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Boonville's Star Spangled Thursday

Jun-14-2008 » Filed Under: 4/2 SBCT

Found the following story via Blog-Ah!.

by Bruce Anderson, Anderson Valley Advertiser

A thousand people in Boonville is fifty thousand in San Francisco, and there were more than a thousand people in Boonville by five o'clock last Thursday waiting for Sgt. Jesse Slotte to come home.

Boonville has never seen anything like it, not even at fair time when the town swells to several thousand visitors, most of them dispersed throughout the Fairground's 20 acres. Last Thursday, there were people everywhere until there were so many people on both sides of the highway between the Fairgrounds office and the Live Oak Building that the road seemed to narrow, seemed to become almost tunnel-like.

"This is amazing," said Harold Hulbert, born and raised in Boonville. "People are clear down to Mountain View Road, all kinds of people, and they're still coming." [...]

We were anticipating Sgt. Slotte not knowing how we'd find him after what he'd been through, thinking maybe that he'd be only semi-ambulatory, half-expecting him to be frail, maybe even shattered. After all, he had been shattered, literally shattered by a roadside bomb in ancient Mesopotamia, a place as remote from a crisp early summer afternoon in Boonville, California, as it is possible to get on this globe.

Sgt. Slotte and his wife Maricela were driving to Boonville from Fort Lewis, Washington. They'd flown from San Antonio to Fort Lewis so Sgt. Slotte could greet his old unit as they returned from a long combat tour in Iraq. Sgt. Slotte hadn't seen his fellow soldiers since the morning last November he'd set off with them on a patrol. The next thing the Sgt. knew he was waking up from a medically induced coma two continents away two months later.

When Sgt. Slotte woke up in San Antonio he began a grueling series of surgeries, almost fifty of them, and he's still waiting for his left leg to re-attach itself to its foot which it's doing, and his doctors say the kid is already a walking medical miracle. Some of his doctors hadn't expected him to live. [...]


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