thedrifter
03-18-06, 08:22 AM
OIF vet not letting amputation slow him
MCB Quantico
Story by:Pvt. Andrew Keirn
MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va.(March 16, 2006) -- The black top of the road was so hot it could blister the skin. A pool of blood grew larger around a young Marine private first class as he withered in pain, alone in unfamiliar surroundings with only his training and God on which to rely.
A year later, Pfc. Jeffery Sanders visited Quantico for hunting, recreation and just to get out of the amputee ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington for the day.
The 23-year-old leatherneck has since been released from the hospital, but he has made several trips from his new home – a dorm room on the campus at Penn State University at Altoona, Pa. – to the hospital. Each three-hour trip is an all too real reminder that he could not escape his life-changing moment.
“I was as boot as boot can be,” Sanders said.
In the summer of 2004, Sanders arrived from the School of Infantry at his first real duty assignment: 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The battalion was readying to deploy as the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s battalion landing team.
Once on deck in Iraq, Sanders and his fellow infantrymen went about a month and a half without seeing combat.
“I was in a convoy one day and mortars hit right outside of the humvee,” Sanders told the Quantico Sentry during a recent interview in his dorm room in Altoona. “That was when it hit me that I was actually in war. Hearing the rocks hit the metal and seeing the smoke makes you say to yourself, ‘Oh, that’s right, I am at war.’”
With that little taste of combat still on his mind, Sanders longed for more. Less than 10 weeks into his deployment, he saw more than he wanted.
On the night of Sept. 5, 2004, an improvised explosive device detonated, critically injuring four other Marines who had to be evacuated to Baghdad. Sanders’ lieutenant gathered his men together to tell them of the attack. The lieutenant had decided it was time to act “like real Marines.” The platoon commander gave his men extra shotguns and ammunition. The Marines felt great, they were finally doing what they were trained to do.
The next day, Sanders set out with his unit to a town believed to have men with information on the previous night’s attack. They marched into town on foot and pulled every adult male out of their homes, shops and cars. The men were lined up for interrogation. The Marines tried to be as intimidating as they could to scare someone into talking, but no one came forth.
Around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, a stifling heat settled on the desert town. Seeing the interrogations were going nowhere, the Marines loaded up into the humvees to head back to their forward operating base. The cooling breeze that came with riding in the open back humvees was refreshing.
“I guess I kind of expected something to happen,” Sanders said, referring to suspicious things he saw as they rolled out.
While in the town, Sanders observed several cars on their way into town pull a quick U-turn after they saw the Marines. He thought then that someone could have had plenty of time to set up an ambush on the roads leading out.
“I was just sitting there in the back of the humvee, talking to Lance Corporal Hanson, the Marine across from me, about how good it felt [having competed a mission],” Sanders said. “Next thing I knew, I was seeing smoke and debris to my right, and then the next thing I remember, I was on my back, laying in the middle of the road.”
The moments between the blast and Sanders realizing where he was are still a blur to him.
“When I realized I had just gotten blown up, my first thought was not ‘am I alright?’” Sanders said. “It was, ‘Oh, hell no, they did not just blow up Pfc. Sanders.’”
Before Sanders even self assessed his situation, his ego took over. All he could think about was taking revenge on whoever did this to him and his fellow Marines.
After calming down, he noticed he was lying in a pool of blood – his own blood. He felt it dripping from his nose, but that could not be the wound producing the amount of blood he saw. Sanders moved his body a little bit and saw the source. In the position he was laying, his left leg looked as if it had been blown completely off. After moving a little bit more, he realized his leg was still attached but it needed serious attention.
“I started screaming for help, but all I could hear were the M240s going off, and I couldn’t see anyone not even my humvee,” Sanders said. “Then something clicked in me, and I realized screaming wasn’t going to help. So I took my Kevlar, flak jacket, and blouse off, and I laid the flak jacket under me because the blacktop was scorching hot.”
In the mid-afternoon Iraqi sun, the temperature that day was close to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. With the black top cooking all day, the surface temperature of was much higher.
Taking his situation into his own hands, Sanders fashioned a tourniquet with his blouse sleeves and tied it off right above his mangled knee.
