On One Leg, a Young GI Fights to Build a New Life
Sean Lewis – A Special Report
By John Aloysius Farrell
His right leg lost in a mortar attack in Iraq last January, Army Spec. Sean Lewis tests a titanium prosthesis in September at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Lewis, 21, is one of 200 amputees among the war’s more than 10,000 wounded.
Sean Lewis hears a loud pop. He is lifted by a concussive wave that shakes his brain inside his head and tosses him to earth. Just shy of one year into his tour of duty in Iraq, Sean had been goofing around at the Army camp at Baqubah with David and Gabe, two buddies from the 588th Engineer Battalion, when the enemy mortar shell exploded among them. Now David and Gabe are dead, ripped by the blast. Sean is soaked in pink mist.
Sean’s right leg is throbbing and, looking down, he sees the abnormal angle, the red arterial blood and the white gleam of bone. He tries to tug the leg back into place, feels waves of coursing pain and begins to scream. Spec. Ian Reed slides to his side. Reed presses down on Sean’s thigh with one hand and reaches into the wound to cinch the artery with his other.
“C’mon, Sean, stay with me,” Reed says. “You gotta stay with me.”
“Don’t let me die, Reed,” Sean pleads. “I don’t want to die. I got to see my wife. I want to see my wife.”
“I am not going to let you die,” Reed says. “You will not die.”
Half a world away, a telephone rings in Indianapolis.
Jessica Lewis is asleep.
She married Sean just before he shipped out to Iraq. He was 19; she was 17. She still has braces on her teeth.
They were wed for just this kind of occasion: The Army recognizes wives but not girlfriends when it comes to notifying next of kin or paying a widow’s benefits.
Jessica’s mother answers the phone and brings it to her. It’s an Army officer, from Fort Hood, Texas.
“Is this Jessica Lewis?” he asks.
“Yes.”
“Are you married to Sean Lewis?”
(“Right there,” she says, “your heart just stops.”)
“Yes,” she replies.
“We had an incident …”
In Iraq, Sean is taken to the 21st Combat Support Hospital at Camp Anaconda, a sprawling forward operating base.
It is the rainy season, and mud, tracked into the warren of hospital tents, dries to the texture and shade of paprika, coating everything, infiltrating lungs and electronic gear, and clouding the air.
The operating room is a boxy, modular trailer, relatively clean when compared to the grimy halls and wards. Of the doctors and nurses who buzz around Sean, several work without surgical gowns, and some have handguns strapped to their hips.
His blood trickles off the table, splattering uniforms and desert boots. There is a whine of power tools as the surgeons try to save Sean’s leg, drilling into the remaining bone to insert metal pins and rods.
The mortar round has caused too much damage. Just before dawn, the doctors saw the leg off, just below his hip. A medic bears the mangled limb away; it’s burned in the hospital’s incinerator.
…
The whine of another set of power tools fills the orthotics and prosthetics laboratory at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. It is expanding to meet increased demand.
The United States has suffered more than 11,000 casualties in Iraq. Sean is one of them.
Soon after 9/11, Walter Reed was designated as a military center of excellence for orthopedic injury. Most of the soldiers who lose limbs in Afghanistan and Iraq come to Ward 57, and to a room in on-base housing to recuperate.
According to the Department of Defense, as of Dec. 21, there had been 1,454 Americans killed and 10,397 wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Among the injured are some 200 amputees.
…
It’s April. Three months have passed since Sean’s injury. His prosthetic leg is not fitting well; it pains him to wear it, and he has an appointment to have it adjusted. Much of an amputee’s initial rehabilitation is spent on repeated fittings of the prosthetic limb, as stumps swell or shrink and are reshaped by surgery.
He is a polite young man, with thin brown hair and wire-rim glasses, who grew up in small-town Indiana. The Army bulked him up, but the once-hardy grunt has reverted to a frail, boyish self. He has lost 60 pounds. His hands twitch at sudden noises. Loud sounds can dizzy and drain him. Besides his missing leg, he suffers from partial memory and hearing loss, an undetermined level of post-traumatic stress and random bouts of depression.
…
Jessica, poised beyond her years, is wearing shorts and flip-flops. Her brown hair is pulled back in a ponytail. Her husband has been to war and back, and neither is old enough to order a beer.
They’ve earned their share of wisdom, but the experience has not shorn them of adolescence. She goes to sleep at night to the murmur of classic Disney DVDs: “101 Dalmatians” or “The Lion King.” (“They are so naive sometimes,” says Sean’s mother, Donna.)
The Army surgeons remove limbs with oscillating saws. In an amputation like Sean’s, the blood vessels are tied off, and the muscles attached to the remaining segment of thighbone to give him control of his stump.
The surgeons generally try to pull a flap of skin across the wound from front to back, so that the scar is in the rear. In Sean’s case, they could not. His scar runs down the front of his leg, across the stump and up the back.
He is fortunate, however, not to have had to endure any proximal amputations, in which the surgeons work their way up a limb, shortening it piece by piece, waging war against infection.
In a small examination room, Sean pulls off his pants and stands in boxer shorts. Jessica sits across the room.
