thedrifter
10-20-06, 07:20 AM
Struggling Along The Road To Recovery
Wounded in Iraq, East Lyme native progressing slowly
By Kyn Tolson
Bethesda, Md. — Through clenched teeth held fast by surgical wires, Sgt. Terry Rathbun grinds out the words he's been unable to express until now.
“I'm getting tired of people asking me what happened,” the wounded Marine says from his hospital bed this week. “I mean, strangers asking.”
Then his eyes open wide. He has seized on an idea, and he chuckles. It's a sound that comes out more soft growl than laughter.
“Yeah, that's what I'll say: 'I got bitten by a horse.' That's a good one.”
Hardly a horse. But this silly humor is one of the fleeting, light moments that have occurred so rarely in the last seven months. There's been so little to laugh about since Rathbun, a 35-year-old East Lyme native, and the others in his Reserve battalion were sent to Fallujah, Iraq, in early April.
And there has been almost nothing but pain — excruciating and unimaginable at first, and deep and constant ever since — right from the second he was shot on Saturday, Sept. 30. That was the day when he and others in his squad with Charlie Company were on one of their last patrols along city streets before they were to be sent home.
“I thought I was going to die,” Rathbun confides to a visitor this week in a quiet moment in his room at Bethesda's National Naval Medical Center. “I saw all that blood spewing out of my neck, and I thought it was the end. I was dying.”
The clarity of that memory is so real, so hard, it's as though it has solidified into an object, an unbreakable, unmovable stone right before his eyes.
But Rathbun didn't die. Neither did his platoon commander, Capt. Harry Thompson, whom Rathbun was trying to pull to the safety of a Humvee when a rifle shot pierced his own face, just to the right of his mouth, and traveled down the length of his neck and out his back.
He and a handful of others were on foot, not far from Marines in “mounted patrol” — Humvees.
The mission that day was to pass out propaganda — a term Marines use to refer to their own handouts, written in Arabic and intended to spread information throughout the city to counter other leaflets the mujahadeen might plaster on walls and poles.
“This one gave information on how to contact someone if they had knowledge of insurgents,” Rathbun says.
The patrol, several hours long, was almost over. The Marines were only about 150 meters from the main gate leading back to their compound when the first shot hit the captain.
“You didn't hear anything,” Rathbun says. “I just heard Captain Thompson go 'uhh,' and he fell. I went to get him, and pull him to the Humvee. That's when it happened.”
Seconds later, he remembers, he was being dragged toward the vehicle, then laid on the lap of a Navy corpsman, his “doc,” who pushed against the spurting blood. He recalls asking for relief from the searing pain and then the 10 cc's of morphine that seemed not to even faze the fire inside his body.
“I remember doc saying, 'I got you through all these months. I'm not going to lose you now.' ”
Rathbun was taken immediately to an American military hospital just outside the city of Fallujah, then to another in Balad. There, he says, doctors operated on him before he was airlifted again, this time to Germany. Within a couple of days, he was med-evaced for the last leg of the trip back to the States. He's been at Bethesda going on three weeks now.
The attention Rathbun receives verges on constant.
Navy nurses whisk into his room to monitor the pain medication that comes through an IV or to check on the tube of his tracheotomy.
A hospital aide pushing a metal cart passes by every few hours, and though Rathbun can't eat any of the food, he might take a small can of Ensure or Gatorade.
He gets visited, too, by a physical therapist, who's helping him regain strength in his right arm, also injured by that single bullet.
Ophthalmologists only recently learned Rathbun is seeing double. Unable for so long to communicate well and in a fog of medications, he couldn't convey early on that his vision isn't right.
The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, has come by more than once, to shake Rathbun's hand, give him a medallion or a signed poster, and to ask about his needs.
And, from time to time, delegates from various veterans groups or military support agencies will stop in the doorway, inquire softly if they might come in. They pass out glossy packets of information, pins or other tokens. Rathbun asks one of them where he might get a license plate with a Purple Heart emblem.
Like so many others on this medical wing in Building 10, Rathbun is a focus of attention.
