Wounded Illinois Guard soldiers stuck in limbo
Jim Higgins
http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=67077
CHICAGO � For Mitch Chapman, recovering from broken bones and a brain
injury, the mission now is treating the pain and surviving the nightmares.
For Michael Brown, who suffers from a shoulder wound and post-traumatic
stress syndrome, it is controlling sudden outbursts.
For Casey Church, the muscles in his left buttocks and hip gone, it is
learning to walk again.
Three months after the end of the Illinois National Guard's yearlong
deployment in Afghanistan, these young men are among 108 wounded
soldiers who returned ahead of nearly 2,900 uninjured comrades � but who
are still fighting their bit of the war.
The 40 who suffered the worst injuries remain hospitalized at a dozen
facilities that include Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington,
D.C., and Brook Army Medical Center in Texas. The remainder, many
suffering serious but less obvious wounds, shuttle back and forth to
Veterans Affairs hospitals and rehabilitation clinics across Illinois.
They burn up state highways and hours of their lives visiting teams of
specialists, many for traumatic brain injuries, others for broken bodies
and shattered confidence. They check in daily with sergeants who track
their progress like parole officers. They have learned to fear and
perhaps control the anger of post-traumatic stress.
Many are reclaiming their old jobs and family routines. Others, facing
long recoveries, say they have been forced to reimagine their futures
and redefine what normal will be. Still others, healing while drawing
active-duty pay in temporary government jobs, speak of being caught in
an agonizing limbo.
"Nobody knows about this. All they know is people die or they come home.
I thought I would either die or come home," said Chapman, 24, of Ogden,
Ill. "It's like I'm at a fork, and I can't go either way."
It is part of the continuing costs and sacrifices of the Illinois
National Guard's largest deployment since World War II. Through the end
of September, the soldiers � nurses, police officers and chemical
engineers in their civilian lives � had been called upon to perform the
ground-level work in U.S. efforts to help the Afghan government fend off
an extremist, Taliban-led insurgency.
They trained Afghan police officers, protected road-building crews and
escorted civil affairs officers reaching out to wary Afghan village
leaders at the end of remote mountain roads. The casualties who returned
didn't pay the highest price: 17 Illinois soldiers died in the mission,
many of them killed by roadside bombs. But the battle continues for the
wounded soldiers. Only now most of them are back home, making painful
adjustments to lives that may never be the same.
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Staff Sgt. Casey Church, East Alton, Ill.
At his uncle's house for the holidays, Staff Sgt. Casey Church leaves
his donated wheelchair ignored in his bedroom, folded up, with a jacket
draped on it.
Church, 24, spends most days learning to walk again at Walter Reed
Medical Center in Maryland. He was serving as a gunner in a C-47 Chinook
helicopter on a resupply mission in Afghanistan's Korengal Valley on
Sept. 2 when a rocket-propelled grenade sent shrapnel tearing into his
left side, tearing off the muscles in his left hip and buttocks.
Four months later, his skin is healing and new muscle tissue is growing
back. Despite pain in his left leg, he can stand and limp with the help
of crutches.
He told his story sitting in his uncle's living room, his crutches
leaning against an entertainment center beside him. In his bedroom were
a tray full of medications and a shopping bag next to it with more.
"It hasn't taken me long to get to this point, but the rest of it's
probably going to go a lot slower," Church said.
Most people are surprised he has his foot and leg at all after they see
his injuries � now a shiny field of angry red scar tissue where his left
buttock was and strips of missing skin on the front of his leg, where
doctors pulled skin grafts. It has taken him 14 surgeries to get to this
point. His vital signs have flat-lined twice in recovery. He has several
more surgeries on the horizon.
His doctors tell him the only tissue injuries they have seen as severe
are on cadavers. The nerve pain he feels in his left foot provokes
medical curiosity � his doctors haven't seen another case like it, they
tell Church.
Church's attitude is that anything that can be fixed should be fixed at
Walter Reed while he is there. Though he would like to be at his own
home in Alton for his 5-year-old daughter's birthday in April, he is in
no rush to leave the military's pre-eminent medical center to continue
his care at lesser-equipped facilities in southern Illinois.
Before he leaves, he said, he wants his sense of balance back, to be
able to walk and to run. It is a focus that helped earn him his staff
sergeant's insignia ("three stripes and a rocker") by 24, an advanced
noncommissioned rank for such a young man. And it has pushed him through
pain and bureaucracy so far, he said.
