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A Stryker soldier is featured in the following article regarding medical advances used to treat soldiers.
By Michael J. Weiss, Reader's Digest
"Oh My God, I'm Hit!"
Hot dust choked the air over the desert outside Rawah, Iraq. It wasn't even noon last June 27, but already the temperature had climbed to 100 degrees. Perched in the gun turret of his Stryker light-armored vehicle, U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Jacque Keeslar surveyed the dirt road ahead while on a mission to raid a safe house for suspected insurgents. As his patrol sped through the dusty landscape, 36-year-old Keeslar never saw the improvised bomb buried beneath the road. Suddenly an explosion ripped through the vehicle with a roar. "Oh, my God!" cried Keeslar as he frantically tried to pull himself out of the turret. "I'm hit!"
Three out of five soldiers in the Stryker sustained serious injuries, but his were the worst: The blast had shredded both his legs. Within 48 hours, surgeons in Germany amputated his right leg below the knee and his left one at the kneecap. "I don't remember when I realized my legs were gone," says Keeslar today. "All I could think about was starting the recovery process so I could walk again."
A mere four months after the attack, Keeslar is getting his wish. At Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., he strides around the physical therapy center with barely a hitch in his gait. Beneath baggy sweatpants and jogging shoes, he wears a revolutionary prosthetic device known as a C-Leg, so named because of a computer microprocessor in the knee that makes 50 calculations per second to adapt to a user's gait.
While in previous wars the loss of a leg meant a lifetime of restriction, service members like Keeslar can reclaim their independence thanks to the $50,000 C-Leg, a wonder of titanium, graphite and technology made by Germany's Otto Bock HealthCare. At Walter Reed, technicians programmed his C-Leg's circuitry to keep him stable and upright -- no matter the surface or angle of terrain.
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