But Bethesda isn't the homecoming he'd hoped for.
The 200 or so men in his Plainville-based Charlie Company, along with almost 800 others in the 1st Battalion, 25th Marines, should be landing in New England next week. They'll be coming from Camp Pendleton, Calif., where they arrived just this week for a final wind-down from their war duty.
Rathbun isn't sure when he'll be leaving the hospital.
There'll be more operations — at least one more for his jaw — and a plastic surgeon will eventually work on the scar that marks the bullet's trail.
Back home in southeastern Connecticut, a divorce that was pending on his marriage of three years has just been finalized. Rathbun's parents, who live on Seacrest Avenue in Niantic, are eager to have him back. His father, Terry Rathbun Sr., has visited him twice in Maryland, but his mother has been unable to travel because of medical problems of her own.
Although much of Rathbun's day is spent floating in and out of naps, he wonders from time to time about what he'll do. Perhaps he'll head to the Midwest, or reconnect with the New York Police Department, where he considered taking a job shortly before receiving notice about the war.
The Marines, Rathbun will tell you, have been such a formidable part of his life. He joined not long after graduating from East Lyme High School in 1990.
“I've changed a lot,” he says. “The Marine Corps saved me. I've said before that if I hadn't joined, I'd either be dead or in jail. ...
“I'm proud of everything I've done,” says the sergeant, who supervised about a dozen Marines in his squad. “And I'm proud of what my guys have done. I'm proud of them, period.”
Thompson, who was injured in the chest by the gunfire in Fallujah, was also brought to Bethesda. He has gone home now, back to Las Vegas.
Rathbun says Thompson was the best platoon commander he's ever had, bar none.
Charlie Company, he adds, was the best. “By far.”
“Captain Thompson called me last night,” Rathbun says. “He called me a crazy bastard. But you know, I saw him do the same thing I did. ...
“People say when you're in war, when you're fighting, that you're fighting for Mom, Dad and apple pie. Well, that's not true. You know who you're fighting for? You're fighting for the man next to you.”
Ellie
Wounded in Iraq, East Lyme native progressing slowly
By Kyn Tolson
Bethesda, Md. — Through clenched teeth held fast by surgical wires, Sgt. Terry Rathbun grinds out the words he's been unable to express until now.
“I'm getting tired of people asking me what happened,” the wounded Marine says from his hospital bed this week. “I mean, strangers asking.”
Then his eyes open wide. He has seized on an idea, and he chuckles. It's a sound that comes out more soft growl than laughter.
“Yeah, that's what I'll say: 'I got bitten by a horse.' That's a good one.”
Hardly a horse. But this silly humor is one of the fleeting, light moments that have occurred so rarely in the last seven months. There's been so little to laugh about since Rathbun, a 35-year-old East Lyme native, and the others in his Reserve battalion were sent to Fallujah, Iraq, in early April.
And there has been almost nothing but pain — excruciating and unimaginable at first, and deep and constant ever since — right from the second he was shot on Saturday, Sept. 30. That was the day when he and others in his squad with Charlie Company were on one of their last patrols along city streets before they were to be sent home.
“I thought I was going to die,” Rathbun confides to a visitor this week in a quiet moment in his room at Bethesda's National Naval Medical Center. “I saw all that blood spewing out of my neck, and I thought it was the end. I was dying.”
The clarity of that memory is so real, so hard, it's as though it has solidified into an object, an unbreakable, unmovable stone right before his eyes.
But Rathbun didn't die. Neither did his platoon commander, Capt. Harry Thompson, whom Rathbun was trying to pull to the safety of a Humvee when a rifle shot pierced his own face, just to the right of his mouth, and traveled down the length of his neck and out his back.
He and a handful of others were on foot, not far from Marines in “mounted patrol” — Humvees.
The mission that day was to pass out propaganda — a term Marines use to refer to their own handouts, written in Arabic and intended to spread information throughout the city to counter other leaflets the mujahadeen might plaster on walls and poles.
“This one gave information on how to contact someone if they had knowledge of insurgents,” Rathbun says.
