Army veteran Mary Dague lost both her arms in combat but now shines a bright light, helps other veterans cope and competes as a gamer.
In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mary Dague made a pivot. She had been poised to pursue volleyball as a college athlete but opted instead to serve her nation as an explosive ordinance technician.
“I wanted to defend my home; it was a big turning point for me, but I didn't join immediately after graduating,” she says.
The change was prompted by her boyfriend’s mother telling her one that day she would teach Dague how to be an amazing housewife. “I thought, ‘Oh, that's so much more work. No.’ So I joined the Army on the bomb squad because that seems safer.”
Dague was interested in becoming an EOD tech because it was one of the few roles for women in combat.
“It would allow me to do a job that I would feel like I was making a difference, especially in the early stages of the war,” she says. “I felt like disarming the IEDs (improvised explosive device) gave me the best chance of saving people, not just military, because we choose on some level to be there, but the civilians who are innocent bystanders.”
Dague, a member of American Legion Post 6 in Chapel Hill, N.C., served her nation well, before being medically retired in 2010 following an IED explosion in Iraq. Since her retirement, she has survived breast cancer, turned into a prolific gamer and inspired other veterans as they cope with their post-service issues.
‘Just take a breath’
A sergeant who served from 2004 to 2010 with the Army's 707th Ordnance Company, Dague deployed to Iraq in 2006.
On Nov. 3, 2007, a call from the Iraqi Army informed her unit their soldiers had just recovered an IED. At the time, she was being trained as a team leader so she analyzed the situation, conceived a plan to safely detonate the device and carried it back to the truck.
As Dague turned away, the IED detonated, throwing her into the back of a nearby medic truck.
Her world went dark. Everything tasted like copper and sand. She surveyed the situation.
"It's all right,’” she recalls telling herself as she processed what happened. “You're still conscious. Just take a breath. It just hit close to you. It just rung your bell. You're good.”
Shortly she discovered her hearing was intact because she heard a woman screaming. She was wondering why no one was quieting the woman down, then realized that she was actually the woman screaming.
Dague’s team quickly treated her and prepared her to be transported to a hospital in Germany. While separated by distance, her thoughts stayed with them.
“It's not the pain of being hurt. It's leaving your brothers to fight without you,” she says. “They're super competent. They're amazing techs and soldiers, but they're also idiots. What are they going to do without me? It was difficult. They put me on the bird and I just started telling myself, ‘Just stay awake. Don't go to sleep. Don't die.’ As we were landing, one of the doctors says, ‘Mary, we've got you.’ And that's when I went to sleep.”
‘We hugged. We cried.’
Upon waking in the hospital, Dague looked down to assess her injuries.
“I lifted my arm and I was like, ‘Oh, it's gone,’” she recalls. “Then I raised the other one — and that one was even shorter.”
Dague didn’t dwell on her missing limbs for long. She asked her now ex-husband about her team members, who were all fine. That alleviated Dague’s primary concern as she underwent surgeries, began her recovery and returned to America.
Her first reunion with her team was brief but memorable. Upon their arrival at 3 a.m., Dague was on the flight line, wearing a new T-shirt with a silk screen of the words, Sgt. Stumpy.
As they say, humor is the best medicine.
“It's my way to be like, it's all right guys,” she says. “Funny side story, we were all talking one day about how we'd all want to die, which sounds morbid, but happens a lot. Mick had said if he lost his legs, he'd be done. And I said, ‘Dude, they got some pretty cool prosthetic legs, but if I lost my arms, it’s game over. Just pull the plug for me.’”
Once her team saw her, they rolled past the general.
“It was like this big group hug, my brothers and me trying to hold back tears,” she recalls. “Then the sea parts and it was just like waterworks. We hugged. We cried. We had a good, heartwarming welcome.”
Gaming for recovery
That sense of community was an important part of Dague’s rehabilitation. She also dedicated herself to learning how to function as an amputee. Fortunately, using prosthetics came easy for her.
“I think that just comes from working with robots,” she theorizes. “That part wasn't too difficult. The problem that stopped me the most was having to use two prosthetics in tandem with no elbows. It really matters what type of arm prosthetics you have. If you don't have elbows, you need an entire package to manipulate an elbow.”
That ties in with Dague’s interest in problem solving.
“I liked being able to problem solve that, something that was mechanical and tangible that I can manipulate,” she says. “But as far as the mental health stuff, I felt like I had to be OK not for me, but for the guys, for my family. I didn't want them to just see me as this sad shell of who I once was. Nobody comes back from war unchanged. But I didn't want them to just see this and think this was the end of me. So going through all of the hardship of trying to adapt, it was a lot easier when I framed it as I'm doing this for them.”
Dague still had breakdowns.
“There's no point in my story where everything was fine,” she says. “I wore leather jackets because they hid my arms. It took me a long time to get to the point where I would wear T-shirts in public and now I wear a ton of tank tops because function over form. I'm at the age now where I don't care if you see my scars. The breaking down was just the step toward acceptance. At some point you have to get those negative feelings out, otherwise they will just poison you.”
Gaming served as a significant part of her recovery.
