BELTON, Mo. — On Veterans Day, celebrations across the country pay tribute to active and retired soldiers serving in times of peace and war.
Heather O'Brien, served in the U.S. Air Force Security Forces from 2002-2009.
"I really wanted to get into law enforcement after high school," she said. "You can’t join till you're 21. At 18, I had to three years to kill."
O'Brien is an Army brat and a pastor's daughter. She served in Kuwait, Pakistan, Okinawa, Japan, and most notably, the Abu Gharaib prison at Camp Bucca, Iraq, in 2007.
Camp Bucca is known as the birthplace of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.
"After 9/11, it just seemed like the right thing to do — fight against people that attacked us," she said.
O'Brien says the woman she knew at enlistment was happy, carefree, and foolish at times. That girl became lost during her deployment at Camp Bucca.
"Heather in Iraq was mean," she said. "I thought I could just treat these people as badly as they were treating us and not consider them human at times; I thought I could just treat them that way."
O'Brien served as a guard at a the Abu Ghraib prison. It held 20,000 presumed inmates, ones the military presumed were terrorists.
"Not all of them were," she said. "But that's what their label was. There was extreme overcrowding and a lot of violence to them, to us, and us to them."
Hostility inside the prison grew — O'Brien says inmates frequently made weapons out of granite rocks, threw feces at guards, and started deadly riots.
"Every day you wake up and you go to work and wonder if you're gonna get your head caved in by a rock," she said. "Or if you're going to kill somebody that day because there may be riots where violence just happened. Is somebody going to try and stab you in the foot or the side when you walk by the fence? When you get hit with feces, which happened all the time, will you finally snap and just lose your mind?"
Hateful thoughts took over her mind.
"It was rioting all the time — the way you act in an area where you allow hate to take over your life. You don't act like a normal person anymore. Not everybody did this," O'Brien said."I did because I was young, and I didn't know how to emotionally prepare myself for something like that."
O'Brien says she hated anyone who wasn't an American. She says she doesn't feel she acted out of line for the circumstances she was in, but her view on human decency has since changed.
"In a prison, it means sometimes physically putting someone down with a baton or pepper spray to keep myself alive," she said. "I wasn't necessarily trying to hurt the other person but, I was making sure they didn't hurt me. You just see them as another animal and if that animal dies, I don't really care. Because I don't. It doesn't feel like an honorable experience."
Following her return home, O'Brien attempted suicide. She calls it a miracle someone found her in time.
"That's when my life started to get better," she said.
O'Brien went AWOL for six years from her family and coped with alcohol. After a month-long hospital stay, she began her healing journey.
"I didn't know that we were allowed to have things like PTSD or trauma if you haven't been in normal combat," she said. "It took me a long time to not be angry about not dying."
Through therapy, she identified with a message from a Commanding Officer the night she arrived in Iraq.
He said, "This will be one of the worst places you've ever been to. Just remember, don't let the monster out of you."
It's the title inspiration of her memoir — Don't Let The Monsters Out.
"For me, it meant becoming consumed by hate. I thought, I'll just be mean, and then when I go home, I'm gonna stuff that all back in, and it won't ever be a problem again," she said. "That's not reality."
Writing her memoir was a form of therapy and offered a platform to share her experiences.
"I'm still learning decades later to make sure that monster stays dead," O'Brien said.
This Veterans Day, O'Brien reflects on her time in the Middle East and says she's worked hard to better the woman she became.
"I understand why people say 'Thank you for your service,'" she said. "If you knew what that meant, you would not thank me for it."
She asks for those sharing gratitude this Veterans Day to avoid the "passing handshake" and spend time asking respectful questions about their military service.
"I used to be mad at everything. I understand that people are attempting to show gratitude," she said. "To me, I hope they show a genuine interest."
Ups and downs got O'Brien to where she is today. She values her time in the armed forces. If she could do it over, she wishes to do things differently.
"I don't regret going. I don't regret joining. I would still go back and do it again," O'Brien said. "I would just better prepare myself mentally for what I was getting into — I don't fault the military for that."
O'Brien is hosting a booth at the Lee's Summit West Holiday Mart vendor fair on Nov. 16. She will have memoirs for sale and sharing her story with patrons. For more information on the sale, click here.
Don't Let The Monsters Out is available for purchase on Amazon.
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KSHB 41 reporter Ryan Gamboa covers Miami County in Kansas and Cass County in Missouri. Share your story idea with Ryan.