Oct.18 is the anniversary of the day in 2006 when I met Lt. Col. Justin Constantine.
And it’s also his “Alive Day” — a day marked annually by some who survive a close brush with death, especially if it happened in combat. It's kind of a second birthday, but with a more serious undertone.
I had traveled to Anbar Province, Iraq. It was three years into the Iraq War, and Anbar was one of the most dangerous places for U.S. troops — the heart of the Sunni insurgency.
I was checking in with Lt. Col. Todd Desgrosseilliers, one of the bravest men I’ve ever met. I was reporting on the war for McClatchy Newspapers and wanted to see what Desgrosseilliers was doing in one of the worst places in the world.
Desgrosseilliers was already a decorated war hero. Months earlier I’d attended the Camp Lejeune ceremony in which he was awarded the Silver Star.
When I got to the small base in Habbaniyah where Desgrosseilliers commanded a battalion of about 700 Marines, I asked him what he was up to. The reply startled me. He was focusing his energy on trying to win over the local populace.
"I want them to stop fighting," he told me. "We fight their strategy, we don't fight them."
Not the aggressive warfighting I had expected, but rather, the gentler approach required by counterinsurgency — winning hearts and minds, as they say.
As the leader of the civil affairs team attached to the battalion, Justin Constantine was a big part of that.
In civilian life, he was a lawyer for the Department of Homeland Security. But in Iraq, as a major in the Marine Reserves, Constantine's job was improving the lives of Iraqis by helping rebuild destroyed infrastructure. That meant building schools and fixing things like water plants and the electrical grid.
'The Marines around me thought I had been killed'
That morning, our convoy of five Humvees was taking Constantine and Desgrosseilliers to a meeting with local leaders, making various stops along the way.
While Justin and I were riding in the back of the last Humvee, I asked about his work. We talked about Juba, a supernaturally-skilled Baghdad sniper the insurgents had likely invented as a recruiting tool.
Justin said snipers were plenty real where we were, though, and had killed several Marines recently.
He cautioned me to constantly move whenever I got out of the Humvee, to walk fast and never stand still. I didn’t need convincing. I was wearing different body armor and clothes and stood out as a target.
So minutes later, when the Humvees pulled over and we got out, I took his advice. I was practically jogging, Justin was just behind me, outside my peripheral vision.
Then I heard the crack of a distant rifle shot.
It came from behind us, out of a cluster of shops and houses and a mosque. Instinctively, I ran and dove behind the next Humvee.
The bullet hit Justin. It entered just behind his left ear and exited his mouth, taking out nearly all his teeth and the tip of his tongue.
“The Marines around me thought I had been killed,” he said in a speech later. “When the Navy corpsman came running over, they said 'Don’t worry about the Major, he’s dead.'”
Desgrosseilliers, who had played rugby with Constantine before the war, dashed back more than a 100 yards in seconds and shielded him with his own body.
“He was clearly hit in the head,” Desgrosseilliers told me recently. “So I wanted to make sure he was still alive, and when I got to him, I grabbed him by his neck, and I felt for a pulse.”
He found one. So, Oct. 18 became Alive Day for Justin.
And for me, too, in a way, because Justin saved my life with his advice. That bullet could have been mine.
But now it’s just my Alive Day. Justin died last year of prostate cancer. He was 52 years old.
There’s a lot more to tell about the day Justin was shot — how accurate the sniper was, for one thing.
He had hit the small opening between Justin’s helmet and body armor. Then he tracked me as I dashed to the next Humvee and shot a round that sizzled overhead as I dove behind it.
Then he shot the Marine standing over me, 22-year-old Corporal Mario Huerta. Another perfect shot, this one squarely in the forehead. The young Marine’s head snapped back, and he was knocked to the ground.
I was in a crouch, reaching for door of the armored truck, and I hesitated, looking down to figure out whether CPR would be of any use. I was shocked to see Huerta rising to his feet.
We yanked open the heavy door together, and he grabbed my pants, ripping the seat open as he flung me in and then dove in himself.
“What happened?” he said.
“Dude, you just got shot in the head,” I replied.
“No way!” he said.
By some miracle of ballistics, his Kevlar helmet and the plastic googles resting on the brim combined to deflect the bullet.
Huerta looked at the torn goggles, laughed, and jumped back out. He raised his rifle and went right back to looking for the sniper.
Bullets continued to come in, one passing inches over Desgrosseilliers’ head.
The unit moved the Humvees to shield Justin, and Desgrosseilliers and Navy corpsman George Grant worked on him to get him breathing. We drove at breakneck pace to a field hospital.
