When the airplanes exploded into the World Trade Center and Pentagon seven years ago tomorrow, Andrew Hillstrom was studying 10th-grade geometry back in Kenosha, Wis. Now he lies in a rumpled bed at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington, D.C., and awaits surgery on the remains of his right elbow.
Shrapnel shattered it into tiny pieces when Army Sgt. Hillstrom, 21, was hit last Sept. 21 in Iraq. Since then, he’s been in and out of operating rooms. He arrived here for surgery five months ago, and came back the other day for more cutting.
“How many operations have you had?” he was asked.
“Not sure,” he said. He wore a baseball cap in bed and had a baby face. “My surgeon doesn’t even know. Fifteen operations, we think.”
He tossed off the figure in a matter-of-fact manner, the way you toss out the number of beers you consumed in some particularly lost weekend. There’s a language here, and a tone of voice, that you run into repeatedly: no feeling sorry for yourself, no dwelling on damage already done. You’re alive, give thanks, now let’s get on with our lives.
“They’re really strong,” said Lt. Ashley Booth. You find her at the nurse’s station at Ward 57, Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, just down the hall from Hillstrom’s room. Booth was born in Annapolis, grew up in Odenton the daughter of a career military man, and graduated Arundel High School.
Now she’s a registered nurse at Reed who floats from one hospital post to another. The great consistency is attitude.
“The strongest,” said Booth, “are the ones who open up and don’t try to keep all their emotions inside. They tell you, ‘I’m back, here’s what happened, now I want to move on.”
Seven years after the terrorist attacks, the war goes on in Iraq and Afghanistan. For a while, the sheer number of soldiers coming home seemed too much for the hospital to handle. Eighteen months ago, The Washington Post ran a series of investigative pieces that detailed physical deterioration of the facilities and alleged bureaucratic insensitivity. The Pulitzer Prize-winning series prompted Congressional hearings that led to forced resignations.
When you handle 5,500 in-patients at a time and 150,000 active and retired personnel, things can go wrong. Hospital officials are eager to point out the tender care administered to patients today, and the recoveries that once might have been considered impossible.
In this unit, said a Reed spokesman, 873 amputees have not only recuperated — but 99 have gone back to active duty, and 25 of them back into combat.
“You come through here,” said Turhan Robinson, “and it’s distressing to see so much damage done to people who are so young. But then, when you see the 21st-century treatment they’re getting, it really lifts you.”
Robinson, a graduate of Baltimore City College and Morgan State University, spent 20 years in the Army. He retired as a major, got his law degree at the University of Maryland and now serves in the office of the attorney general of Maryland. He’s also the civilian aide to the Secretary of the Army for Maryland.
“These young soldiers surviving today,” he said, “wouldn’t have survived in Vietnam. They’re getting a second chance at life here. That’s how much things have improved.”
Sgt. Hillstrom’s part of it. He lies in his rumpled bed and awaits the next operation on his shattered elbow. Titanium holds it together now. He says the pain is sometimes profound, but it comes and goes. He doesn’t make too much of it. It seems to be part of an unspoken ethos.
“Sometimes you talk with other patients,” said Hillstrom, “especially the ones who have injuries like your own. You talk about where you got hurt, how it happened, what kind of progress you’re making. You want to look ahead, not back. And you don’t get into the politics of the war.”
The emotional roots of his enlistment go back precisely seven years. He was sitting in 10th-grade geometry when the attacks came. He remembers somebody wheeling a television into the classroom, “and a kind of surreal effect, like it couldn’t possibly be happening. It hit me hard. It still does.”
He joined the Army after high school. By then, Americans were fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Hillstrom figured, “Maybe I could help bring some relief.”
He was in Iraq 11 months when the roadside explosive went off. Now it’s 11 days short of a year since that moment — and Thursday will be seven years since the attacks that started it all.
• Tomorrow: Saving face
