The Bridge in Fallujah: Joe Dan Worley's Grit With Faith

We came across this story as reported by The Baptist Paper (republished from the Christian Index), and we couldn't let it pass without sitting with it a while: "Wounded Iraq War veteran shares story of faith amid suffering."

Joe Dan Worley joined the Navy in 2003, just shy of his 22nd birthday, and trained as a corpsman — a combat medic attached to a Marine unit. By the fall of 2004 he was in Fallujah, carrying a medical bag instead of a rifle, leaving a pregnant wife named Angel back home. On September 6, a suicide bomber drove a seven-ton truck packed with explosives into his platoon's patrol. Eight men died. Worley called it the hardest thing he'd ever been through. Eleven days later, two weeks from his flight home, his convoy hit a bridge. The lead vehicle took an IED. Worley ran toward the wreckage with his bag, doing the job he'd trained for. A second bomb, buried under the road, went off beside him.

His leg was nearly gone. His own sidearm, strapped to his hip that morning, took part of the blast meant for his body. For a moment, the men around him thought he was dead. He wasn't. He tied his own tourniquet. Packed his own wound. Gave himself the morphine. And then, torn up worse than anyone should have to be, he kept calling out instructions to help the other wounded men around him. That's not a figure of speech we're using for effect — that's what the record says he did on that bridge.

Here's the part that matters most to us. Worley doesn't tell this story as a man who gutted it out alone. He's a deacon now, at Flat Rock Baptist Church in Villa Rica, Georgia, and when he stood up in front of a Sunday School class to tell it, he didn't lead with the Purple Heart or the Bronze Star he earned treating twenty-five wounded soldiers before he was ever hit himself. He led with this: his faith, and his surrender to Jesus Christ, were the greatest source of strength and hope he had. Not instead of his training. Not instead of the grit that had him tying his own tourniquet while the world went white. Alongside it. Underneath it. The grit got him through the next sixty seconds on that road. The faith is what's carried him every day since — through surgeries, through a reunion with a wife and a three-month-old daughter he hadn't met yet, through whatever grief and anger a man is entitled to after a day like that one.

We talk a lot about grit in this house. It's half our name. But grit by itself can curdle — it can turn into something hard and proud and alone if it's never handed to anything bigger than the man carrying it. Worley's story is the other kind. Grit that got handed off. Grit with somewhere to go. That's the whole compass for us: the Faith that gives direction, the Grit that gets you down the road, the Love waiting at the other end of it — a wife, a daughter, a congregation — and the Patriotism of a man who ran toward the explosion instead of away from it, because that's what he'd signed up to do.

If you've got a season like that — one that tried to take something from you and didn't get to keep it — we want to hear it. Tell us your story. We're building this place one bridge crossing at a time.