Wrapped in a silicone liner, the “residual limb” should rest comfortably in a bucketlike socket, which in turn connects to the prosthetic leg. Sean’s stump is short, and it is difficult to find a fitting that takes his weight without causing him discomfort.
“Tight is good,” prosthetist Dennis Clark says, “but too tight is not good.”
“Eventually it will get numb, and when I took it off to take a shower, it would leave a black line all around,” Sean says.
“Definitely not good,” Clark says.
And “there’s another knot … It’s always sitting on that, and it hurts bad,” Sean says.
Sean suffers from heterotopic ossification, Clark explains, a condition in which the body grows bony spurs within the wound. This painful side effect has been especially prevalent among amputees who lose limbs in explosions.
“Feel it there?” Sean says, offering the red, blotchy stump for scrutiny. “It’s like a marble.”
“With all these burst injuries,” Clark says, “a lot of guys, they have these shards. Really awful.”
Sean also has a shard of metal: a 3-inch-long piece of shrapnel in the shape of a spike embedded in his body. A pat on the back can bring searing pain.
“It’s like a millimeter above my lung and maybe a quarter-inch next to my jugular,” he tells the prosthetist, exaggerating only slightly. His mother and friends urge him to have the spike removed, but he keeps it: as proof, perhaps, or a reminder. Or maybe he is just too sick of surgery.
Clark generally uses a computer-aided design program to make a foam mold for a new socket. For Sean, he thinks an old-fashioned plaster casting may yield better results.
“This is my future runner here; that was the discussion we had on day one,” says Clark. “We just have to get there. Have to get to that place.”
The process reminds Sean of the time as a boy when he wore a cast on a broken ankle. Except: “I don’t have that ankle anymore,” he says.
Sean and Jessica leave the lab, heading across the Walter Reed campus toward their room in on-base housing.
Jessica had offered to drive Sean to his appointment and drop him off, but the hospital abuts a rough neighborhood, and he is concerned, since his injury, about his ability to protect her.
“She’s my darling. My baby,” he says aloud, as if to himself, “and I will not let anything happen to her.”
The hospital is open and well lit. Sean gets along quite well on crutches. Wounded comrades greet him along the way. No one gawks. Not like in downtown Washington.
Back home in Indiana, when they see a wounded veteran, people buy him a beer, Sean says. But when he walks the streets of the nation’s capital or enters a restaurant, people stare. To them, he feels, he is an unwanted reminder.
Children are the best, he says. They come up to him and ask, with innocence, “Where is your leg?”
“It went to heaven before me,” he tells them, or, “I left it in Iraq.”
…
Until the doctors sawed off his leg, Sean and Jessica did not have much time together.
They married in February 2003, just before he shipped out to Iraq with the Army’s 4th Infantry Division.
“They had given him the day off. We were going to get married in like, April,” Jessica recalls, “but then they were saying that he was going to be leaving in, like, February so we just did it quick, before he left.”
“Hey, Mommy, I’ve been engaged for a year and a half and want to get married,” Jessica told her mother.
Carrying a notarized parental permission slip, she traveled to Texas, to where Sean was stationed at Fort Hood.
One of Sean’s friends from his unit, whose pickup truck could get them to the ceremony, served as best man.
Another soldier pal was “the only other person who could get the day off,” Jessica remembers. “You know, I’m like, ‘You can be my maid of honor!”‘
And so they drove to the courthouse in nearby Belton in the best man’s truck: three in the cab and the “maid of honor” riding in the back, outside, in the rain.
That weekend they went to San Antonio. They saw the Alamo and rode the rides at the Six Flags amusement park for their honeymoon.
“It wasn’t anything like real grand or anything,” Sean says.
…
It is a warm spring day. He is resting on a bench in a garden courtyard, sharing a cigarette with Jessica and absently massaging his stump.
As he learns to live on one leg, Sean and Jessica have all the time they want. Too much time, sometimes.
They are billeted in a cramped hotel-like room in a building called the Mologne House. There are two double beds, some hotel furniture, a cooking counter and a bathroom.
“Shut all the doors except your bedroom and live with your wife in there for … months. See if somebody comes out alive,” Jessica says, when asked what it’s been like. “When you have a fight, the only place you can go is to sit in the bathtub.”
The tension is sometimes palpable.
“At times I just get real upset about having lost my leg, about having been hurt, not being able to do certain things again,” Sean says. “And a feeling of … guilt about my friends.”
“It’s like, yes, they died, but I should have died with them,” he says. “Those are my soldiers. Those are my guys.”
In those dark moments, when he’s despondent, “she hugs me. And cuddles me. And kisses me. And eventually I will feel better.”
“It’s not an instant turnaround. It never has been. It takes a little bit,” he says. “So she’ll sit there and hold me, and rock me, and it’s comforting. It really is. It helps a lot.”
…
They met at a church gathering when she was 12 and he was 14, after his family moved from Ingalls, Ind., population 1,200, to her hometown of Indianapolis.
They attended North Central High School. Sean’s father is a carpenter; his mother works as a bookkeeper. Jessica’s dad does landscaping, and her mother cleans houses.
