Van of Valor

A year after their shared ordeal in Afghanistan’s deadliest corridor, two Purple Heart recipients sit down. One on the Van of Valor mission, listens as the other, a warrior turned artist, recounts how he forged a new mission from the trauma of war.

By Dr. Kevin Wallace
Van of Valor

BRISTOL, Tenn. – The interview doesn’t begin with war, but with the tools to capture its stories: Hollyland microphones, a donation from an aunt who insisted on quality over cheap substitutes. 

It’s a fitting start for a conversation between Dr. Kevin Wallace and the man he’s interviewing, a fellow veteran Sgt. Thomas Waterman. 

Both men earned their Purple Hearts in the same unforgiving patch of Afghanistan in Bala Murghab — and also both served another known insurgent hotbed, the Bala Baluk district and its infamous “IED Alley.”

It has been years since they served, but the memories, sharp and visceral, remain.

“You’re being put right into the thick of it—a gunfight,” Waterman recalls, describing his arrival in Bala Baluk. 

The calculus of war, as he explains it, was brutal and immediate. 

“It’s better to get shot in a gunfight than face beheading or imprisonment for espionage,” said Waterman.

The heart of Waterman’s story, as told to Dr. Wallace, is a tapestry of chaos, dark humor, and the unvarnished reality of modern combat. 

He recounts an unorthodox mission escorting Army Corps engineers into Iran, where a Colonel’s obsession with proper uniforms clashed with the surreal nature of the operation. 

His sarcastic retort of “Tea and cookies, sir” to a superior’s panicked questioning about the situation was met with a promise he’d never work with them again — a promise he welcomed.

But the core of his combat experience is anchored in the relentless pressure of IED Alley. He describes high-stakes convoy missions where the objective was as much about survival as it was about projecting presence. 

In one moment of darkly comic relief, the official goal of a presence patrol was a resupply run for ice cream.

“Yes, we successfully got the ice cream,” Waterman confirms, before adding the inevitable postscript to any moment of normalcy in a warzone: “despite coming under fire on the return trip.”

His narrative is punctuated by the thunder of weapons and the quick-wittedness required to stay alive. 

He was part of the team that fired the first mortar rounds by Gulf 2-7 Marines since Vietnam — 150 rounds of 81-millimeter fire, an event marked by a unique camaraderie that included “combat stripe” tattoos from the mortar tube’s cooling fins and a light-hearted tent stake prank on a young Marine.

Yet, the chaos could turn lethal in a heartbeat. 

He provides a raw, first-person account of a fierce firefight where an RPG skip ricocheted and struck his Non-Commissioned Officer in Charge (NCOIC). 

He recalls the steadfast dedication of a comrade, Jones, who, amidst the barrage, was determined to retrieve a fallen soldier’s glasses, vowing to leave no gear behind.

It was in another engagement that Waterman took a ricochet to the thigh, a wound that would lead to a profound and chilling moment. 

He was mistakenly reported as killed in action, while his teammate Dave was listed as alive. The error nearly reached his wife.

“Sergeant Major Janin gave me his personal cell phone to call home,” Waterman says. “The error was corrected in time.”

The interview concludes as it began, with a focus on the present. 

But the ghost of Bala Baluk is ever-present. When asked if he was ready for what came next, in combat or in life, Waterman’s response is pure, unvarnished warrior spirit, a fitting epitaph for his old life and a motto for his new one:

“No better fucking way, brother.”

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