“I remember I turned away and gave it two hard tugs to set the knot,” Sanders said. “That’s when I realized how bad it hurt. It almost just wanted to make me quit after that. I was feeling some pain before, but I was more worried about getting myself situated and safe.”
Blocking the pain out of his mind, Sanders gathered his wits and cleaned the mud off the nozzle of his Camelback so he didn’t have a mouth full of mud on top of the other injuries to his leg and jaw.
The tourniquet was working, and the blood pooling began to wane.
“I remember the blood having bone chips and fragments all in it,” Sanders said. “I never really looked at my leg though. I was too afraid to see how bad it actually was. I laid there, trying to keep hydrated, and all I kept saying was, ‘Lord stay with me, Lord stay with me,’ over and over again.”
With his platoon-mates engaged in an intense firefight, Sanders was left to fend for himself for some 15 minutes. The rest of the Marines had to neutralize the threat before they could enter the blast zone to get to Sanders.
While the vehicle commander was being treated by the corpsman, he kept asking how everyone else was. The vehicle commander asked about each of them by name, and when he mentioned Sanders’ name, no one knew where Sanders was.
His vehicle commander was missing fingers and half his thumb, and his whole left shoulder was gone; yet, he was more concerned about one of his Marines.
Later in a hospital, Sanders heard the vehicle commander screaming in his sleep, “Sanders! Sanders! Where’s Sanders?”
“That actually meant a lot to me,” Sanders said. “To hear that made me realize how much he cared about my wellbeing.”
Once Sanders was finally reched, he was flown to Baghdad to have surgery on his leg. While in the Baghdad hospital, a chaplain let him use a cell phone to call his parents. It was important to Sanders to be able to talk to his parents before the military notified them about his situation. He had heard horror stories about parents getting a phone call that does nothing more than give just enough information to panic them.
It was the first call Sanders placed to his parents since he had been in Iraq. His dad answered, and he could hear his mother asking if it was “her Jeffery” on the phone.
“I told my dad, ‘Whatever you do, don’t put mom on the phone.’” Sanders recalled. “I told my dad that I got hurt yesterday, and my left leg was really bad, but I’m coming home, and I’ll see you guys in a couple weeks.”
Sanders’ father, Jim, was relieved that his son had called.
“It was a relief to hear from him since we hadn’t heard anything since he first arrived in Kuwait around six weeks prior,” Jim said. “We knew he had a serious injury, but at least we knew he’d be safe and coming home soon.”
Then Sanders talked to his mom on the phone. He told her what had happened and that he was fine. She kept herself composed while talking to her son.
Sandy Sanders didn’t know when the phone rang if it was her son, but the way her husband was talking, she thought it might be. She was standing in the kitchen with her husband when the phone rang and kept asking her husband if it was Jeffery. She wanted to get on the other phone and talk to her son, too. While Jeffery was telling his father of his situation, his father was just nodding his head and holding his hand up to his wife.
“I was worried and scared,” Sandy said. “It was a relief to know he was safe at the moment, but he still had to fly out of Baghdad under the cover of darkness, and that’s dangerous, too.”
Sandy was thankful for the chaplain who allowed Sanders to use the cell phone to call her. She knows if she would have been notified by the government, her imagination could have run wild and worried her more than she needed to be.
“Every mother and father’s worst nightmare is not having their child come home,” Sandy said. “I was thankful he would be coming home even though he was severely injured.”
“My dad told me later that after she hung up that phone, he had never seen someone cry as hard as she did once that phone was hung up,” Sanders said.
Sanders awoke from surgery the day before his 22nd birthday to the sight of four doctors standing over him.
“That’s when they told me they couldn’t save my leg, and I knew I was going to be an amputee,” Sanders said. “That was the moment when the tears started streaming down my face. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life was sign that paper saying cut it off.”
His recovery in the hospital was a trying time for the whole family. Sandy stayed with her son at the hospital for four and a half months. Jim stayed home to work but drove down to see and support his son and wife every weekend. He made the trip to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from central Pennsylvania 28 times.
“It’s been hard for all of us,” Sandy said. “We’re the parents, and it hurts when you see your child hurting. There’s still an emotional factor that we haven’t got past yet, but as he gets better with time, so do we.”
