Iraq veterans coping with pain and memories

Iraq veterans coping with pain and memories

David Lee Sterling II will never be the same man after a blast injured him in Iraq. He saw a bright flash of light and felt a wave of melting heat when the rocket-propelled grenade smashed into the turret of his Bradley Fighting Vehicle in Iraq. He painfully pried open a singed eyelid and saw his wounded lieutenant looking at him.

“I held my arm up and said, ‘Sir, we’ve been hit. I’m missing my hand, and your leg’s hurt. We need to get out of here.’ “

Sterling’s driver maneuvered the vehicle to safety, allowing the 23-year-old First Infantry Division soldier from Placerville, Calif., to join the ranks of blast….

…survivors from roadside bombs and rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs) that are favored by Iraqi insurgents.

For those survivors, their tours of duty were jolted to a sudden halt with bright flashes, searing heat, and noises drilling into their heads. Some had limbs blown off, internal organs shredded. Some lost their hearing or sight. Some had brain damage.

The aftermath of surviving such an attack has many complexities, according to Associated Press interviews with survivors and the medical specialists who are treating them.

Injured soldiers must learn to tie shoes with artificial arms, walk with artificial legs, overcome jumpiness when hearing loud noises and even learn to spell again with a brain dimmed by a concussive injury.

“If I want to write ‘hello’ — I know hello is spelled h-e-l-l-o — sometimes … I spell it with an ‘a,’ ” said Edmund Aponte, 35, a National Guardsman from Providence, R.I., who had a brain injury from a blast.

“But then I correct it right away. They told me as long as I keep correcting myself, you should get better,” Aponte said.

Blast victims’ lives are saved by surgical centers that specialize in “Golden Hour” treatment — the first 60 minutes that are crucial in keeping trauma patients alive.

But those centers “are not equipped to take care of you for a long time,” explained Col. Jim Gilman, a health policy official in the Army surgeon general’s office. “They fix you up and move you on further to the rear.”

The “rear” in the Iraqi war is the United States, where doctors in Army and Veterans Affairs medical facilities have to find and treat all the problems that were missed in the first round.

There are so many possible diagnoses that a team of specialists is needed, said Dr. Steven Scott, chief of physical medicine and rehabilitative services at the James A. Haley Veterans Medical Center in Tampa, Fla.

“If you just treat an amputation, you may miss the fact that there’s a short-term memory loss from a head injury,” Scott said. “Or, they might have so much emotional stress it affects the use of an artificial limb.”

Some wounded soldiers interviewed by the AP probably would not have survived their injuries in wars past, and the road map to living with their injuries is still being written.

Alan Lewis of Milwaukee, who drove his Humvee over an Iraqi mine, is already learning to run and ski on his artificial legs.

“I didn’t want to go home in a wheelchair,” he said. “I wanted to walk to the plane. So on October 31, I packed my bags and had a friend drop me off at the airport. I got to Milwaukee, walked to baggage claim and went straight to the house in a cab.”

When Aponte’s Humvee rolled over a wire connected to a remote-controlled roadside explosive, he felt like someone was hammering on a frying pan next to his head.

As he felt warm blood oozing from one eye, there were horrible things he would not yet know: his brain was damaged, he was deaf in one ear and two soldiers in the vehicle were dead.

He went to work in a social services office at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, fixing problems for other wounded soldiers.

Sterling, who was promoted to sergeant at the medical center, now has an artificial arm. He learned to tie his shoes and change his son’s diaper with one hand. His next big challenge is learning to overcome a jumpy feeling when there is a loud noise or pop.

Sterling, riding in a car with a reporter during a rainstorm, flinched when he saw sandbags piled along a curb to prevent flooding. In Iraq, they may have been filled with explosives.

Aponte, likewise, said he has learned it takes time to decompress.

“If I was five months in that crazy area with the stress of getting shot and blown up, it would take me five months of peacetime to calm down,” he said. “Your brain has to start getting used to, ‘Hey, you’re back home, relax. It’s just the door,’ instead of thinking it’s an attack.”