Here is what Air Force Staff Sgt. Nicholas Bradley remembers about the moment, 39 days ago, during his third Persian Gulf wartime tour, when the roadside bomb went off in Afghanistan and broke every bone in his young face.
He was driving the last vehicle in a convoy outside Kabul and had just turned off the main drag. Suddenly, for reasons beyond his comprehension, he couldn’t open his eyes. When he tried to talk, he couldn’t make sounds. He was sprawled by the side of the road and felt blood running down his face. He heard a buddy tell him, “Everything’s OK, the Medevac’s coming.”
“And the next thing I knew, I was here,” says Bradley. He means the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where Bradley, 25, sits in a wheelchair in Ward 57 of the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Unit, with his wife, Chantel, sitting close enough to examine his brand new nasal reconstruction.
The latest operation on his face was a couple of days ago. Then there were two fingers that had been blown off, and others badly scarred. For 11 days, he had to be fed intravenously. His right arm’s in a cast, and his legs are pretty badly banged up. The metatarsal bone, between the ankle and toes, is fractured, and there are torn ligaments in his left arm.
As Bradley talks, he holds two fingers over a bandage covering his throat, where doctors had to perform a tracheotomy. He was operated on in Afghanistan, then in Germany, and he’s gone through nine major operations in the month since he arrived here.
Precisely seven years after the terrorists attacked America, the wars’ casualties are lower, but the broken bodies keep coming home. Attention must be paid. The U.S. death count has now reached 4,155, and the wounded 30,324.
“And it would have been much higher without the care they’re getting here,” says Turhan Robinson, Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army for Maryland. “This is 21st century treatment. It’s a second chance at life.”
To look at patients here is to understand what Robinson’s talking about.
Bradley’s facial bones were broken on Aug. 3. That’s less than six weeks ago. Now he sits here, talking perfectly well, thinking clearly, the pain in his face minimal, he says. He stares at his wife, who stares back at him. They mirror each other’s expressions of awe.
“I’m here,” he says softly. “I had a good friend in the truck who didn’t make it. I’m blessed. I don’t have nothing to be upset about.”
“I can remember the beginning of the phone call when they told me he was hit,” says Chantel Bradley. “He said, ‘This is Lt. Col. Tim Meserve. There’s been an accident with your husband.’ My dad was standing there, and he had to catch me. That’s all I remember.”
Bradley was unconscious for nearly a week. Chantel, at her parents’ home in Florida, left their 2-year-old daughter with her folks.
When she reached the hospital, Nick was still unconscious. When he awoke, says his wife, he looked at her and murmured, “I love you.”
“And then we cried for a little bit,” says Chantel. Her eyes brim again at the memory. “I told him, ‘You have to hurry up and get better so we can get to work on having another baby.’
“You want to have more kids?” he asked in a woozy voice.
She nodded her head: two people defying the shadow of death by creating more life. They seem so young and vulnerable. He mentions small pleasures, “the amazing first sip of water after nothing but intravenous feeding for 11 days.” She mentions the pleasure of hitching a ride on the back of his motorized wheelchair.
Seven years since the terrorist attacks, and six years into the wars, this medical center has had its well-publicized problems — physical deterioration, allegations of bureaucratic insensitivity, a sense of bursting its seams when the wounded were coming home too quickly — but there are medical miracles being performed here.
“They’re taking real good care of us here,” says Bradley. You hear that from a series of patients. Some say they want to stay in the military. A few mention a desire to return to combat. All express a wish to get on with their lives and not look back.
You see it as you exit the hospital lobby. There’s Bradley, zipping along on his motorized wheelchair. And there’s Chantel, happily hitching a ride on the back of it.
Friday: Private wars