Jessica got good grades and mostly was “a jeans and sweat-shirt girl who did what I wanted and didn’t care” about the high school social hierarchy. Cheerleaders, those slaves to fashion, would privately tell her how they envied her independence.
They are absolute patriots, the latest generation of the working-class stock that fights the country’s wars. They voice no regrets about Sean’s service in Iraq. They think the cause is just and America’s motives noble.
“I am proud to have gone to Iraq,” Sean says. “I am proud it was my division that took out Saddam.”
Sean loves the military. It is everything to him: a home, a career, a fulfilling duty and a way of life. It gives Sean clarity and meaning in an era short on moral anchors.
Sean’s mother and stepfather, Paul, encouraged him to enlist. Both of their fathers had fought in World War II, and Paul was a Vietnam-era veteran. They thought the Army would give structure to their son’s life and teach him responsibility. With veterans’ benefits and the added maturity, he could then attend college.
Sean graduated from high school in June 2001 and was at boot camp in Georgia when the hijacked airplanes hit the Pentagon and the World Trade Center. (“Of course then I freaked out,” Donna recalls. “We’re going to war, and my son is in the Army.”)
Sean has an audacious dream: He wants to stay in the service and return to active duty. Like many of the broken soldiers at Walter Reed, his primary goal is to return to his buddies in Iraq. They are brothers. They cover each other’s backs. They need him.
It’s not a totally unrealistic ambition, though more likely for officers than enlisted men or women. And no soldier maimed as badly as Sean has made it back “down range” to Iraq.
“As far as I am concerned, right now, I am a very stubborn person. I am going to be able to handle it. I don’t care. Even if it is painful, no matter what, I will go through anything,” Sean says.
Out of earshot from her husband, Jessica worries that Sean may be aiming too high, that he may be setting himself up for bruising disappointment.
She smiles wistfully when she hears about other wounded soldiers who supplement their retirement pay with lucrative work for civilian contractors.
But she appreciates the positive mind-set and motivation that Sean’s goal demands of them. And she respects her husband’s courage.
Sean may one day conclude that his plans are unrealistic, but “he has to be the one making the decision. It can’t be them telling him he can’t do it,” she says.
His grateful government has awarded Sean a Purple Heart and a high-tech prosthetic. The carbon fiber and titanium “C-leg” has a built-in microprocessor that “reads” the terrain and adjusts in a blink to his gait and stride.
He has been visited by the politicians and celebrities who come by to boost morale at Walter Reed. He appreciates the efforts of the medical staff at the hospital.
But, aside from Jessica, the only people he really trusts are fellow amputees. No one with two legs, he says, no matter how empathetic, can know what he endures, understand the obstacles he faces or comprehend what he has lost.
“The doctors are all telling me, ‘Oh, you’ll be OK. You’ll be fine. You’ll be walking. You’ll be running.’ They tell me that, but they have never experienced this,” he says.
…
“I just get so mad at them …. They are so high and mighty,” he says. “I’m like, ‘I don’t care. You have two legs. Have you ever gone through this? No? Leave me alone.’
“And they are like, ‘I understand.’ And that really makes me mad. ‘No, you don’t. You don’t understand a damn thing,”‘ he says.
…
In the Pentagon’s original war plans, the 4th Infantry was to enter Iraq from the north. But then Turkey denied the U.S. overland access from its Mediterranean ports. So Sean and the 588th drove up from Kuwait to occupy a chunk of the dangerous Sunni Triangle, north of Baghdad.
Sean served as bodyguard, radio man and sometime driver for Lt. Col. William Adamson, the battalion commander. His access to Adamson and the radio traffic made him a prized source of scuttlebutt and go-between for his fellow soldiers.
After securing an Iraqi airfield, Sean’s unit was assigned to guard a bridge across the Tigris River. They settled in a place called Camp Boom, near Baqubah, and set up quarters in an abandoned Iraqi motor pool they called “the Alamo.”
“The people, the greater amount of the people – 80 percent of the population, I guess – are very wonderful people,” he says. “Wonderful, loving people.”
But as the summer of 2003 turned to fall, the Iraqi guerrillas picked up the pace of their attacks, and Sean’s unit joined in the division’s sweeps and raids, looking for the insurgent remnants of Hussein’s Fedayeen fighters and Baath Party henchmen. The days became dangerous and grim.
“It was just fear: That was the basic law. Everybody was afraid of the Fedayeen. Everybody was afraid of the Baath Party,” he remembers. “Everybody was afraid of us.”
Sean had several close calls in Iraq. He was stabbed in the thigh and shot by a distant rifleman, though the nearly expended rounds failed to penetrate his body armor.
In part because of the body armor, U.S. torso injuries are down by half when compared to previous conflicts: The Kevlar helmets and vests, augmented by high-tech ceramic plates, reduce the number of sucking chest or grievous stomach wounds that were prevalent in World War II or Vietnam.
But arms and legs go unprotected, and can be torn by roadside mines, rocket-propelled grenades or mortar shells. And so there is a flip side: The percentage of amputees among the wounded is double the historic rate.
Sean grabs a cigarette, lights it and asks: “Would you like to know what went on when it happened?”
…
Like many of his Army comrades in Iraq, Sean waged war to his private soundtrack.
