thedrifter
07-16-06, 10:05 AM
Diminished in body but not in spirit
Soldier who lost three limbs to an Iraqi bomb pushes past the pain, determined to fully recover
By David Zucchino
Los Angeles Times
Posted July 16 2006
FORT HOOD, Texas · Bryan Anderson emerged from an elevator in the airport terminal, a diminished figure in a wheelchair. Both legs were gone, and most of his left arm -- all severed when a roadside bomb hidden in a curb demolished the Humvee he was driving in Baghdad, Iraq, last fall.
Spc. Anderson was never a big man -- 5-foot-6, 125 pounds. Now he was down to 80 pounds, spare and wiry, as he rolled through the terminal in late May to begin a 10-day visit with the soldiers who were with him the day his life changed irrevocably.
Those men, who dragged him from the Humvee and stopped his bleeding Oct. 23, would see more than a fragile young man in a wheelchair. They would see a stubborn survivor who had transformed their lives, and his own, in a way none of them could have imagined.
The young military policeman who had been confined to a hospital bed when he arrived in Ward 57, the amputee ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., was seven months later able to travel alone on a commercial flight.
He had been eager for the soldiers to see him walk off the plane but had injured the stump of his leg getting out of a car. So he was stuck in his wheelchair, feeling frustrated and marginalized.
As he rolled through a terminal exit, Anderson stopped suddenly. He strapped on his metal legs and struggled to his feet. He stood straight up, grimacing but triumphant, a cigarette dangling from his lips, as his friends rushed to embrace him.
"Hurt like hell," he said later. "But I had to show them I could do it."
A daily drumbeat of news reports tracks anonymous American soldiers and Marines wounded by improvised explosive devices in Iraq. Of the 18,700 troops wounded in the war, 57 percent have been hit by IEDs. On Oct. 23, the soldier injured in downtown Baghdad happened to be Bryan Thomas Anderson, a cheerful kid from suburban Chicago with a mother named Janet, a stepfather named Jim and a twin brother named Bobby.
Spc. Michael Wait was in a Humvee ahead of Anderson's when the bomb exploded. In a side mirror, he saw Anderson's Humvee crumple and burn as it careened into a curb.
Wait, a trained combat lifesaver, ran to the wreck but forgot his medical bag and weapon. He had to run back for them. "I kind of lost my mind, because I knew they were hit bad," he recalled.
Three soldiers escaped the Humvee, two of them wounded. Anderson was trapped inside the burning vehicle. He was stunned and in pain, choking on smoke. He remembers screaming: "I need air!"
Wait used an extraction tool to pry off the heavy Humvee door. He heard Anderson scream: "Help me!"
What Wait saw took his breath away: "I saw his legs were gone and his hand was missing and all the blood under the radio mount, and I said, `Oh, my God.'"
Wait and another soldier dragged Anderson out. The fresh air seemed to revive him. Anderson remembers a calm and solitary thought: "My life is really going to change now." Wait applied tourniquets to both leg stumps, struggling to close off the femoral arteries. Another soldier tied a tourniquet around Anderson's left arm.
Later, surgeons at Baghdad's Combat Support Hospital said the tourniquets were the most effective they'd seen. Anderson would have bled to death in minutes without them, they said.
"He had three, almost four, arteries wide open, and he didn't go into shock," Wait said. "So I know God was there."
Anderson, 25, is among 432 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have undergone amputations. Seventy-three have lost two limbs. Anderson is the fourth to lose three.
With faster and better medical care, and improved body armor, soldiers who would have died in previous wars are surviving. More than 8,500 have been wounded so grievously that most of them will never return to duty, and the amputation rate in Iraq is nearly double that of previous wars.
In January, in the cafeteria at Walter Reed, Anderson was barely able to hold a can of Dr Pepper in his injured right hand, bracing it against the stump of his left arm. His stepfather, Jim Waswo, made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and fed it to him. Waswo also had to help Anderson with the toilet and the shower.
But Anderson already was getting around on his own, negotiating crowded hospital corridors in his motorized wheelchair.
He spent mornings with Capt. Jon Verdoni, an occupational therapist, operating a computer program designed to train him to use residual muscles in his left upper arm to manipulate a prosthesis. Connected to sensors, he flexed the muscles to move a car icon through road barriers on a computer screen.
In a few months, Verdoni predicted, Anderson would be bilateral -- able to use both hands for everyday tasks.
Anderson also was learning to walk. One day in early January, he eased himself for the first time onto a pair of short prosthetic legs known as "stubbies," training legs to prepare him for the full-length microprocessor-controlled legs.