Once he was stabilized, there were medevac flights to Baghdad, Germany, and finally, the United States.
After his war
Then came what Justin Constantine did after his war.
What he did with that terrible wound. Because it immediately became a tool — his superpower for an extraordinary second act.
“From the first moments in the hospital where he was able to move around when they’d come in and say, 'Hey, there's this younger kid who's injured, he's really struggling, he doesn't want to eat,'” said Dahlia Constantine, who was his girlfriend when he was wounded and later became his wife. “Justin would go over to their room, all bandaged up with his own injury, and talk to them and sit with them and say, 'Hey, look, I'm going through this,' and they could see because Justin's injury was so visual, and he would be able to have an impact."
In some ways, Justin never recovered. He had PTSD and a traumatic brain injury. He had dozens of operations and would have had more if he’d lived.
And yet it’s nearly impossible to list all the things he accomplished after being wounded.
He graduated at the top of his class from the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, earned an advanced law degree from Georgetown, and served as legal counsel for the U.S. Senate Veterans Affairs Committee.
He worked as an attorney for the FBI, founded a non-profit, wrote two books, and served on at least a half dozen charitable boards, including the Wounded Warriors Project.
He also made a host of inspirational videos and speeches.
The way he told the story of being shot was riveting. And his face was proof, right there, of his credibility when he told audiences about never, ever, ever giving up.
“It was a horrible wound for him,” said Desgrosseilliers. “He was a lawyer, and the lawyers have to be able to talk. And the bullet took part of his tongue.
"And so, it would have been very easy for him to give up, right? And instead, he takes the injury and turns into a vehicle to help other people.”
He was methodical, scheduling out almost every minute of his days and putting much of his time into helping other veterans through what Dahlia called a "multifaceted approach." He worked at the policy level with government officials, at the grassroots level with non-profits, and at the personal level — aiding people who simply contacted him out of the blue after he became a kind of icon in the veteran community.
“These were just strangers, people who knew that Justin worked on these things and looked at him as their last hope,” said Jack Fanous, who hired Justin to work at JobPaths, a company that created software to help veterans transition to civilian life.
On business trips, Fanous would drive and Justin would spend hours on the phone, working down his long list of those seeking help.
That could be an Army veteran with depression, a Marine going through a divorce, or a military spouse with a job problem.
“There was one story I remember of a soldier who was having a tough time with his daughter's healthcare and couldn't get through to the doctors,” Fanous said. “And Justin had some relationships at a hospital where these people were looking for services and made a couple of phone calls and opened a couple doors for them to get their help that they needed. And he didn’t know who they were.”
Justin won a host of awards for his work on behalf of veterans and their families. He got to ring the closing bell at NASDAQ, was named a “Champion of Change” by President Barack Obama, and was even one of the veterans President George W. Bush painted for his book “Portraits of Courage."
All that public recognition became just another way for him to leverage his ability to help. And that's also how he viewed the damage to his face.
“It set him apart because his injury was so severely … obvious,” Dahlia Constantine said. “It gave him this street cred, for lack of a better word.”
Fanous said Justin understood the wound and his story were his leverage to help others.
“‘He would tell me, ‘I have this now,’” Fanous said. “‘And if it opens this door to do this for these people, then so be it. That's the card that I was dealt, and I'm going to use it.’”
Dahlia said that, being human, he would sometimes get down about the way he looked.
“But for me, it's just the most beautiful face I've ever seen,” she said.
Others who might have been wounded like that would have handled it differently, Dahlia Constantine said.
“Several people did say to Justin, had that happened to me, I would have just stayed in the house,” she said. “But good luck trying to keep Justin in the house. I mean, even when he was diagnosed with cancer, he was out there trying to motivate other people. It's just part of his mission as a person, not just as a Marine, but as a man.”
Justin kept getting things done right up to the moment he couldn’t. Fanous said Justin routinely did Zoom business meetings during chemotherapy sessions.
And when his vocal chords stopped working two days before he died and he couldn’t call anymore, Justin kept emailing Fanous, reminding him to follow up on business contacts.
At that point, his wife said, he also could still write, and one thing he scribbled was a request to one of his nurses.
He wanted her to make sure he was getting the proper calorie count in his feeding tube.
“ I have a workout plan to get to when I go home,” he wrote.
And that’s the man I wanted to tell you about, the man who survived that hard day in 2006. Who never, ever, ever gave up.
Justin Constantine didn’t get a third act. But he did plenty with his second one.
This story was produced by the American Homefront Project, a public media collaboration that reports on American military life and veterans.