He downloaded music from the Internet, burned it on a disc and linked his CD player to a pair of speakers in his Humvee. His favorite disc began, as a joke, with “Y-M-C-A.” Then Jimi Hendrix, playing the national anthem.
On the evening of Jan. 21, the CD player was blasting as Sean and his two pals – Pfc. J. David Parker and Spec. Gabriel “P” Palacios – stood outside the brigade tactical operations center at Camp Warhorse, some 35 miles northeast of Baghdad.
They had delivered their colonel to a meeting at Warhorse, a captured Iraqi air base. Staff Sgt. Richard Jason wanted to work out in the battalion gym,and asked Sean to come along.
Sean liked exercise, especially liberating long-distance runs, but on this particular afternoon, he turned his sergeant down. He had been driving all day, tense hands gripping the wheel, scanning the roadsides for explosive devices and the tree lines for ambushers. He wanted to chill.
So Sean stayed with the trucks. As he waited for Jason to return, he rocked with his buds to the tunes on his stereo, and they talked of how they’d party, and boasted of how much they’d drink, when in just a few weeks they’d be heading home, their year-long tour of duty over.
Parker was a smiling 20-year-old, born and raised in California, a surfer and lifeguard, the son of a Navy SEAL. He enlisted in the Army after the 9/11 attacks, postponing plans to study engineering at Texas A&M University.
Palacio was 22, the pride of an immigrant family from Nicaragua who had found a home in the Army after graduating from high school in Massachusetts. He excelled in the unit’s soccer games and hoped to qualify, with his military service, for U.S. citizenship. His buddies called him “P.”
Their reverie was interrupted by the rolling thuds of Iraqi mortar and rocket rounds and the flash of explosions, several hundred yards away. The U.S. troops guarding the camp perimeter responded with the thump of a Mark-19 automatic grenade launcher, and the chatter of machine-gun fire. From afar, Sean and his friends urged the guards on.
Over the speakers, James Brown was wailing “I feel good.” It was getting cold; Sean put on his coat, lit a cigarette. There was a flash of light, he was thrown to the ground, and his eyeglasses were pulverized by the shock wave from the 120mm mortar shell.
Stunned, Sean tried to rise up, saw Parker nearby, sliced open, heaving final breaths. He looked to Palacio. “I knew it was P from where we were standing, but he had no head,” Sean says. “He still had his hands in his pockets.”
Sean’s face and torso, the interior of the nearby Humvee, the CD player and speakers were speckled with blood and bits of flesh.
Staff Sgt. Jason was working out in the makeshift gym when he heard the boom. He ran to the chaos outside, and got there in time to see Parker shudder, reach out and die.
Reed was cradling Sean, pressing down on the femoral artery with one hand and reaching into the leg to try and cork the severed end with the other. Sean was swooning, sliding into shock.
Reed took off his belt and wrapped it around Sean’s shattered thigh. “Sean, I got to do this. It is going to hurt, but I got to do this,” he said, and pulled it tight as a tourniquet. “Get me some pain meds. Get me to the hospital,” Sean pleaded.
A doctor from the Warhorse hospital had been inside the operations center.He and a medic slid to the ground next to Sean, drew bandages and dressings from an aid bag, and patched the gaping, football-shaped wound in his thigh.
They bore Sean to the hospital tent. He was hooked to electronic monitors and IVs. A nurse moved to catheterize him. He grabbed her arm and told her, “Lubrication. Lubrication.”
It took awhile to find an anesthetist, who launched into an explanation of the risks of anesthesia, of how a small percentage of patients died.
“Doc, I’m dying now. Fix me,” Sean begged. “Put me out.”
The surgeons had begun their work when the power failed, throwing the surgical tent into darkness.
…
The nurses and doctors at the 21st CASH – one of two combat medical units in Iraq – sleep, eat and shower in tents. The wounded rest on webbed nylon cots. In the regular bombardments of enemy mortar or rocket rounds, the nurses stay by their patients, covering them with flak jackets.
But if proximity to the battlefield carries a price in danger, and a lack of operational comforts, it also has benefits.
A wounded soldier runs a race with time. If the injured can be treated and stabilized within a “golden hour” after being hurt, they have an excellent chance of surviving.
“Once you have the bleeding stopped and good vital signs, your chance of dying here approaches zero,” says Col. Robert Lyons, head of medicine for the 21st.
Lyons is waiting in the CASH emergency room as Sean is carried by helicopter from Warhorse.
When he arrives in the hospital tent, Sean is lifted onto an ER bed, his vital signs taken. Almost immediately, he is moved to the operating room. “I got 16 seconds,” says a doctor, looking at the clock. “That was a good pit stop.”
In the operating room, the surgeons lift Sean’s leg. Shrapnel has punctured his thigh, leaving a hole they thrust their hands through to wiggle their fingers on the other side.
A portable digital X-ray unit confirms the damage: A huge chunk of the femur is gone, the femoral artery is cut, and the sciatic nerve may be severed.
…
Wounds are rarely sutured shut here – there is too great a chance of enclosing debris that might lead to a festering infection. Surgeons hope to save his leg, stabilize it within a steel framework, dress and pack the wound and ship him to a military hospital in Germany.
