Re: That was Jeremy Feldbusch, twenty-four years old, a sergeant in the Army Rangers, who was guarding a dam along the Euphrates River on April 3 when a shell exploded 100 feet away, and shrapnel tore into his face.
Well, I already read about Sergeant Feldbusch's story:
Two months in Iraq, and a sergeant's world went dark
Jeffrey Gettleman/NYT
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
BLAIRSVILLE, Pennsylvania Jeremy Feldbusch joined the army to travel the world. Now the only place he can go by himself is the 40 steps from his bed to the reclining chair in the living room.
The stucco walls guide him past the bathroom, kitchen and closet, past the photographs of him in football jacket and wrestling singlet, past the coffee table, where he sometimes stubs his toe. At last, he finds his chair.
"Mom!" he yelled on a recent day. "I want a drink of some drinky stuff!"
"How about water?" his mother, Charlene, said.
"No! Mountain Dew!"
"O.K., Jeremy, O.K."
Sergeant Jeremy Feldbusch left home in February a fit, driven, highly capable army Ranger. Two months later, he came home blind.
A growing number of young men and women are returning from Iraq and trying to resume lives that were interrupted by war and then minced by injury. Feldbusch, a moody 24-year-old, is one of them, back in a little town in western Pennsylvania, in a little house overlooking trees and snow-blanketed hills he cannot see.
"What happened to my plans to become an officer? Gone," Feldbusch said. "Can I ever jump in my truck again and just take off? No. Do I always have to be with my mom or dad now? Yep."
Since the war started, more than 2,300 U.S. soldiers in Iraq have been hurt in combat, many by artillery shells and homemade bombs that spray shrapnel. Bulletproof vests and helmets protect vital organs.
But as the insurgency continues, doctors say that severe facial injuries, along with wounds to the arms and legs, are becoming hallmarks of this war.
"There's that little area between where the helmet ends and the body armor starts," said Dr. Jeffrey Poffenbarger, an army neurosurgeon. "And we're seeing a lot of guys getting hit right there, right in the face."
Back home, one little piece of metal can turn an entire household upside down.
Charlene Feldbusch stopped working to take care of her son. She rubs cream on his face in the morning, helps him pick out his clothes, fixes him breakfast, lunch and dinner and gives him pills at night so he does not shake.
His father, Brace, has started writing a book about him.
"He's been such an inspiration to me, accomplishing more at 24 than I have my entire life," said Brace Feldbusch, a former coal miner who lost two fingers to a coal cart before he lost his job. He ticked off the chapters, his son's greatest moments: winning the state freestyle wrestling championship; bench-pressing 405 pounds, or 185 kilograms; graduating from the University of Pittsburgh, a biology major, the only member of the family to finish college; becoming an army Ranger.
His two brothers, Shaun, 25, and Brian, 17, sometimes feel left out.
"But they understand our entire world has changed," Charlene Feldbusch said. "Somebody has to be with Jeremy all the time. But that's O.K. I'm his mom. And that's what moms do."
During the two months Jeremy Feldbusch spent recovering at Brooke Army Medical Center near San Antonio, Texas, his parents lived at his bedside.
Charlene Feldbusch remembers one day seeing a young woman, also a soldier, crawling past her in the corridor with no legs and her 3-year-old son trailing behind. Charlene Feldbusch started to cry. But not for the woman.
"Do you know how many times I walked up and down those hallways and saw those people without arms or legs and thought, Why couldn't this be my son? Why his eyes?"
Artillery shells make a certain sound when they are coming right at you, the sergeant said. Not a looping whistle, but a short shriek.
On April 3, Feldbusch, a 6-foot-2, or 1.9-meter, thickly built mortar man, heard the shriek. He and his platoon of Rangers were guarding the Haditha Dam, a strategic point northwest of Baghdad along the Euphrates River, when a shell burst 100 feet away and a piece of red-hot shrapnel hit him in the face. The last thing he remembers is eating a pouch of chicken teriyaki.
The inchlong, or about 2.5-centimeter-long, piece of steel, part of the artillery shell's casing, sliced through his right eye, tumbled through his sinuses and lodged in the left side of his brain, severely damaging the optic nerve of his left eye and spraying bone splinters throughout his brain.
Two weeks later, at the Brooke Army Medical Center, doctors removed the shrapnel and reconstructed his face with titanium mesh and a lump of fat from his stomach in place of his missing eye, so the hole would not cave in.
For five weeks, the young sergeant remained in a coma. When he came out, it was still black.
"I could hear my parents' voices," he said. "And I thought, What are they doing here? Am I dreaming? What the hell is going on?"
His mother knelt by his bedside and sang softly into his ear, "When I wish upon a star."
Then she asked him, "Jeremy? Who do you love?"
True to form, he whispered, "Brace." He was joking.
Two weeks after he came out of the coma, his parents broke the news. He was being awarded a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star. But there was very little chance he would see again.
"I thought there's no way this is happening to me, there's no way I'm going to go through life as a blind man," Jeremy said. One day, as he lay in bed with tubes and wires and needles sticking out of him, his father looked down on him and said, "Maybe God thought you had seen enough killing."
Jeremy responded, "But, Dad, why did he have to take my eyes?"
Once he retires and receives his medical discharge, the sergeant will be eligible for veterans' benefits that include training for the blind and a disability salary that will most likely exceed his current $1,800-a-month paycheck.
The inchlong piece of shrapnel not only took his sight and dulled his sense of taste and smell, but it took some of his brain, too. It left him quick to lose his temper and acutely sensitive to pain. When he got out of the hospital, it hurt his skin when the wind blew.
It also left him prone to seizures. Right before Christmas, he had his third.
Jeremy spends most of his time in bed or slouched in the reclining chair in the corner of the living room, watching his favorite television shows like "Sanford and Son" and the news. At first, he had a lot of visitors and friends. Blairsville, an old coal-mining town of 3,600, even had a parade for him this summer, and the mayor proclaimed Sept. 20 Jeremy Feldbusch Day.
He talks about going back to school and getting a master's degree. And hitting the weights again. He used to be really into that.
But the anti-seizure medications make him sleepy. He naps a lot.
Even in his dreams, he no longer sees. And he has stopped trying to picture faces.
"When I was first in the hospital, I tried to think of what the doctors and nurses all looked like," he said. "But then I stopped.
"I'm blind. I figured why am I doing this? I'm never going to see them."
The New York Times
iht.com |
