At just 45 years old, Sammy Owens has already battled injury, PTSD, addiction and Leukemia.

Veteran has survived far more than war

William Buchheit's picture
Part 1
By: 
William Buchheit

Not many people who have been diagnosed with Leukemia, suffered severe war injuries and fought the demons of depression and addiction would consider themselves very lucky.

Yet, 45-year-old Sammy Owens says “luck” has long been the story of his life. As evidence, he digs past the ghosts, nightmares and flashbacks he’s wrestled with the last 14 years and points to one tragic day in Iraq back in February, 2005. It was then that he accompanied 12 US Army soldiers on what was supposed to be a routine mission.

Today, Owens is the only one in that troop still alive.

He earned a Purple Heart for his bravery on the battlefield and has faced a gauntlet of challenges in his long transition back to civilian life. Yet, there is one thing that Owens wants to make perfectly clear to everyone.

“I wasn’t the hero,” he declares. “I was the guy who was with the heroes.”

A Dojo and a Dungeon
Growing up in Spartanburg in the 1980s, Owens developed an affinity for professional wrestling. He and his uncles never missed an event at the Spartanburg Memorial Auditorium and would even act out matches at the house. Hoping to improve his fighting skillset, Owens talked his mom into enrolling him at a karate school downtown. There, the nine-year-old gained some valuable knowledge and began to move through the ranks. He did hold one major reservation, however. He did not like that the dojo practiced only light-contact sparring. He’d heard about another school up the road that encouraged harder hitting and more intense combat sessions. That school was Mike Sanders’ American Karate. The catch was that Sanders, an accomplished fighter in his own right, only worked with students at least 13-years-old.

And so it was that the Spartanburg native had to wait until 1987 to join Sander’s institution. When he did, he learned immediately that Sanders’ reputation as a tough, intimidating instructor was well-earned.

“There would be challengers,” Owens remembers. “People would drive from an hour away from a boxing gym or another karate school just to fight, and Mike would let it happen.”

Sanders subscribed to Mike Tyson’s theorem that “Everybody has a plan until they get hit,” and, more than once, outsiders who showed up to challenge his fighters did not leave the dojo on their feet. Located on Church St. in Spartanburg, the school’s rough location and violent reputation earned it a menacing nickname: “The Dungeon.”

But the diminutive Owens enjoyed testing his mettle as he learned a diverse array of pugilistic disciplines such as Shuri Ryu and Judo. By age 16, he’d earned a black belt in Kempo, an Okinawan martial arts system brought to America by the legendary Ed Parker in the 1950s.

Army Strong
From the time he was a little boy, Owens dreamed of joining the Army. And though his mother tried vehemently to change his mind, the Upstate teen simply wouldn’t be denied. At age 17, he dropped out of Dorman High (where he’d been a standout baseball player) and convinced his parents to sign a release so he could enlist a year early.

It was 1991 and US bombs were beating Iraq into submission during Operation Desert Storm. Owens went to bootcamp at Fort Sill, OK and eventually spent four years at Alaska’s Fort Wainwright working with special forces soldiers he describes as “the cream of the crop.” Even among such military standouts, Owens held his own, earning “Soldier of the Month” honors on numerous occasions.

When the time came to re-enlist, the Spartanburg native says he “decided to go the special forces route.” He went to Ranger school at Fort Bragg, NC and then joined the Army’s famed 82nd Airborne Division, where he carried out over 70 successful jumps. But it wasn’t until he arrived in Bosnia in 1998 to help with a peacekeeping mission that Owens saw the horrors of war up close for the first time.

“No people I knew ever got hurt but I did see a lot of bad things over there (in Bosnia),” he says. “I saw women and kids get raped by the people we were supposed to be helping, and there was nothing we could do about it.”

All Hell Broke Loose
In 2001, Owens left active duty and signed on with the Army National Guard. In 2005, he was deployed to the Ramadi/Tikrit region of Iraq, where he survived the attack that would change his life forever. On that fateful February morning, Owens and the 12 other members of his troop took up position on a hill to keep an eye on a convoy of some 200 Iraqi rebels. The mission was supposed to be an easy one, with the soldiers simply tracking the enemy’s position until planes could come along and dismantle the convoy from the air. The men had been issued specific instructions not to engage the enemy.

But for reasons that remain a mystery to Owens all these years later, one of his fellow soldiers suddenly began firing at the convoy, which contained about 50 vehicles.

Instantly, Owens says “All hell broke loose.”

The convoy returned fire on the overmatched Americans, and within seconds roughly half of Owens’ troop were dead. Though the Upstate veteran remembers little of the chaos and terror of the battle, he has a hole in his belly where a piece of shrapnel gashed him. He left the hill that day wounded and distraught about his fallen brothers.

He was flown to the US Army hospital in Bamberg, Germany for six months to recover from the abdominal injury, a swollen spinal cord and a crippling case of PTSD. Heavily medicated, Owens spent most of his time there in a haze. No longer capable of fighting, the Spartanburg native was finally shipped home. It was still 2005, but Owens was no longer the same soul who’d left for Iraq earlier that year.

“I was done,” he explains. “There were certain things that had taken place that day (on the hill in Iraq) that had ended my military career.

Editor’s Note: The second and final installment of Sammy Owens story will appear in next week’s paper.

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