Army veteran from Adrian uses Iraq War experiences to help others

RAISIN TWP. — On Monday, Army veteran Eric Espinoza and his family will travel to the Central Texas State Veterans Cemetery to pay their respects to those who gave their lives in service to their country.

It has become a Memorial Day tradition for the 1998 Adrian High School graduate, who served for 13 years as a combat engineer and was deployed once to Kosovo and three times to Iraq before he was medically retired as a sergeant first class in 2013. He lives in Texas now.

“When we talk about Memorial Day, obviously the first thing they think of is the fallen that never made it back,” Espinoza said last weekend while taking a break from helping get his father’s house in Raisin Township ready to sell. “And you got to give respect. …

“It's also to me about visiting other veterans who passed, not per se in combat or while in service, just as time has gone on.”

He’ll share photos from the cemetery with family members of the veterans buried there who don’t live close enough to visit easily.

Then, after the holiday, he’ll return to his civilian job at Fort Cavazos, Texas, doing something he did as a soldier: working to help other soldiers survive by developing robots that can deal with IEDs.

Helping others is something that the soldiers he served with noticed, whether it was finding and disarming improvised explosive devices in Iraq, developing better training for soldiers preparing for deployments, or working with the Veterans Health Administration on tracking the effects of the traumatic brain injury (TBI) he sustained from 80 IED explosions.

“He has always sacrificed,” Jon Fink of Hampstead, North Carolina, said. He and some of Espinoza’s other Army buddies also traveled to Adrian to help with Cipriano Espinoza’s house.

Eric Espinoza went to see a doctor after he saw a commercial on Armed Forces Network TV about the symptoms of mild TBIs.

“I honestly don’t think he was thinking of himself” when he went to get checked out, Fink said. “He was thinking, ‘If I’m going through this, how many other guys are?’”

Espinoza said one of his youth leaders from when he went to Bethany Assembly in Adrian saw a newspaper article about him and told him he’s a hero.

“I don’t believe that,” he said. “…The real hero is your wife, your kids, Because they didn’t sign up for it, you know? Getting married, they didn’t sign up for those endless deployments. They're just months and months and months a long way from your family. It’s tough. So your military spouse is the real hero in my book.”

He’s been married to Ingrid for almost 21 years. They have two kids together — Adrianna, 14, and Penelope, 8. He also has a stepdaughter, Jocelyn, and a grandson, Alphonso.

Blast effects

Espinoza has been part of a couple of news stories, one in 2010 in the military newspaper Stars and Stripes about mild TBIs and a recent veteran profile in the Fort Cavazos Herald.

He was in Balad, Iraq, on his third deployment during the drawdown of American forces when he saw the TV commercial about mild TBIs. He had been experiencing TBI symptoms such as migraine headaches and dizziness and blacked out three times, the first time while he was working out.

After the third blackout, he went to get checked out.

Earlier in the Iraq War, the military didn’t have TBI protocols. By 2010, that had changed.

“At this point in time they had TBI clinics available,” he said. “And they referred me to the TBI clinic, and I did some evaluations with them, and they determined, ‘It's time for you to get medevacked out.’”

His sergeant major, Terrence Murphy, made the call. He wanted Espinoza to get treatment and not risk having a brain aneurysm or some other serious medical complication in Iraq.

He was first sent to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and then to the Warrior Transition Unit (WTU) at Fort Hood, Texas, which has since been renamed Fort Cavazos.

“The amount of IED hits that I took was unheard of,” Espinoza said. "They thought I was crazy, and I said, I was hit by over 80 IEDs.”

He spent three years in the WTU before being medically retired in 2013, but he continued his treatment with the VA.

“The VA at the time was very interested in concussion protocol and TBI,” he said. “So they related a lot of it to NFL players, concussions, things like that. So I still do evaluations with the VA periodically.”

He said he still feels the effects of those 80 IED blasts, such as dizziness, headaches and ringing in the ears. There are no medical or surgical treatments.

"You just got to figure out what your trigger points are and things like that,” he said.

He has post-traumatic stress disorder, too, but he has a different view of PTSD than what might be the more common concept of the condition.