There were scabs and scar tissue on Anderson's stumps, still sore and tender from the amputations. He wobbled as a prosthesis specialist, Michael Corcoran, helped him stand.
He struggled to balance on the stubbies, which raised him to the height of a grade-schooler. He took a step and grimaced in pain. He was unsteady, but still standing. Corcoran was impressed.
"To be up and standing in just six weeks -- it's remarkable," he said.
Since then, Anderson has undergone punishing physical and occupational therapy six hours a day, five days a week, pushing himself beyond his pain threshold. From the moment he found himself confined to a hospital bed, he said, he was determined to use his arms and legs again -- even if they weren't the ones he was born with.
His therapists say some amputees take weeks to overcome shock and depression before starting physical recovery. A few never recover. But Anderson's recovery began at once, they said, and progressed rapidly because of his relentless optimism and capacity for pain. He did not complain, for instance, when 3 more inches were cut from his left arm so that his prosthesis fit properly.
Anderson, who says he's had about 20 surgeries, blames no one for his misfortune: "Sometimes I'm like, `Man, why did this have to happen to me?' But then I'm like, `Well, I'm alive, you know? I am alive.'"
He did not see his friends Sgt. Kevin Murray and Wait again until late January, at a Fort Hood ceremony upon the unit's return from Iraq. Anderson flew in with his parents and arrived in his wheelchair, in full uniform.
When he spotted Wait, Anderson pushed his wheelchair through a crowd to reach him. Anderson had received a Purple Heart from a commander, he told Wait, but it meant nothing to him unless the man who saved his life pinned it to his uniform.
Wait found himself crying as he pinned the medal on his friend.
On most days, Anderson is optimistic and energetic. But he has slipped into depression a few times. After a bad week in January, he and his mother flew to Las Vegas for a brief vacation to cheer him up.
By early spring, he was comfortable with his prostheses, able to walk for considerable distances. He had mastered his prosthetic left hand. He cooks his own meals, takes showers on his own, lights his own cigarettes.
In April, he went skiing and rock climbing in Colorado, using a bucket-like device clamped to skis and a special rock-climbing harness. His hands bled from climbing and his prosthetic arm fell off at one point, he said, "but I did it, and that's what counts."
By late May, he was back at his unit's base at Fort Hood, ready to continue the reclamation of his life.
The men of the 411th Military Police Company had known Anderson as high-spirited, energetic and driven. They were not surprised, from the moment he strapped on his legs at the airport, to see that he was still that same man.
During the soldiers' reunion in May, there were no regrets, no sorrow, no pity -- just a celebration of Anderson's new life. The veterans razzed and teased one another. They guzzled beer, swapped stories and wolfed down cheeseburgers.
They took Anderson tubing on a lake, lifting him in and out of the tube. He drove a Jet Ski, supported by a friend sitting behind him. He played catch with a baseball for the first time since losing his limbs.
"I want to do everything I used to do," Anderson said, sunburned and sweating from a half-hour spin on the Jet Ski.
He wore a T-shirt printed with the word "Stumpy." For his girlfriend, who would arrive the following week, he had brought a T-shirt that read "I'm With Stumpy."
Wait, 23, the soldier who saved Anderson's life, said Anderson's Humvee was in Wait's usual spot in the convoy that day. "I feel it should've been me, and I don't think I could've handled it," Wait said. "I would've given up."
The first night of the reunion set the tone for the visit. Anderson was sipping on a beer, sitting stage-side in the VIP section as the guest of country singer Tracy Lawrence at a concert outside Fort Hood. His fellow soldiers had arranged it, including renting a special handicapped-accessible van that Anderson had learned to drive.
They helped themselves to Lawrence's private stash of iced beer. The soldiers surrounded Anderson, whooping and hollering as huge speakers blasted Lawrence's down-home, patriotic elegies.
Between songs, Lawrence introduced Anderson to the crowd, thanking him for "the ultimate sacrifice." He dedicated a song to Anderson titled If I Don't Make It Back, about a soldier killed in Iraq. "It's probably going make you cry, Bryan," Lawrence said.
Anderson didn't cry, not even when strangers reached across a barricade to hug him and kiss him and thank him. When taps was sounded and the Stars and Stripes was illuminated by a yellow spotlight in the black Texas night, he appeared on the verge of tears, but he did not weep.
He saluted with his good right hand and cradled a beer with his new left hand. When taps was over, he raised his beer and let out a whoop, just another soldier-survivor back from Iraq, letting loose with his battle buddies.
The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Co. newspaper.