With its layers of skin gone or shredded, Sean’s upper leg looks like a slab of prime beef on a butcher’s counter. The doctors probe and irrigate, and suction away dead skin, blood and dirt, drawing their instruments from a tangled pile between his legs.
The surgical team is skilled and experienced. But it is rushed, brute work under field conditions.
“Who knows how to work the apparatus?” one of the surgeons asks, momentarily frustrated by the digital X-ray machine. “Could someone nice get some help from radiology?”
A doctor looks at the blinking portable monitor tracking Sean’s vital signs and asks, “What is his temperature?”
“We are still, believe it or not, trying to track down a temperature probe that works,” he is told.
One of the doctors, Col. David Cohen, acknowledges that they’re playing the longest of long shots by not immediately amputating the shattered limb.
If the nerve is intact, and if Sean’s artery and vein can be patched with grafts, and if the break in his bone can be bridged with metal plates and if Sean avoids severe infections, says Cohen, there remains but a chance that after multiple operations and two or three years in rehab he could emerge with a semi-functional leg.
“He’ll have to work on it forever. Even then, who knows?” Cohen says. Amputation may be a blessing.
Finally, the surgeons release Sean to the nurses in the intensive-care ward, where he is to be monitored through the night. A doctor sits by his bedside. Sean is a tangle of tubes and wires and gauze soaked in gore. He drifts in and out of shock; his vitals are not good, and they can’t get a pulse in his ankle.
After the mortar attack, another GI rushed to Sean’s side to reach into his wound and clamp his shredded femoral artery. Two of Sean’s friends were killed in the attack. Others (pictured) visited his bedside the morning after the amputation at a mobile hospital. The Army gave him a Purple Heart.
————————————————————————————————————————–
Just before dawn, they bring Sean back to the operating room. His leg is explored again, the incisions extended, and the doctors confirm that his sciatic nerve has been severed. They amputate.
In the first light of morning, Col. Russ Martin, one of the surgeons, slurps lukewarm coffee from a plastic cup at a table in the mess tent and explains their decision.
Sean “was shocky during the night, not doing too well,” says Martin. “His leg wasn’t getting enough blood.”
As the muscles in Sean’s leg died, they were tainting his blood with poisonous wastes, endangering his kidneys.
In peacetime, “you almost never see a primary – or immediate – amputation,” Martin says. “There is too much chance you’ll get sued.”
“War is different. When somebody is dying on the operating table, you have to make decisions for them,” he says. “Out here you just have to really use your judgment. You do your best.”
…
The winter sky is graphite gray. A bitter wind sweeps the banks of the Tigris River, shaking the intensive-care tent. The rattle of the fabric wakes Sean from his narcotic doze.
He had seen what the mortar round did to his leg; he is not surprised to learn it is gone.
The guys from his unit arrive and gather in the ward: his sergeants, best friend, the chaplain and other combat- tempered men, all ashen-faced, their eyes red-rimmed. It is a ritual that the nursing staff has come to respect, and they retreat to corners of the tent.
One by one, the warriors approach the side of Sean’s bed.
The crucifix that he wore with his dog tags has been lost in the mortar blast. So his best friend Josh takes a cross from around his own neck and hangs it on his wounded pal.
Josh is crying. He cannot talk. He leans over and hugs his friend.
“I’m OK. I’m alive,” Sean murmurs. “Be happy. I’m alive.”
After the soldiers leave, Col. Carol McNeill, the chief nurse, and Maj. Beverly Beavers, the CASH operations officer, move to Sean’s bedside. They hold his hand, stroke his hair and put him on the phone to his family in Indiana.
“Hi, Mom,” he says groggily.
“Hi, son,” she replies.
“I’m OK, Mom. But I lost my leg.”
“I know, but thank God you’re alive.”
“Yeah. But my buddies aren’t.”
After they hang up the phone, Beavers praises the young hero.
“I just drive around,” Sean mumbles through the drugs. “How does that make me a hero?”
A few hours later, he is taken to the airstrip. “Goodbye, everybody,” he sings through the morphine, as they wheel him from the ward.
His litter is secured in the scaffolding in the hold of a U.S. cargo plane for evacuation to the military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, near Frankfurt, Germany.
Staff Sgt. Jason accompanies him. He watches over Sean from the fabric bench that runs along the inside of the fuselage. It is cold; he can see his breath.
Back at Warhorse, the bodies of Parker and Palacios have been taken away, and the damaged Humvees towed for washing and repair.
They save Sean’s CD player for him, but his speakers are discarded. They are too steeped in P’s blood to be cleansed.
…
Spring gives way to summer. After midnight, when the Ambien fails to knock him out and his room in the Mologne House closes around him, Sean flees to the medieval landscape of Dereth, searching for combat and treasure in an online game called Asheron’s Call.
The game allows players to design their own characters, but he has searched in vain for an option for one-legged play. The best he can do is wink at his life by crafting his avatar’s name: he calls himself Hopalong.
The online world allows him to escape the dreary monotony of life at Walter Reed. But while Sean is free and whole in Dereth, there are places he does not venture.