“When people say PTSD, it's almost like a four-letter word and you're supposed to be this crazy person that has PTSD,” Espinoza said. “But combat-related PTSD, I look at it differently. I think combat-related PTSD, we're blessed. It's a blessing to know what it is like to be at the edge of life and be prepared and walk away from it.”

Where some combat veterans struggle with PTSD is trying to experience that adrenalin rush again, he said.

“But when you're on the edge of life, and you know you're not safe, that's a different high that you'll never get,” he said.

He manages his PTSD by keeping busy, particularly by working on custom hot rods and low-riders.

Deployments

Espinoza joined the Army in 1999 after realizing college wasn’t for him. His father had served in the Army in an air defense unit protecting the New York metropolitan area during the Cold War, and he had heard about what combat engineers do, so he decided to enlist.

His first duty station was in Baumholder, Germany, with the 40th Engineers. He was sent to Kosovo where they supported the NATO forces there, doing route reconnaissance to make sure the roads could handle the weight of the military vehicles and checking the road widths and overpasses to see if the larger vehicles could get to where they needed to go. The first time he was shot at was in Kosovo.

He was there for six months, then headed to Fort Hood and the 91st Engineers. He reenlisted in 2003 and was soon in Balad, Iraq, with the 54th Engineers. At that point, they did more Quick Reaction Force work than engineer work.

His second deployment to Iraq started in October 2005. He was in Ramadi, which was part of the Sunni Triangle west of Baghdad.

“That was a pretty rough deployment,” Espinoza said. “We learned a lot about explosives at that point.”

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By then, the insurgents were using military-grade ordinance, such as 155-millimeter artillery shells taken from old Iraqi Army supplies, in the IEDs. Sometimes they used fuel in the bombs, and other times there would be chemicals of some sort. What the soldiers learned was their training hadn’t been very realistic.

During that deployment, they got better equipment, particularly the mine-resistant, ambush-protected vehicles. MRAPs are large, armored trucks designed to better protect the troops inside from roadside bombs and small-arms fire.

Not everybody made it back. Espinoza recalled one day when they went out, and one of his good friends, Jason Flores, died. They had talked about the route and what to look out for, but for some reason the truck Flores was in parked someplace it shouldn’t have, and an IED exploded under it. Flores and everyone else in the truck was killed, including a soldier from another unit who had been in Iraq for only two days. He was there to learn what the area was like to help the rest of his unit prepare.

By the end of the deployment, his unit had cleared 375 IEDs. That included the 80 that exploded. They were out almost every day.

The Army calculated that each IED blast would take 2.5 soldiers out of the fight, either by killing or wounding them, Espinoza said. Multiplying by the 375 IEDs they cleared, that meant more than 900 casualties were prevented.

“That was our driving force for everything that we did was that we're more prepared for these things than the other units are,” Espinoza said. “We took a lot of pride in clearing our routes, making sure those were cleared for follow-on forces to get through.”

Preparing for the next battle

After that deployment, Espinoza went back to Fort Hood where he became a trainer to prepare soldiers for their deployments. He and one of his buddies, Carl Beuermann, found the training that was being done was “terrible.”

“We talked to the battalion commander at the time and said, ‘Hey, this training sucks. It's not realistic at all,’” he said.

“We made a lot of changes in that unit for IED defeat,” he said, “and to me, it's probably one of the most important things I've ever done in the military.”

While Espinoza was in the Warrior Transition Unit after being medevacked from Iraq, he interned with Booz Allen Hamilton, a defense contractor, on their counter-IED team. He met people working on robotics there.

After he transitioned out of the Army, he became an instructor at Camp Bullis in San Antonio, Texas. For the past 10 years, he’s worked for another contractor, Amentum, at Fort Cavazos. He’s still working on defeating IEDs, only now it’s with robots instead of four soldiers with flashlights heading out into the night in an MRAP.

“We didn't really have robots. We had very simplistic robotics,” he said. "Now, the soldiers are using these robots to go down instead of themselves. So that's a huge perk of being able to do that.”

— Contact reporter David Panian at dpanian@lenconnect.com or follow him on X, formerly Twitter: @lenaweepanian.

This article originally appeared on The Daily Telegram: Army veteran from Adrian uses Iraq War experiences to help others