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Fighting to return to normal

Nov-27-2004 » Filed Under: TF Olympia

The following is a lengthy article describing the ordeal of one Task Force Olympia soldier to recover from his wounds at Walter Reed.

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BY MICHAEL MARTZ, TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER

The physical-therapy room was filling up when Dean W. Schwartz walked in, a slight hitch in his gait from the blue titanium leg fitted to his left thigh.

The leg was temporary. So was his time here, six months after a rocket-propelled grenade blew off his leg on a bomb-pocked road in Mosul, in northern Iraq.

Sgt. Robert Faulk motioned toward an empty cot next to an older veteran with graying temples and no right leg. "You can have a spot here if you like, next to Superman," Faulk said.

Schwartz's T-shirt read "Paradise Lounge," a memento of a trip to San Diego for a triathlon featuring "challenged athletes." He's one of them now, a wounded veteran learning to run on an artificial leg and carry on with his life. In just a few days, he will have completed the New York City Marathon on a hand-cranked cycle in a little more than 2 hours, 46 minutes.

The physical-therapy room at Walter Reed is one place where the sacrifice of war comes home. Here, the scope of it is revealed in the soldiers who return wounded and changed - more than 9,000, according to the Pentagon's estimate. An untold number return with their bodies whole, but their minds in peril, their hearts in darkness.

Here, the wounds are apparent. One veteran hobbled the length of the room slowly on crutches. His lower right leg was gone. His mangled left foot was set in a cage-like brace.

"Oh, that's so hard," the man whispered to the therapist trailing him.

This is the world that cartoonist Garry Trudeau studied firsthand and depicted in the "Doonesbury" saga of B.D., who, like Schwartz, lost a leg in an RPG attack in Iraq. In fact, Schwartz met Trudeau more than once in the amputee ward and physical therapy department at Walter Reed.

The mood, though, is more like a locker room than a hospital. The staff stays upbeat, and so do the guys, some of them double-amputees, all of them sweating out their exercise routines. The humor can be rough.

The older guy next to Schwartz yells at a teasing orderly, "You know I'll get up and beat you with this stump!"

Schwartz is 22. He wrestled and played football in high school in Charlotte County. He kayaked and climbed mountains in college in Wise County.

He's ready to get back to something like normal. When Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld visited him in the amputee ward at Walter Reed, Schwartz told him, "I can't change what happened. I'm going forward. I'm going back to college."

But Schwartz also knows that the world outside Walter Reed won't always understand him the way the people inside do.

"You've got people [here] you can relate to," he said. "It's kind of hard when you leave. . . . Everybody back home doesn't know about all this stuff."

One day after the presidential election, Walter Reed had treated 194 amputees since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Based on the Soviet Union's experience in Afghanistan two decades ago, the hospital was bracing for as many as 500 to 1,000.

But that was before the U.S. assault on the Iraqi insurgent stronghold of Fallujah and the counterattacks in other parts of the country, including Mosul, where Schwartz's company, part of the Virginia National Guard's 276th Engineer Battalion, is stationed.

Four members of the 276th, including one in his company, suffered minor injuries recently during attacks in and around Mosul. Soldiers in the battalion have received 26 Purple Hearts since arriving in Iraq in March.

It continues...


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