“My friends and I, we use swords, axes, whatever. Nothing blows up,” he says. “But then there are people who shoot fireballs, that kind of stuff, and there is an explosion, and when that happens, sometimes my hands will twitch.”
The twitching is an affliction that followed him home from Germany. It was at Landstuhl, between repeated surgeries, that he first experienced the psychological toll of his injuries.
Those were the darkest days, as soggy snowstorms swept through the gentle hills of the Saar and the Rhineland, delaying his departure for the States.
“In Germany, I got real bad,” he recalls, remembering the black waves of depression.
The Army offers counseling, but to his family’s and friends’ dismay, Sean has little use for the psychologists always asking him how he is feeling.
He is still angry at himself for tarrying outside at Warhorse instead of going to the nearby gym.
“I would have been perfectly fine. Nothing would have happened,” he says. “I could have been bettering myself, but no-o-o, I wanted to sit there and hang out.”
He feels the loss of long-distance running and knows that, if he ever returns, it will be laboring on an artificial leg.
And sometimes he feels guilty, overwhelmed by an unreasonable belief that often grips survivors: that he should have died as well.
When the mortar shell exploded, it killed David and Gabe, but not Sean. Why was he spared?
“Me losing my leg is one thing,” he says, “but seeing one of my best friends die and one of my other best friends have no head, and his body is mangled …”
Jessica has a different candidate for the worst of moments.
When visiting Sean in Walter Reed’s Ward 57, she saw soldiers who had lost their minds, and heard them ranting and hallucinating. Her husband, too, had hallucinations: of tigers at the end of his bed and other phantoms. She was terrified he would slip from her.
She joined him when, because of wintry weather, his flight home to Washington was diverted to Scott Air Force Base, near St. Louis. She drove from Indiana, and they let her share his bed. They cried in each other’s arms. She got a taste of what was to come when he awoke, delusional, in the middle of the night.
“He tried to get up and I pushed him down,” she says. “He was … reaching like he was going to the fridge for a soda … all kinds of strange stuff.”
She had been taking a college course in design, and working as a hostess in a restaurant, but left school and moved to Walter Reed.
“If she were not here, I don’t know what I would do,” Sean says. “I would be miserable.”
His mother, Donna, joined them. “He was just so pale. He looked horrible,” she remembers. Her son’s mind was dulled by drugs. He refused to look at his stump. “He was still trying to come to terms.”
Sean was 7 when Donna’s marriage to his father broke apart. She left California and took her son to Indiana, where she met Paul, who had arrived under similar circumstances from Texas, and had two children of his own. Donna and Paul married and had William, now 12.
Donna tries to keep a brave front while navigating the unfamiliar boundaries of her relationship with Sean, now that he is married.
“He was hurt. I’m his mom. I just want to hold him,” she says. But Sean is desperate for Jessica’s touch, and care, and reassurance.
“He just wanted to see Jessica alone for that time, because: ‘I need to see her reaction to me now that I have something wrong with me. Is she going to accept me?”‘ Donna explains.
Donna, then Jessica, had their “breakdown days.” Paul, the tough ex-Marine, came to visit his son. He too was overwhelmed.
“I didn’t handle it,” he says. “There were boys there blind, with no arms or legs, just a torso who couldn’t speak. It just tears your heart out. I had to go away and deal with it by myself.”
Donna kept it together for three months, then fell apart in May, knocked down by depression and anxiety. “My house was a wreck. I couldn’t get out of bed. My doctor told me it was delayed grief,” she says, sitting in her living room, a country-western tune playing in the background.
Eventually, she checked into a hospital. The whole family was affected; Her son William took to tearing the legs off his action-figure toys.
…
The Army, for Sean, was the path from working-class Indiana to accomplishment and glory. But he would not send a son down that route. He wants his children to go to college and get good jobs, not sacrifice their legs, or their lives, on some foreign battlefield.
He threatens to beat up his brother William, or Jessica’s younger brother Patrick, when they talk about following him into the service.
“I went into the Army for you,” he tells them. “You are going to college.”
The family lives on a wooded lot in Ravenswood, a working-class neighborhood of Indianapolis.
In their living room there’s a fireplace and a fish tank, tan wall-to-wall carpet, reclining chairs facing the television, and a makeshift shrine, on a table, to Indianapolis Colts quarterback Peyton Manning. On the wall hangs a print of “The Last Supper” and family photographs, including one of Sean in his Army fatigues, standing before an American flag.
Jessica’s parents have doubts about the war, but Paul and Donna retain their faith in President Bush and his policy in Iraq.
“I’m like Sean: He knew what he was getting into when he joined the Army,” says Paul. “We’re either going to have to fight them here or fight them over there. I’d as soon fight them there. I don’t want my other children, William and Nicole, to see the kinds of things you see in war.”
When Sean shipped out to Iraq, Paul vowed not to cut his hair until his son returned. It grew to his shoulders until, on a visit home from Walter Reed, Sean hacked it off with a combat knife.
…
Sean has the support of friends, in-laws and family. They are convinced he can overcome his physical liabilities, but worry about the strain his wounds have placed on his marriage and about his state of mind. The list of dangers – alcoholism, suicide, depression, divorce – is formidable.