“I thought I was never going to game again, which I was pretty sad about,” says Dague, who restarted about a year into recovery. “While visiting friends with my ex over Christmas, they all decided to play Mario Cart. And I was watching them for a while play, and finally asked if they could put a controller on the floor to see if I could play.”
It took some trial and error, but Dague adjusted to playing video games with her feet. In fact, during that visit, she beat her friends in Mario Kart.
Something about Mary
After her divorce, Dague began dating James Cribbett, who fostered her love of gaming. One of the first gifts he bought her was the video game Fable III.
“I was so excited about it and I sat down to play, I must have played for weeks,” she remembers. “And then he got me into this game called Dragon Age: Origins. I didn't have to use the triggers so much, but it was enough that I got to learn how to play with them. And that helped me realize, I'm a gamer now I do this.”
Now married, the couple regularly play video games, sometimes on Twitch where her handle is Wonder Nubs, a take on Wonder Woman.
Dague’s sense of humor was on display when she returned to EOD school where Cribbett was a student. One of her former instructors encouraged her to mess with the students. She agreed and all the instructors were told to take a break at the same time. As the hallway filled with students, Dague was ready in her wheelchair.
“I wheeled out and said, ‘Get out now! They didn’t tell me this could happen. My life is over. I was going to play professional volleyball.’”
Apparently, it wasn’t funny to everyone. Eleven students dropped out that day.
Cribbett recalls that scene, saying he first learned of her when an instructor shared the story of Dague’s injuries.
“I got assigned to the same unit and got to hear a lot of Mary stories from all of the guys,” he says. “I was like, ‘Who's this person?’ For a long time I knew the legend of Mary before we ever actually met.”
They bonded instantly.
“It was mostly the personality and the commonalities between us,” Cribbett says. “There's not a lot of women in our career field. The thing that attracted me the most was that we're both big nerds. We both love animals and video games, and of course we’re both bomb techs. We got all the dark humor and could make dark jokes to each other and know that the other one wasn't going to be horrified.”
Beating cancer
Early in their relationship, Dague was diagnosed with stage one breast cancer just after Cribbett returned from a “very violent deployment.” They received the news right before a scheduled hair appointment for Dague.
“After deployment, I was looking forward to some time to decompress,” he recalls. “And then we were hit with —it's cancer time. I just had a breakdown. I didn’t know how we were going to handle this.”
It was a difficult year as Dague was sick due to the treatments, coupled with the resentment Cribbett received within his unit as he tended to her care.
“I was getting a good bit of flak for whatever the perception was that I was essentially taking every Monday off to do nothing,” he says of when he took Dague for her treatments at VA. “That built a bit of resentment between me and the unit at the time, and it was just kind of a fog for a long time of trying to be supportive of her while maintaining my own mental health and then getting ready for another deployment.”
Dague is now cancer-free, going on 12 years. “It was just a really stressful time, but I don't think I could have gotten through it without James.”
A tale of two weddings
Now, Cribbett helps Dague throughout the day, while letting her do as much as she can. He’ll hand her an energy drink from the table, then let her balance it so she can take sips. They both provide mutual mental wellness for each other, knowing full well what the other has experienced in combat.
“She's always my conscience,” he explains. “She’s the big heart in the relationship. Whenever I'm embittered by something or I'm in my own head, she's usually pretty good at talking to me and telling me to keep the communication going so that we can find solutions without being destructive to ourselves or anything else. She's always been the person that I can talk to about anything.”
Their sense of humor was on display for their first of two weddings, this one with friends. They invited all their EOD friends to a Halloween costume play party on Nov. 16 after the team returned from deployment. Midway through the party, they surprised the guests by inviting them to the back yard for a wedding.
And so Cribbett (dressed in a Chewbacca bathrobe with a matching Chewbacca hat) and Dague (dressed in a Darth Vader poodle dress) were wed.
You might think their second wedding was more traditional. Not a chance.
It was held in Las Vegas where he wore a Mario tuxedo and she wore a Princess Peach (also from the Mario series) dress. The best man was dressed as Luigi and the pastor was dressed as the bishop from ”The Princess Bride.”
At that wedding, they exchanged rings, well, make it an armband for Dague.
A healing journey
Dague’s story resonates with her brothers and sisters who face their own struggles. Whether through a gaming platform, speaking engagements or other modes of communication, Dague offers hope, support and encouragement to other veterans.
“The thing with veterans, especially combat veterans, is everybody is going to try to put them into a box,” she says. “They want to try to make it fit, to try to understand it. But the thing is, none of us come from the same background. We go through what we go through because of our own circumstances. They're all different. There is no book for this. There's no cure.”
Her advice is to take it slow, communicate and progress a step at a time.
“The best advice I can give is to allow yourself to break down and then to talk about it with somebody who you trust and that trusts you,” she advises. “That's the most important part. It's not going to automatically make everything better. It's not going to cure your struggles, but it will help you start. It will help you gain perspective. It's just one little step after another. And sometimes you got to backpedal a little bit, but it's important to get back up and take that next step again.”
- Women Veterans