"The way I see it, I got hurt by the Army," Church said on New Year's
Eve, "and the Army is going to spend the money and the time it takes to
get me better."
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Staff Sgt. Michael Brown, Lansing, Ill.
For most of the Illinois National Guardsmen injured in Afghanistan, the
deepest wounds are invisible. Preserved by high-tech body armor and
advanced medical care, many nonetheless suffered traumatic brain
injuries powerful enough in some cases to affect their reactions and
alter hormonal chemistry.
"If you're not hurt physically, coming back from Afghanistan, people
think you're OK. That's not the truth," said Staff Sgt. Michael Brown,
30, of Lansing, Ill., who worked as a tax advocate for the Internal
Revenue Service and is a member of Bravo Battery of the 2nd Battalion,
122nd Field Artillery.
A bomb buried in a gravel road in Afghanistan's Logar Province blew the
legs off Brown's Humvee gunner and a civilian police trainer, tore a
chunk from his shoulder and rattled his head in September 2008, leaving
a lasting brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder.
He is comfortable now with fellow soldiers but worries about losing his
temper among civilians.
As Brown sat at his new guard job in the Robbins armory office of Bravo
Battery and telephoned soldiers who won holiday gift baskets, he
lamented the shoulder injury that ended pickup basketball games, forced
him to write with his left hand and carries the threat of potentially
fatal blood clots at any time, perhaps forever.
Nevertheless, it was learning to manage angry outbursts that terrified
him most.
In conversation a subdued and gentle man, he suspected he had PTSD one
day after yelling at his little brother and a young niece. He has since
been officially diagnosed and urges other soldiers to seek screening for it.
He said he has learned to take frustrations in stride.
"The real test is going to come when I go back to my civilian job and I
have to deal with civilians," said Brown, contemplating the first day he
must face angry IRS clients. That tentative date is June 2010, the Army
tells him. "It's a process."
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Spec. Mitch Chapman, Ogden, Ill.
Spec. Mitch Chapman has a physical therapist in Champaign, a
post-traumatic stress counselor in Danville, a neurologist in
Bloomington and a dentist in Rantoul, because nightmares make him grind
his teeth at night.
Because he also has trouble with his memory, the 24-year-old soldier
from Ogden, Ill., keeps a thick binder on hand to keep his copious
medical records nearby and his handful of weekly appointments straight.
Yet, despite it all, he yearns to return to wartime duty.
He bounced an aching knee in frustration behind a desk in a Champaign
guard armory, an interim assignment he has held for a year. "How can I
be on active duty and live at home?" he said.
That is the deepest puzzle for some soldiers, halfway through their
recovery processes at home. With a foot in two worlds, they see no clear
future in either, said Chapman, formerly of the Effingham-based 2nd
Batallion, 130th Infantry.
He was driving an 18-ton armored vehicle 45 minutes west of Kandahar
when a roadside bomb exploded and flipped the vehicle like a toy,
crushing a New Hampshire National Guardsman and sending Chapman through
more than a year of treatments.
His treatment plan includes physical therapy and job training, seeing
neurologists to treat pain and visiting malls to curb a new fear of
crowds. He takes sleeping pills but must wear a mouth guard to avoid
gritting his teeth during nightmares. His wife is expecting their second
child.
In the midst of this, the soldier is trying to remain ready to be
deployed again, he said, which includes planning to get the fourth
course of his anthrax inoculation.
"There's got to be something there for me," he said, staring at military
decorations spread out in his newly repainted dining room but thinking
again of Afghanistan and what he had survived. "I walked away from this."
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A DIFFERENT PRESCRIPTION
In a break from medical care procedures during and after past conflicts,
one in four wounded U.S. soldiers back from Afghanistan and Iraq are
recuperating at home and in clinics nearby, away from the overwhelmed
military hospitals that spawned accounts of neglect earlier in the wars.
Beginning in 2004, the military began shifting wounded reservists and
guard soldiers from crowded base hospitals to newly formed
Community-Based Warrior Transition Units in their home states, and see
the doctors they most likely would visit for continued treatments later
in life. There are 1,698 wounded soldiers in nine warrior transition
units nationwide and 7,283 mostly active-duty service members in 29
warrior transition units on military installations and in traditional
military hospitals.
"It's easier to transition into regular life, whatever that may be,"
said Col. Larry Heisler, task force commander for the Northern Region
Medical Command, which includes the wounded Illinois soldiers.
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