Mississippi State student William Brooks will be featured on MTV’s “True Life” show tonight at 9 in the episode “I’m Becoming a Civilian Again.”
Brooks left Mississippi State in the fall of 2003 after his National Guard unit was activated. He joined the National Guard as a junior in high school to “get some discipline” and to pay for college.
During his seven years in the National Guard, Brooks spent three months in Iraq. On March 29, 2005, he was part of a convoy driving to the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad. Brooks was assigned to be the “extra man” in his humvee that day, but switched places with the driver.
“I took the place of a buddy of mine because he hadn’t had a day off in two months,” said Brooks.
Because of a Muslim holiday celebration occurring along the usual route, the convoy used a less safe alternate route.
“It was nicknamed ‘IED Alley’,” said Brooks. “IED stands for improvised explosive device. Basically they can be any type of bomb. We had to pull off because of a sandstorm and had to stagger 80 meters in between each vehicle.”
As Brooks moved his Humvee to the left, his left front tire hit a buried IED. He said the road conditions are very poor and filled with ruts and bumps, making it easy to bury IEDs and have them go unnoticed.
When the bomb detonated, the humvee was blown into the air and expelled all passengers.
The 350-pound door pinned Brooks from the waist down and he was bleeding from his nose and arms.
“My legs had been blown to bits and looked like they had been through a meat grinder,” Brooks said.
After Sgt. Richard Anthony removed the door, he and Staff Sgt. Nat Burcham used tourniquets to stop Brooks from bleeding out. Brooks had enough presence of mind to tell Anthony and Burcham to retrieve his military ID from his back pocket to help the medical personnel.
At the hospital in Baghdad, Brooks dead-lined twice and he received 35 pints of blood in one hour.
He was put into a drug-induced coma and had surgery to finish his two above-the-knee amputations.
Brooks said he remembers waking up 10 days later in Washington, D.C., and he spent over 13 months recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center there.
Josh Durdin, who has known Brooks since kindergarten, said, “He is one of the strongest people I know, and no, I am not talking about since he served in the National Guard and was blown out of his Humvee and ripped off his legs. William has overcome everything that has been put in front of him and still manages to remain positive.”
MTV was interested in doing a show with stories from the war, and they heard about Brooks after some of the members of his unit nominated him.
“I’m kind of a private person and didn’t really want to be on TV,” Brooks said. “It took me about a week to decide.”
“They (MTV crew) seemed very professional,” said Michael Brown, Music Department head.
MTV came and filmed a few minutes of Brooks in one of Brown’s music appreciation classes.
MTV filmed Brooks off and on for four months at various locations.
The last day of filming was Brooks’s first day of classes back at Mississippi State, where he returned this year as a junior majoring in political science.
“I don’t know how they (MTV) are going to cut it,” said Brooks. “I hope I’m honestly portrayed.”
“True Life” is an award-winning documentary series that began in 1998. According to MTV’s Web site, its purpose is to tell real-life stories of young people and the unusual subcultures they inhabit in hopes of reflecting the state of youth culture at any given moment.