From the Los Angeles Times
COLUMN ONE
Iraq veteran lets the games, and healing, begin
At this year's wheelchair sports competition in Spokane, Wash., a newcomer -- a Marine whose brain was injured -- tests his mental and physical strength.
By Kim Murphy

July 18, 2009

Reporting from Spokane, Wash. — Cpl. Anthony Alegre's unit knew the Humvees they drove through the streets of Ramadi, Iraq, were woefully under-armored.

They stuffed sandbags in the doors, but when roadside bombs turned the sand into shrapnel, they began wedging pieces of metal and wood around their seats. No use. The car bomb that hit Alegre's patrol on May 29, 2004, killed three of his fellow Marines and left four pieces of metal in his brain.

No one expected the 20-year-old infantryman to survive. The doctor in the Baghdad hospital, unequipped to reattach a piece of his skull that had blown off, lodged it in Alegre's abdomen for safekeeping, wrapped a bandage over his brain and put him on a plane to Germany.

The young Marine lay in a coma for three months, then spent the next year learning to talk, sit up and feed himself.

Still in a wheelchair much of the time, the now-25-year-old veteran picked up a pellet rifle this week and fired 60 precise rounds into a target across a long room -- testimony to three years of weapons training and five years of audacious will.

"Not bad for the first time," Alegre said quietly as he laid down the gun and stretched his neck in a wide circle to ease the strain.

Later in the week, he bowled a 119, hurled a shot put and javelin, and batted a softball, all competitions in the National Veterans Wheelchair Games, which have become the largest such sporting event in the world.

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have filled the ranks of the 29th annual games, which this year drew more than 500 competitors in events such as table tennis, swimming, basketball and the no-holds-barred game of quad rugby once called murderball.

The roadside bombs that have been the enemy's signature weapon in the two wars have added veterans with brain injuries to the amputees and spine-injured men and women who compete in the games. The brain trauma has left some unable to walk, and others unable to focus.

"This will be the second year that we're dealing with the traumatic brain injuries," said Tom Brown, director of the veterans' games, which are being held in Spokane this year and conclude today.

Those with "closed head injuries can almost seem normal," he said, "until they do something, and then their coordination is off, their thought process is slowed down, and they may have the ability level of a . . . quadriplegic."



"No ma'am. I've never done anything like this," Alegre said on the opening day of the games, his slight frame resting comfortably in his wheelchair, his voice a soft, gentle Georgia drawl with a touch of Marine Corps bravado.

"But it's better to go ahead, rather than to say . . . 'I don't want to do it. I'm stuck in a wheelchair. What's the point?' " he said.

"God spared me for a reason. And I'm going to see what I can and can't do."

Alegre had pretty much always wanted to be a Marine. His older brother, Nick, was in the Corps, and when Anthony turned 17, he begged his parents to let him enlist.

He went off for training at Camp Pendleton, was shipped out to Okinawa, Japan, and before long found himself in Iraq. He'd call his mother as often as he could, trying to be reassuring, telling her he was fine. But Ester Parkerson could hear in his voice that he wasn't.

He'd written a letter to his stepfather, with special instructions that she not be allowed to see it, but she searched the house until she found it.

"He was talking about demons; he was talking about fear. He was talking about weird stuff, and I didn't understand exactly what he meant. So I asked my husband, and he said, pretty much, [Anthony] . . . was afraid his time was coming. He had seen a lot of his buddies die. When he called, he'd say, 'Please pray for us, we need your prayers.' "

So when the call came that her son's skull had been shattered by a makeshift bomb, Parkerson thought she was prepared. What she wasn't ready for was what she saw at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., a week later.

"All the muscle was gone. Everything. He was attached to every tube and cable you could think of. There were machines breathing for him, he had a tube in his stomach feeding him. . . . I just grabbed his hand and I said, 'Oh my God, what have they done?' "

Nick ventured into the room, ripped off his sterile gloves and walked out again, refusing to enter. His sister, Alissa, rushed out crying.

Parkerson soon realized that she wasn't alone: Legions of parents had war-ravaged sons and daughters confined to hospital rooms.

"They were coming in, bleeding through the ears, bleeding through their nose. I told this one mother, 'Regardless of how bad he looks right now, you hold on to him with all you got, because God's gonna take care of him,' " Parkerson said.

"The thing that broke my heart," she said of the injured veterans, is "they can't talk. So they give you this look. They all have this look of kind of desperation. . . .

"This one young man, his legs were hanging up, his arm was hanging up, he was halfway blind, he had shrapnel in his face. . . . His father told me, 'He's asking me if he looks all right. . . . I told him, "You're just as ugly as you've ever been. But you just hang in there." ' "

Alegre's recovery was filled with setbacks. He came down with an infection the doctors couldn't identify, and his temperature shot up to 108. He suffered a double brain aneurysm, then a blood clot in his lung. The muscles in his left leg and arm contracted so badly that doctors had to put a cast on them for months.