Ellie
Soldier who lost three limbs to an Iraqi bomb pushes past the pain, determined to fully recover
By David Zucchino
Los Angeles Times
Posted July 16 2006
FORT HOOD, Texas · Bryan Anderson emerged from an elevator in the airport terminal, a diminished figure in a wheelchair. Both legs were gone, and most of his left arm -- all severed when a roadside bomb hidden in a curb demolished the Humvee he was driving in Baghdad, Iraq, last fall.
Spc. Anderson was never a big man -- 5-foot-6, 125 pounds. Now he was down to 80 pounds, spare and wiry, as he rolled through the terminal in late May to begin a 10-day visit with the soldiers who were with him the day his life changed irrevocably.
Those men, who dragged him from the Humvee and stopped his bleeding Oct. 23, would see more than a fragile young man in a wheelchair. They would see a stubborn survivor who had transformed their lives, and his own, in a way none of them could have imagined.
The young military policeman who had been confined to a hospital bed when he arrived in Ward 57, the amputee ward at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., was seven months later able to travel alone on a commercial flight.
He had been eager for the soldiers to see him walk off the plane but had injured the stump of his leg getting out of a car. So he was stuck in his wheelchair, feeling frustrated and marginalized.
As he rolled through a terminal exit, Anderson stopped suddenly. He strapped on his metal legs and struggled to his feet. He stood straight up, grimacing but triumphant, a cigarette dangling from his lips, as his friends rushed to embrace him.
"Hurt like hell," he said later. "But I had to show them I could do it."
A daily drumbeat of news reports tracks anonymous American soldiers and Marines wounded by improvised explosive devices in Iraq. Of the 18,700 troops wounded in the war, 57 percent have been hit by IEDs. On Oct. 23, the soldier injured in downtown Baghdad happened to be Bryan Thomas Anderson, a cheerful kid from suburban Chicago with a mother named Janet, a stepfather named Jim and a twin brother named Bobby.
Spc. Michael Wait was in a Humvee ahead of Anderson's when the bomb exploded. In a side mirror, he saw Anderson's Humvee crumple and burn as it careened into a curb.
Wait, a trained combat lifesaver, ran to the wreck but forgot his medical bag and weapon. He had to run back for them. "I kind of lost my mind, because I knew they were hit bad," he recalled.
Three soldiers escaped the Humvee, two of them wounded. Anderson was trapped inside the burning vehicle. He was stunned and in pain, choking on smoke. He remembers screaming: "I need air!"
Wait used an extraction tool to pry off the heavy Humvee door. He heard Anderson scream: "Help me!"
What Wait saw took his breath away: "I saw his legs were gone and his hand was missing and all the blood under the radio mount, and I said, `Oh, my God.'"
Wait and another soldier dragged Anderson out. The fresh air seemed to revive him. Anderson remembers a calm and solitary thought: "My life is really going to change now." Wait applied tourniquets to both leg stumps, struggling to close off the femoral arteries. Another soldier tied a tourniquet around Anderson's left arm.
Later, surgeons at Baghdad's Combat Support Hospital said the tourniquets were the most effective they'd seen. Anderson would have bled to death in minutes without them, they said.
"He had three, almost four, arteries wide open, and he didn't go into shock," Wait said. "So I know God was there."
Anderson, 25, is among 432 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans who have undergone amputations. Seventy-three have lost two limbs. Anderson is the fourth to lose three.
With faster and better medical care, and improved body armor, soldiers who would have died in previous wars are surviving. More than 8,500 have been wounded so grievously that most of them will never return to duty, and the amputation rate in Iraq is nearly double that of previous wars.
In January, in the cafeteria at Walter Reed, Anderson was barely able to hold a can of Dr Pepper in his injured right hand, bracing it against the stump of his left arm. His stepfather, Jim Waswo, made a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and fed it to him. Waswo also had to help Anderson with the toilet and the shower.
But Anderson already was getting around on his own, negotiating crowded hospital corridors in his motorized wheelchair.
He spent mornings with Capt. Jon Verdoni, an occupational therapist, operating a computer program designed to train him to use residual muscles in his left upper arm to manipulate a prosthesis. Connected to sensors, he flexed the muscles to move a car icon through road barriers on a computer screen.
In a few months, Verdoni predicted, Anderson would be bilateral -- able to use both hands for everyday tasks.
Anderson also was learning to walk. One day in early January, he eased himself for the first time onto a pair of short prosthetic legs known as "stubbies," training legs to prepare him for the full-length microprocessor-controlled legs.
