can’t handle this,’” his wife, Erin Newland, said. “‘I’m done. I just can’t take this anymore.’”

Instead, she went online and did some research, and she talked to the family therapist who had been assigned to take care of her husband’s post-traumatic stress disorder.

“I learned to not get into it with him and not get mad,” she said. “Instead, I’d just need to let him do his ranting and raving.”

“She was able to identify when I was getting angry, and she would back off,” he said. “If I wasn’t in a strong marriage, I don’t know where I’d be right now.”

But he kept getting slapped down. Pfc. Chad Marsh’s family asked him to fly back with the soldier’s remains from Germany to Wichita, Kan. Marsh died Feb. 21 in an IED blast, and he had been one of Newland’s soldiers.

“Mortuary affairs said I couldn’t do it again because it wasn’t the image the Army wanted to present,” Newland said. “Broken soldier.”

Then he found out about his disability rating of 80 percent: $800 a month for a family of four. He had to create a new life for himself.

He started looking for civilian work at Fort Carson, Colo. “I wanted to go somewhere I could find work and that was beautiful,” he said. He’d never been to Colorado before. “As soon as I saw the mountains, I was sold.” But after spending the last of his savings to fly out there from Germany, a mortgage broker who had promised to help with a home loan dropped him because of his financial situation. Even after he found a job, the bank said no. “At that point, I realized things were going to hell,” he said. “They shot me down after telling me to fly out.”

Desperate, he went to the chapel at Fort Carson and he prayed. As he left, downtrodden, another veteran stopped him and asked what was wrong. He hooked Newland up with Mike Conklin.

Conklin founded an organization called Sentinels of Freedom that is designed to help wounded veterans build a future by finding them jobs and making sure their education is paid for up to the doctorate level.

After talking with Newland on the phone from California, Conklin said, “I’m getting on a plane, and I’ll meet you there.”

For Newland, who had dropped out of high school, it was beyond anything he could have hoped for.

“I’ve never had anything given to me,” he said. “I’ve had to work for everything. But I could not accept an uncertain future with my children.”

On Father’s Day, he found out he had been accepted in the Sentinels of Freedom program.

“Mike Conklin is an angel,” Newland said.

A time to heal

Sunlight filters through skylights into the dining area of the Newlands’ new home, which smells of fresh paint and new furniture — all donated. It’s October, and golden aspens up and down the lane mix with red oaks. Haley, 5, and Dryden, 3, play on a swing set in the backyard, which also has been furnished with deck furniture and a barbecue grill capable of serving a football team. For four years, Sentinels will pay the rent on the house, and then the Newlands have the option to buy it. ReMax real estate found a job for Newland in their technology department. He’s received a scholarship from Jones International University. He has a mentor team of 10 professionals, including a retired Army colonel.

“This has been a huge lifestyle change,” he said.

And life, in many ways, is easier. But not easy. At lunch one day, his children grabbed balloons. “Daddy doesn’t like balloons,” Haley said. In the car on the way home, Dryden’s popped. “It’s lucky we were stopped,” Erin Newland said. “We would have swerved off the road.” In an instant, a child’s toy morphed into a grenade. Newland has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, and loud noises can trigger war-zone memories.

In the evenings, Erin Newland takes Ian through his physical therapy. “I can still feel every piece of shrapnel,” he said. “I can’t even describe the pain.”

As he plays with his children, he winces when Dryden climbs over the wrong leg. But he smiles when Haley asks visitors to push her on the swing. And he laughs when his wife calls him a “pogue” — military banter for someone who doesn’t patrol.

“She’s more infantry than I am,” he said.

But he traveled alone when he again flew to Arlington one year after McGinnis died. There, he met up with his full chain of command. Former battalion commander Lt. Col. Eric Schacht pinned former Charlie Company commander Capt. Mike Baka with the gold oak leaves that came with his promotion to major. They held the ceremony on a cold December day at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Then, with others who had come to pay their respects, they walked to McGinnis’ grave.

“Whenever he was around, we were laughing, smiling,” Newland said.

Slowly, painfully, he knelt on the grave to spend some time with his friend.

Multimedia

See photo galleries and video of Charlie 1-26

The complete saga

Part 1: To Adhamiya and back

Part 2: ‘I’ve seen enough. I’ve done enough.’

Part 3: ‘Not us. We’re not going.’

Part 4: Picking up the pieces

Extras

‘Nothing was done.’

Getting the pain out in the open

Leadership in the midst of loss