Jessica has one inviolate rule when it comes to the endless hours they spend watching television in their cramped hotel room: They don’t watch the news from Iraq. It is too disquieting.
But sometimes Sean waits until she falls asleep, turns on the television, and watches the news with the sound off.
The mental challenge of recovery is more than matched by the physical demands. Sean has had to endure more than a dozen medical procedures to clean, trim and shape the stump of his right leg; at one point he needed emergency transfusions.
He was wracked, from the beginning, by phantom pain from his missing limb. It is a phenomenon noted through the ages: Amputees frequently maintain the sensation of feeling from their missing arms or legs.
His treatment has been augmented by a banquet of drugs. He took Dilaudid and morphine at first, and methadone, the synthetic narcotic, to wean him off the morphine. Ambien, for insomnia. Neurontin, to treat the phantom pain. OxyContin and Oxycodone, for pain. Nortriptyline, an anti-depressant. Vioxx, to control the bony growths of heterotopic ossification. And more.
“The medication gave me extreme mood swings, I took so much,” he says.
Jessica carried his pills around in a bulging fanny pack, administering them as directed.
“I have a problem with my memory. My brain got rattled pretty bad,” Sean says.
Some days he feels invincible; others not so good. He sweet-talks Jessica in the morning; snaps at her at dinner. His twitching wakes her up at night. He savagely attacks the pillow in his sleep. He makes appointments and fails to keep them.
| ABOUT THIS REPORT John Aloysius Farrell, Washington bureau chief for The Denver Post, was embedded with the 4th Infantry Division last January, covering the medical treatment of wounded soldiers in Balad, Iraq. He was able to follow Spec. Sean Lewis into the emergency room and observe doctors working on him; later he asked Sean whether he could chronicle his recovery. All of the dialogue in this report was witnessed by Farrell, except the attack in which Sean was wounded, which was reconstructed from interviews with Sean, participants and witnesses, and the notification of his wife. |
At a motorcycle rally for injured veterans, the loud roars of the engines spooked him; he had to go inside and sit down.
When he finally gets to sleep at night, Sean has a recurring dream. He is caught in an explosion. “I can look down and see my whole body is charred,” he says. “I can’t move my arms or legs. And just when I wonder am I going to die, I wake up.”
Sean was happy to leave his room on Ward 57 after only two weeks. He was bored with watching so much television and thrilled to be back in Jessica’s arms at night. But rehab life in Mologne House has its own brand of tedium.
Jessica says: “He would get moody. Drive me nuts and all that.” For weeks he tunneled into himself, refusing to call his family in Indiana.
Eventually, Jessica stopped accompanying him to the daily physical therapy sessions – reserving that small slice of the day for herself.
One time, when she asked him to cut back on his online game-playing, he snapped: “Look, this is my different world. When I am there, you are not.”
…
In the frantic moments after being wounded, as he was shouting for the medics, Sean paused and thrust his hand down his pants to make sure that he had not suffered a castrating wound. He was relieved to find himself intact, and went back to screaming for help.
He says, too quickly to be entirely convincing, that he did not worry how Jessica would react to his body’s disfigurement: whether she might find his maimed body repulsive, or conclude that she had never signed up for a life of nursing an amputee.
But when Jessica is asked, over dinner one night in September, why she stayed by Sean’s side through this ordeal, he interrupts. “That is a valid question,” he says, and looks to her as she answers.
They know of a friend whose wife left her soldier husband after experiencing Walter Reed, saying she couldn’t handle it.
“My love is not wrapped up in his leg,” says Jessica. “I love him to death. I just cannot imagine life without him.”
Sean’s crutches rest against the wall behind him; he is having more discomfort with his artificial leg.
One night last summer, piercing pain sent Jessica, pale and vomiting, to the emergency room in the predawn hours. It was an ectopic pregnancy, an embryo lodged outside the uterus.
“‘Ohmigosh. She’s dying. What is happening?’ I was terrified. There was everything going through my mind,” Sean recalls. “I had dreams where it is, like, 10 years later and I am dating again because my wife just died of cancer. Stuff like that.”
The episode, and the questions it raised – where and how would they have raised a baby? – have complicated his dreams of returning to his unit.
Before the Iraq war, less than 3 percent of military amputees returned to active duty. That percentage is expected to increase with the help of the new prosthetics.
“Americans would be surprised to learn that a grievous injury, such as the loss of a limb, no longer means forced discharge,” President Bush said during a visit to Walter Reed last year. “This is a new age, and this is a new army. Today if wounded service members want to remain in uniform and can do the job, the military tries to help them stay.”
But to be a real soldier again – to reach deployable status – Sean will have to meet the demands of a medical review board and pass an arduous physical test.
As marvelous as the C-leg is, it has its limitations. It cannot tolerate water or fine dirt and sand; it can overheat during strenuous exercise and needs to be recharged. And an infantryman must be able to run under fire, carrying heavy equipment and armor.
Sean has already missed his first personal milestone: to run a road race in August.
Over time, many amputees come to terms with the injury, give up their dreams of rejoining their units, take their retirement pay and return to college or find a job.
Not Sean. He still wants to stay in the Army. To run a marathon. To go back into action with the 4th Infantry.