Sanders has been through nearly 20 surgeries since his injury, but he has never once regretted his experience.
“There’s nothing more prideful then fighting for your country and earning a Purple Heart,” Sander said. “Fighting for your country, fighting for freedom, whether it’s ours or the Iraqis, I enjoyed every minute of it. I wish I was there right now. I feel like I’m letting my guys down by being here.”
Sanders knows there is nothing he can do from his college in Pennsylvania, but he restlessly thinks to himself the impact he could have if he was there now. He constantly wonders if a fellow Marine might lose his life because he’s not there to interject.
“If someone asked me right now if I’d rather be in Iraq right now or college, I’d say Iraq,” Sanders said. “There are no hot girls in Iraq like there are here at college, but I still would much rather be over there, getting some with my brothers.”
The civilian world has trouble understanding the bonds that are forged through the military. The Marine Corps’ men and women share a common goal and common love that goes far beyond a job; it is a family, a way of life. Serving one’s country brings an overall pride that a civilian just has not experienced, Sanders said.
“When you’re over there and you get the chance to see the people smiling and showing appreciation for what you’re doing, it makes it all worth while,” Sanders said. “The smile on the kids’ faces when you give them the Skittles out of your MRE is priceless.”
Sanders now does everything a normal college student does, but he has to some of those things just a little differently. With the aid of a prosthetic leg, he strives to live a normal life. And for the most part, he does.
“Sometimes it can get bothersome,” Sanders said. “When I get up in the morning and I have to hop over to the bathroom, or if I’m going to go somewhere, I have to spend time putting the leg on. It’s so easy to just roll out of bed in the morning and hop on two good legs and go. I don’t have that luxury. Adjusting to life has been pretty tough, but I’m doing it.”
“Jeff has an appreciation that he is not dealing with something worse,” Sandy said. “He has seen a lot worse, and he is thankful for the life he can still live with his injury. Some of the people coming back don’t have it that good.
Sanders continues to march on, making every moment count.
Ellie
MCB Quantico
Story by:Pvt. Andrew Keirn
MARINE CORPS BASE QUANTICO, Va.(March 16, 2006) -- The black top of the road was so hot it could blister the skin. A pool of blood grew larger around a young Marine private first class as he withered in pain, alone in unfamiliar surroundings with only his training and God on which to rely.
A year later, Pfc. Jeffery Sanders visited Quantico for hunting, recreation and just to get out of the amputee ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington for the day.
The 23-year-old leatherneck has since been released from the hospital, but he has made several trips from his new home – a dorm room on the campus at Penn State University at Altoona, Pa. – to the hospital. Each three-hour trip is an all too real reminder that he could not escape his life-changing moment.
“I was as boot as boot can be,” Sanders said.
In the summer of 2004, Sanders arrived from the School of Infantry at his first real duty assignment: 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines at Camp Lejeune, N.C. The battalion was readying to deploy as the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit’s battalion landing team.
Once on deck in Iraq, Sanders and his fellow infantrymen went about a month and a half without seeing combat.
“I was in a convoy one day and mortars hit right outside of the humvee,” Sanders told the Quantico Sentry during a recent interview in his dorm room in Altoona. “That was when it hit me that I was actually in war. Hearing the rocks hit the metal and seeing the smoke makes you say to yourself, ‘Oh, that’s right, I am at war.’”
With that little taste of combat still on his mind, Sanders longed for more. Less than 10 weeks into his deployment, he saw more than he wanted.
On the night of Sept. 5, 2004, an improvised explosive device detonated, critically injuring four other Marines who had to be evacuated to Baghdad. Sanders’ lieutenant gathered his men together to tell them of the attack. The lieutenant had decided it was time to act “like real Marines.” The platoon commander gave his men extra shotguns and ammunition. The Marines felt great, they were finally doing what they were trained to do.
The next day, Sanders set out with his unit to a town believed to have men with information on the previous night’s attack. They marched into town on foot and pulled every adult male out of their homes, shops and cars. The men were lined up for interrogation. The Marines tried to be as intimidating as they could to scare someone into talking, but no one came forth.