There were scabs and scar tissue on Anderson's stumps, still sore and tender from the amputations. He wobbled as a prosthesis specialist, Michael Corcoran, helped him stand.
He struggled to balance on the stubbies, which raised him to the height of a grade-schooler. He took a step and grimaced in pain. He was unsteady, but still standing. Corcoran was impressed.
"To be up and standing in just six weeks -- it's remarkable," he said.
Since then, Anderson has undergone punishing physical and occupational therapy six hours a day, five days a week, pushing himself beyond his pain threshold. From the moment he found himself confined to a hospital bed, he said, he was determined to use his arms and legs again -- even if they weren't the ones he was born with.
His therapists say some amputees take weeks to overcome shock and depression before starting physical recovery. A few never recover. But Anderson's recovery began at once, they said, and progressed rapidly because of his relentless optimism and capacity for pain. He did not complain, for instance, when 3 more inches were cut from his left arm so that his prosthesis fit properly.
Anderson, who says he's had about 20 surgeries, blames no one for his misfortune: "Sometimes I'm like, `Man, why did this have to happen to me?' But then I'm like, `Well, I'm alive, you know? I am alive.'"
He did not see his friends Sgt. Kevin Murray and Wait again until late January, at a Fort Hood ceremony upon the unit's return from Iraq. Anderson flew in with his parents and arrived in his wheelchair, in full uniform.
When he spotted Wait, Anderson pushed his wheelchair through a crowd to reach him. Anderson had received a Purple Heart from a commander, he told Wait, but it meant nothing to him unless the man who saved his life pinned it to his uniform.
Wait found himself crying as he pinned the medal on his friend.
On most days, Anderson is optimistic and energetic. But he has slipped into depression a few times. After a bad week in January, he and his mother flew to Las Vegas for a brief vacation to cheer him up.
By early spring, he was comfortable with his prostheses, able to walk for considerable distances. He had mastered his prosthetic left hand. He cooks his own meals, takes showers on his own, lights his own cigarettes.
In April, he went skiing and rock climbing in Colorado, using a bucket-like device clamped to skis and a special rock-climbing harness. His hands bled from climbing and his prosthetic arm fell off at one point, he said, "but I did it, and that's what counts."
By late May, he was back at his unit's base at Fort Hood, ready to continue the reclamation of his life.
The men of the 411th Military Police Company had known Anderson as high-spirited, energetic and driven. They were not surprised, from the moment he strapped on his legs at the airport, to see that he was still that same man.
During the soldiers' reunion in May, there were no regrets, no sorrow, no pity -- just a celebration of Anderson's new life. The veterans razzed and teased one another. They guzzled beer, swapped stories and wolfed down cheeseburgers.
They took Anderson tubing on a lake, lifting him in and out of the tube. He drove a Jet Ski, supported by a friend sitting behind him. He played catch with a baseball for the first time since losing his limbs.
"I want to do everything I used to do," Anderson said, sunburned and sweating from a half-hour spin on the Jet Ski.
He wore a T-shirt printed with the word "Stumpy." For his girlfriend, who would arrive the following week, he had brought a T-shirt that read "I'm With Stumpy."
Wait, 23, the soldier who saved Anderson's life, said Anderson's Humvee was in Wait's usual spot in the convoy that day. "I feel it should've been me, and I don't think I could've handled it," Wait said. "I would've given up."
The first night of the reunion set the tone for the visit. Anderson was sipping on a beer, sitting stage-side in the VIP section as the guest of country singer Tracy Lawrence at a concert outside Fort Hood. His fellow soldiers had arranged it, including renting a special handicapped-accessible van that Anderson had learned to drive.
They helped themselves to Lawrence's private stash of iced beer. The soldiers surrounded Anderson, whooping and hollering as huge speakers blasted Lawrence's down-home, patriotic elegies.
Between songs, Lawrence introduced Anderson to the crowd, thanking him for "the ultimate sacrifice." He dedicated a song to Anderson titled If I Don't Make It Back, about a soldier killed in Iraq. "It's probably going make you cry, Bryan," Lawrence said.
Anderson didn't cry, not even when strangers reached across a barricade to hug him and kiss him and thank him. When taps was sounded and the Stars and Stripes was illuminated by a yellow spotlight in the black Texas night, he appeared on the verge of tears, but he did not weep.
He saluted with his good right hand and cradled a beer with his new left hand. When taps was over, he raised his beer and let out a whoop, just another soldier-survivor back from Iraq, letting loose with his battle buddies.
The Los Angeles Times is a Tribune Co. newspaper.
Ellie