“Reality is only as far as you perceive it,” he insists. “The only growing cloud of reality is how much can I bend it to my own will.
“I am going back to my unit.”
He has no illusions about how he will feel if he fails. He is estranged from the society he defends. When he came home from Iraq on leave last year, he shunned the cheering crowd that had gathered at the airport, and paused only to return the salute of a small contingent of veterans. One of the happiest moments of his rehabilitation was a visit to Fort Hood, where he was reunited with his Army buddies.
“I am going to hate it – hate being a civilian,” he says.
There are no insurmountable problems, Sean instructs Jessica, just “obstacles,” and “obstacles can be overcome.”
And as much as she may want to start a new life with him away from the Army and its dangers, she does not push him as he makes his decision.
“I don’t think it’s healthy to stand in the way of somebody who is doing what they believe,” she says.
Besides, she says: “If I stand in his way, then I’m just another obstacle.”
…
Four blocks from the White House, each Friday night, a group from Walter Reed gathers in a back room at Fran O’Brien’s, a steakhouse on 16th Street.
Friends and family fill out the crowd, and at first glance the dinner has the look of a pregame banquet for a college wrestling or football team.
It is only upon examination that the unique nature of the gathering becomes evident, by Sean’s stiff gait and those of a half dozen other legless amputees, or by the flesh-colored plastic-and-steel prostheses that jut from the sleeves of the sports shirts and team jerseys the young men are wearing.
…
It is October. Sean has been at Walter Reed for almost nine months now, longer than most of the others. He is no longer the shy, new guy. Now he helps organize and run the dinners.
Aside from his seniority, Sean is an above-the-knee amputee, which puts him high in an informal pecking order that exists among the wounded. The scale is as clear as the rules of poker: A double amp beats an above-the-knee guy, who outranks those missing a foot, arm or hand.
The dinners are relaxed affairs that foster a sense of community. Air Force Col. Andrew Lourake, a mentor for the Walter Reed amputees, is the master of ceremonies. Lourake lost his left leg in a motorcycle accident but has returned to full flight status.
The night’s business is a roast of Alex Leonard, a paratrooper from Montana who lost his right leg in northern Iraq. His rehabilitation is complete; he is leaving Walter Reed.
Among themselves, the amps enjoy a searing brand of humor. “When Alex was born, the doctor slapped his mother,” Lourake says.
“His stump … looks like the Horn of Africa,” says Daniel Metzdorf, another paratrooper short a leg.
Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the former commanding general of coalition forces in Iraq, is in the crowd tonight. He is out of uniform, dressed in a checked sports shirt and blue jeans.
“I always prayed for you, and for all my soldiers,” Sanchez tells the injured men and women. He chokes up a bit while reciting a line from Shakespeare’s warrior king, Henry V. It has been adopted by many of the troops in Iraq as their own: “For he who sheds his blood with me this day shall be my brother.”
“We’re not going to quit; we’re not going to falter,” Sanchez says. “We’re not going to fail.”
Sean and Jessica cheer with the others. They still support the war, and are fervently backing President Bush in the election, now just days off.
In a way, they have no choice, Jessica says. They have made a dear investment in the Iraq war. They’re afraid the politicians will lose faith, cut and run.
Defeat would mean, she says, that “what he lost, and all the lives that were lost, and all the others that got hurt, was for nothing.”
…
December has arrived, and with it Sean’s 21st birthday.
He has finished his rehabilitation, is walking, most days, without crutch or cane, and awaits the necessary Army paperwork that will allow him to leave Walter Reed.
He takes Jessica to lunch at their favorite Mexican restaurant. As the hours go by, he comes to a decision.
Reality has won. There is no place in the Army for a man with one leg. He will take medical retirement, and abandon his goal of returning to duty, to his guys, to Iraq.
He announces his choice that night, as he and Jessica celebrate his birthday over dinner at Fran O’Brien’s.
“When were you going to tell me?” she asks him.
“I just did,” he says, a little sheepishly.
He realizes now, he says, that he can’t return and be a warrior once more. Cannot share in the brotherhood of the battlefield. Would be a dangerous burden to his buddies. And if he cannot be deployable, he doesn’t want to settle for work as a clerk, in the rear detachment, while others go to war.
“It was a fantasy,” he says. “Maybe if I was a below-leg (amputee) I could get back there.” Maybe if he was an officer.
He detests the thought of mustering out, taking some humdrum job, and spending the rest of his days at the bar in the local VFW hall, boring younger soldiers with yarns of what it was like in Iraq in 2003.
He is frightened about what lies ahead. But with the same zeal with which he once vowed to return to active duty, he outlines new goals. To get his college degree. To buy a house. Maybe to begin a family.
Sean invites two friends from the Department of Veterans Affairs over to the table, and quizzes them about his retirement benefits. He talks to them about taking a job with the VA, and whether there are openings in Texas or Indiana.
He’s begun to heal.
In time, the war will end. The parades will pass. The politicians and celebrities will find new causes. The young men and women who packed the Mologne House and the Friday night parties at Fran O’Brien’s will fade from the nation’s memory.
But Sean Lewis will not forget. Each morning, for the rest of his days, he’ll wake up and remember.
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