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Soldier's spirit

Aug- 8-2005 » Filed Under: 1/25 SBCT

The following story profiles Brent Bretz, a soldier recovering from injuries sustained in Mosul last December.

Link to Full Article
Justin Juozapavicius, The Arizona Republic

Brent Bretz has a Purple Heart.

He also has a small plastic cup with some of the stitches, staples and screws that held his broken body together for months. Even the shard of glass shrapnel doctors took out of his lower lip is rattling around in there someplace.

That cup is his other badge of honor.

At 23, he has been a state wrestling champ, a husband, a father and an Army sniper.

Now he is working on being a survivor.

In December, a makeshift bomb stole parts of his body on a road outside Mosul, Iraq.

It cost him most of both legs and the hearing in his left ear and shattered his left arm, ruptured his spleen, fractured his face and burned the left side of his body.

It also cost him months of agony.

It's early July, and 40 surgeries later, Sgt. Bretz is back home in Mesa to rest, just briefly, before returning to the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.

When he returns in late July, doctors will determine if he's strong enough for more surgeries. If he isn't, he'll be sent home for another month.

It is a waiting game.

"It's the not knowing," Bretz's mom, Kathy Pearce, says a day before they flew to Texas. "Do we stay? Do we go?"

Pearce, 52, left her job working for two attorneys to be at her son's side around the clock.

The prospect of more hurry up and wait is making Bretz impatient, too.

He wants to be whole again. To stand 6 feet tall again.

He wants to get his prosthetic legs and ditch his wheelchair for his hulking, black F150 truck, the one with the tinted windows, mammoth tires and Bush-Cheney decals.

"I just want everything done and over with," he says. "It's been taking too long already."

The article goes on to discuss his injury and recovery.


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