The only thing he could remember at first was his name, rank, Social Security number and date of birth: facts hard-wired into a Marine's brain.

Gradually he learned to feed himself without choking. He began to recognize those around him and to talk, if only in brief sentences. He could move his arms and legs.

Ten months after the injury, the doctors decided to reattach the piece of Alegre's skull that had been stored in his abdomen. They had to scrape the membrane off his brain, which had attached to the skin over the wound.

Alegre awoke to find that once again, he could neither move nor speak.

It was, he said, the worst day in many years of bad days.

"In the recovery room, I had my first seizure. I was pretty much back to square one," he said. "But . . . I knew what I had to do -- which was work out, reach for this, reach for that."



Brain trauma has been described as the signature injury of the Iraq war. The symptoms often are fleeting, and mimic those of post-traumatic stress disorder: anger, depression, memory loss, crippling headaches.

Improved body armor and better battlefield care, Brown said, have stocked the veterans' games with troops who in a previous era would have been dead.

At a meeting for novice competitors on Monday, dozens of men and a few women gathered in a semi-circle of wheelchairs around Brown -- who was born without legs -- as he laid out the territory. Alegre sat quietly, listening carefully.

"How many of you got into hotel rooms that weren't accessible?" A dozen vets raised their hands.

"Elevators. Elevators are always a problem at the games," Brown said. "Again, you have 350 wheelchairs all trying to use three to four elevators the hotel has, there's gonna be a wait. Take that into consideration."

Competitors who don't show up on time for an event get scratched, he said. People who show up without their competition number plates don't compete.

"What happens if you have a TBI?" asked one man at the back of the room, referring to a traumatic brain injury.

"What about it? What's the question?" Brown barked.

"If you forget some little thing. Your number. Stuff like that," the vet responded. "Because I won't remember that."

"The rules apply to everybody," Brown said. "And it's your coach or your family . . . that needs to help you remember."

Alegre got up at 5:30 on Tuesday for his 8 a.m. air rifle event. His hotel is connected to the convention center where the games are being held, but he wanted to make sure he had time for breakfast so he'd be able to focus.

It means a lot for him to do well: It's the Marine in him, said Kenneth Hill, a retired master sergeant and a patient advocate for Veterans Affairs. He has become Alegre's closest friend and mentor.

When Alegre decided he and his parents needed a break from each other, he asked Hill if he'd go to Spokane.

"The biggest change I've seen in Anthony is his mental state. His self-esteem, his acceptance of who he is now -- and that fostered all the physical improvement," Hill said, occasionally wiping away tears as he talked. "He was very angry. Scared. Uncertain. Frustrated. And he's learned to accept those emotions for what they are and . . . make it better. He's walking more now, sometimes even without the cane. He's in the gym lifting weights. . . . He's got his own truck and he's driving."

In each of three rounds of the air rifle competition, the vets had 30 minutes to aim and fire at 20 small targets.

Alegre aimed methodically as Hill paced around behind him, occasionally grabbing a pair of binoculars to see how it was going. The projectiles in nearly every case pierced the bulls-eye. In a field of experienced competitors, Alegre finished in 11th place.

Two days later, he bowled a 119, coming in about 20th.

"The good part was just meeting the other people and cheering them on. It's pretty fun," Alegre said.

Meeting veterans who have moved past the black hole of memories that was Iraq has been good for him, Alegre said. He still relies on strong sleeping pills to keep flashbacks at bay, the ones that parade across his mind each night as he switches off the light. "I guess you could call it meeting up with friends who are no longer here," he said.

Asked to describe his emotional state, the word Alegre came up with was "shattered."

He was bitterly disappointed when the Marine Corps forced him to leave. He had hoped to get better, get strong and go back to Iraq. Then, when that didn't look possible, he thought about being a recruiter.

"I gave my all for this country, but they don't want me being a recruiter in a wheelchair, because that would be me saying, 'Yeah, you could end up like me, or you could come back just fine,' " he said, his solemn face easing into a rare smile.

With a $4,800-a-month government stipend from the VA, he has moved with his mother and stepfather to a house on 11 acres in rural Georgia and plans to start college soon. He hopes someday to become a VA counselor, like Hill.

"It's really helping to be somewhere like [the veterans' games], with other guys. I mean, I was hurt in '04, but I've met guys here who've been hurt for 20 or 30 years, and who are really good people. They have so much more heart than I will ever have," Alegre said. "I'm trying to get that heart. That's what I need. I come to this thing, and try to figure out how to do things in a different way."

kim.murphy@latimes.com

Ellie