'I've been in the Army twenty-six years,' he says, 'and I can tell you it's a con.'
In 2010, I began to follow U.S. soldiers down a long trail of waste and sorrow that led from the battle spaces of Afghanistan to the emergency room of the trauma hospital at Bagram Air Base, where their catastrophic wounds were surgically treated and their condition stabilized. Then I accompanied some of them by cargo plane to Ramstein Air Base in Germany for more surgeries at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, or LRMC , the largest American hospital outside the United States.
At the back of the plane, slung between stanchions, are four litters with critical care patients, and there among them is the same three-man CCAT team I accompanied on the flight from Afghanistan. They've been back and forth to Bagram again since then, but here they are in fresh brown insulated coveralls, clean shaven, calm, cordial, the doctor busy making notes on a clipboard, the nurse and the respiratory therapist checking the monitors and machines on the SMEEDs.
Patient number three is breathing on his own and fast asleep, a saline drip feeding into his arm. He looks okay, but for the flattening of the blanket under the SMEED. He's lost both legs, but both below the knee. He has his hands. He has his junk. Of these four patients, he's the one the military and the media will call"lucky." But the doctor doesn't call him that.
The cavernous plane is very cold. There's a blanket on each of the seats along the wall. I wrap myself up and sit down next to my military minder Sergeant Julian, mainly to stay out of the way of the CASF nurses who are busy checking on their patients, getting those on the bunks well settled for the long flight. The mother of the handsome kid has also sunk into a seat next to her son's litter, but she leans forward, still clutching the bedrail as if to hang on to her boy.
In the meantime, her contractor husband has enlisted his friends to help widen doorways, lower light switches, build ramps, and reconstruct a bathroom on the ground floor for a boy in a wheelchair. It's a weekend and I can hear them hammering as we talk on the phone."They say he'll always be in a wheelchair," she says, her voice shaking."I was in our pool this morning, and I realized that he'll never be able to get into it by himself. He loves the pool.
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