Around 3 or 4 in the afternoon, a stifling heat settled on the desert town. Seeing the interrogations were going nowhere, the Marines loaded up into the humvees to head back to their forward operating base. The cooling breeze that came with riding in the open back humvees was refreshing.
“I guess I kind of expected something to happen,” Sanders said, referring to suspicious things he saw as they rolled out.
While in the town, Sanders observed several cars on their way into town pull a quick U-turn after they saw the Marines. He thought then that someone could have had plenty of time to set up an ambush on the roads leading out.
“I was just sitting there in the back of the humvee, talking to Lance Corporal Hanson, the Marine across from me, about how good it felt [having competed a mission],” Sanders said. “Next thing I knew, I was seeing smoke and debris to my right, and then the next thing I remember, I was on my back, laying in the middle of the road.”
The moments between the blast and Sanders realizing where he was are still a blur to him.
“When I realized I had just gotten blown up, my first thought was not ‘am I alright?’” Sanders said. “It was, ‘Oh, hell no, they did not just blow up Pfc. Sanders.’”
Before Sanders even self assessed his situation, his ego took over. All he could think about was taking revenge on whoever did this to him and his fellow Marines.
After calming down, he noticed he was lying in a pool of blood – his own blood. He felt it dripping from his nose, but that could not be the wound producing the amount of blood he saw. Sanders moved his body a little bit and saw the source. In the position he was laying, his left leg looked as if it had been blown completely off. After moving a little bit more, he realized his leg was still attached but it needed serious attention.
“I started screaming for help, but all I could hear were the M240s going off, and I couldn’t see anyone not even my humvee,” Sanders said. “Then something clicked in me, and I realized screaming wasn’t going to help. So I took my Kevlar, flak jacket, and blouse off, and I laid the flak jacket under me because the blacktop was scorching hot.”
In the mid-afternoon Iraqi sun, the temperature that day was close to 120 degrees Fahrenheit. With the black top cooking all day, the surface temperature of was much higher.
Taking his situation into his own hands, Sanders fashioned a tourniquet with his blouse sleeves and tied it off right above his mangled knee.
“I remember I turned away and gave it two hard tugs to set the knot,” Sanders said. “That’s when I realized how bad it hurt. It almost just wanted to make me quit after that. I was feeling some pain before, but I was more worried about getting myself situated and safe.”
Blocking the pain out of his mind, Sanders gathered his wits and cleaned the mud off the nozzle of his Camelback so he didn’t have a mouth full of mud on top of the other injuries to his leg and jaw.
The tourniquet was working, and the blood pooling began to wane.
“I remember the blood having bone chips and fragments all in it,” Sanders said. “I never really looked at my leg though. I was too afraid to see how bad it actually was. I laid there, trying to keep hydrated, and all I kept saying was, ‘Lord stay with me, Lord stay with me,’ over and over again.”
With his platoon-mates engaged in an intense firefight, Sanders was left to fend for himself for some 15 minutes. The rest of the Marines had to neutralize the threat before they could enter the blast zone to get to Sanders.
While the vehicle commander was being treated by the corpsman, he kept asking how everyone else was. The vehicle commander asked about each of them by name, and when he mentioned Sanders’ name, no one knew where Sanders was.
His vehicle commander was missing fingers and half his thumb, and his whole left shoulder was gone; yet, he was more concerned about one of his Marines.
Later in a hospital, Sanders heard the vehicle commander screaming in his sleep, “Sanders! Sanders! Where’s Sanders?”
“That actually meant a lot to me,” Sanders said. “To hear that made me realize how much he cared about my wellbeing.”
Once Sanders was finally reched, he was flown to Baghdad to have surgery on his leg. While in the Baghdad hospital, a chaplain let him use a cell phone to call his parents. It was important to Sanders to be able to talk to his parents before the military notified them about his situation. He had heard horror stories about parents getting a phone call that does nothing more than give just enough information to panic them.
It was the first call Sanders placed to his parents since he had been in Iraq. His dad answered, and he could hear his mother asking if it was “her Jeffery” on the phone.
“I told my dad, ‘Whatever you do, don’t put mom on the phone.’” Sanders recalled. “I told my dad that I got hurt yesterday, and my left leg was really bad, but I’m coming home, and I’ll see you guys in a couple weeks.”
