During my year in Iraq training their civil police I was stationed at the Baghdad Police College, where I served as a team leader to the American instructors and Arabic language translators. We knew that the security procedures in place needed a total revamp, mostly due to the corruption that was (is) prevalent in their society.
We required that everyone trying to access the campus identify themselves with an ID card we issued. Unfortunately, just about anyone could get in by slipping a bribe to one of the guards. We knew we were ripe for an attack, however our boss refused to take any kind of action. We, the other team leaders and I, pleaded with him to no avail.
On December 6, 2005 two al Qaida homicide vest bombers infiltrated the college grounds, and 47 brave police cadets and officers were horribly murdered. Another 85 were sent to area hospitals with severe wounds and injuries.
I brought home the nagging feeling that I (and the other team leaders) should have done more to convince our boss to take action to prevent the attack. This resulted in my developing severe PTSD from the incident.
Fortunately, the University of Texas at Dallas’s Center for Brain Health had programs to treat PTSD in veterans and peace officers, and they accepted me into their care. A yearlong course of cognitive behavior therapy, coupled with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation - and a bunch of journaling in my part - helped me overcome my grief at not doing more to prevent this tragedy.
A few months later I attended a Post Critical Incident seminar at the Law Enforcement Management Institute of Texas at Sam Houston State University, where I was exposed to a session of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR). Through this session I was able to replace the sight I always first saw in my mind, one of my female police officers taking her final breaths, with the image of her smiling face. I still remember the rest of that awful day, but I'm no longer vexed with the sight of seeing the blood running down her face as my initial memory.
So yes. My guilt over not being able to convince my boss to do more to protect us has indeed resolved.
