CEDAR RAPIDS — Walmart on a Saturday … a hot curling iron … a box on the side of the road — those might be mundane to the average American. But for Justin Bascom, they’re anything but — even two decades after his military deployment to the Middle East.
“Boxes or debris on the side of the road — that was a huge thing for us,” Bascom, 44, said of his time driving for the Army in Iraq in what become known as the “triangle of death” — a notoriously violent region south of Baghdad. “We always looked for debris, and so that was a big thing when I came back — seeing boxes on the side of the road was not normal for me.”
And his anxiety would spike — like it would in a crowded Walmart or when his wife would burn her hair with a curling iron, sending off a smell like burned flesh — leaving the Cedar Rapids native in a state of extreme stress he found unbearable…