Sanders’ father, Jim, was relieved that his son had called.
“It was a relief to hear from him since we hadn’t heard anything since he first arrived in Kuwait around six weeks prior,” Jim said. “We knew he had a serious injury, but at least we knew he’d be safe and coming home soon.”
Then Sanders talked to his mom on the phone. He told her what had happened and that he was fine. She kept herself composed while talking to her son.
Sandy Sanders didn’t know when the phone rang if it was her son, but the way her husband was talking, she thought it might be. She was standing in the kitchen with her husband when the phone rang and kept asking her husband if it was Jeffery. She wanted to get on the other phone and talk to her son, too. While Jeffery was telling his father of his situation, his father was just nodding his head and holding his hand up to his wife.
“I was worried and scared,” Sandy said. “It was a relief to know he was safe at the moment, but he still had to fly out of Baghdad under the cover of darkness, and that’s dangerous, too.”
Sandy was thankful for the chaplain who allowed Sanders to use the cell phone to call her. She knows if she would have been notified by the government, her imagination could have run wild and worried her more than she needed to be.
“Every mother and father’s worst nightmare is not having their child come home,” Sandy said. “I was thankful he would be coming home even though he was severely injured.”
“My dad told me later that after she hung up that phone, he had never seen someone cry as hard as she did once that phone was hung up,” Sanders said.
Sanders awoke from surgery the day before his 22nd birthday to the sight of four doctors standing over him.
“That’s when they told me they couldn’t save my leg, and I knew I was going to be an amputee,” Sanders said. “That was the moment when the tears started streaming down my face. The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do in my life was sign that paper saying cut it off.”
His recovery in the hospital was a trying time for the whole family. Sandy stayed with her son at the hospital for four and a half months. Jim stayed home to work but drove down to see and support his son and wife every weekend. He made the trip to Walter Reed Army Medical Center from central Pennsylvania 28 times.
“It’s been hard for all of us,” Sandy said. “We’re the parents, and it hurts when you see your child hurting. There’s still an emotional factor that we haven’t got past yet, but as he gets better with time, so do we.”
Sanders has been through nearly 20 surgeries since his injury, but he has never once regretted his experience.
“There’s nothing more prideful then fighting for your country and earning a Purple Heart,” Sander said. “Fighting for your country, fighting for freedom, whether it’s ours or the Iraqis, I enjoyed every minute of it. I wish I was there right now. I feel like I’m letting my guys down by being here.”
Sanders knows there is nothing he can do from his college in Pennsylvania, but he restlessly thinks to himself the impact he could have if he was there now. He constantly wonders if a fellow Marine might lose his life because he’s not there to interject.
“If someone asked me right now if I’d rather be in Iraq right now or college, I’d say Iraq,” Sanders said. “There are no hot girls in Iraq like there are here at college, but I still would much rather be over there, getting some with my brothers.”
The civilian world has trouble understanding the bonds that are forged through the military. The Marine Corps’ men and women share a common goal and common love that goes far beyond a job; it is a family, a way of life. Serving one’s country brings an overall pride that a civilian just has not experienced, Sanders said.
“When you’re over there and you get the chance to see the people smiling and showing appreciation for what you’re doing, it makes it all worth while,” Sanders said. “The smile on the kids’ faces when you give them the Skittles out of your MRE is priceless.”
Sanders now does everything a normal college student does, but he has to some of those things just a little differently. With the aid of a prosthetic leg, he strives to live a normal life. And for the most part, he does.
“Sometimes it can get bothersome,” Sanders said. “When I get up in the morning and I have to hop over to the bathroom, or if I’m going to go somewhere, I have to spend time putting the leg on. It’s so easy to just roll out of bed in the morning and hop on two good legs and go. I don’t have that luxury. Adjusting to life has been pretty tough, but I’m doing it.”
“Jeff has an appreciation that he is not dealing with something worse,” Sandy said. “He has seen a lot worse, and he is thankful for the life he can still live with his injury. Some of the people coming back don’t have it that good.
Sanders continues to march on, making every moment count.
Ellie