The patrol, several hours long, was almost over. The Marines were only about 150 meters from the main gate leading back to their compound when the first shot hit the captain.
“You didn't hear anything,” Rathbun says. “I just heard Captain Thompson go 'uhh,' and he fell. I went to get him, and pull him to the Humvee. That's when it happened.”
Seconds later, he remembers, he was being dragged toward the vehicle, then laid on the lap of a Navy corpsman, his “doc,” who pushed against the spurting blood. He recalls asking for relief from the searing pain and then the 10 cc's of morphine that seemed not to even faze the fire inside his body.
“I remember doc saying, 'I got you through all these months. I'm not going to lose you now.' ”
Rathbun was taken immediately to an American military hospital just outside the city of Fallujah, then to another in Balad. There, he says, doctors operated on him before he was airlifted again, this time to Germany. Within a couple of days, he was med-evaced for the last leg of the trip back to the States. He's been at Bethesda going on three weeks now.
The attention Rathbun receives verges on constant.
Navy nurses whisk into his room to monitor the pain medication that comes through an IV or to check on the tube of his tracheotomy.
A hospital aide pushing a metal cart passes by every few hours, and though Rathbun can't eat any of the food, he might take a small can of Ensure or Gatorade.
He gets visited, too, by a physical therapist, who's helping him regain strength in his right arm, also injured by that single bullet.
Ophthalmologists only recently learned Rathbun is seeing double. Unable for so long to communicate well and in a fog of medications, he couldn't convey early on that his vision isn't right.
The commandant of the Marine Corps, Gen. Michael W. Hagee, has come by more than once, to shake Rathbun's hand, give him a medallion or a signed poster, and to ask about his needs.
And, from time to time, delegates from various veterans groups or military support agencies will stop in the doorway, inquire softly if they might come in. They pass out glossy packets of information, pins or other tokens. Rathbun asks one of them where he might get a license plate with a Purple Heart emblem.
Like so many others on this medical wing in Building 10, Rathbun is a focus of attention.
But Bethesda isn't the homecoming he'd hoped for.
The 200 or so men in his Plainville-based Charlie Company, along with almost 800 others in the 1st Battalion, 25th Marines, should be landing in New England next week. They'll be coming from Camp Pendleton, Calif., where they arrived just this week for a final wind-down from their war duty.
Rathbun isn't sure when he'll be leaving the hospital.
There'll be more operations — at least one more for his jaw — and a plastic surgeon will eventually work on the scar that marks the bullet's trail.
Back home in southeastern Connecticut, a divorce that was pending on his marriage of three years has just been finalized. Rathbun's parents, who live on Seacrest Avenue in Niantic, are eager to have him back. His father, Terry Rathbun Sr., has visited him twice in Maryland, but his mother has been unable to travel because of medical problems of her own.
Although much of Rathbun's day is spent floating in and out of naps, he wonders from time to time about what he'll do. Perhaps he'll head to the Midwest, or reconnect with the New York Police Department, where he considered taking a job shortly before receiving notice about the war.
The Marines, Rathbun will tell you, have been such a formidable part of his life. He joined not long after graduating from East Lyme High School in 1990.
“I've changed a lot,” he says. “The Marine Corps saved me. I've said before that if I hadn't joined, I'd either be dead or in jail. ...
“I'm proud of everything I've done,” says the sergeant, who supervised about a dozen Marines in his squad. “And I'm proud of what my guys have done. I'm proud of them, period.”
Thompson, who was injured in the chest by the gunfire in Fallujah, was also brought to Bethesda. He has gone home now, back to Las Vegas.
Rathbun says Thompson was the best platoon commander he's ever had, bar none.
Charlie Company, he adds, was the best. “By far.”
“Captain Thompson called me last night,” Rathbun says. “He called me a crazy bastard. But you know, I saw him do the same thing I did. ...
“People say when you're in war, when you're fighting, that you're fighting for Mom, Dad and apple pie. Well, that's not true. You know who you're fighting for? You're fighting for the man next to you.”
Ellie