Seven years after the attacks that plunged America into war, the White House announces a troop reduction in the Persian Gulf. Eight thousand soldiers will come home by February. In his bed at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Sgt. 1st Class Joshua Ferguson watches the news on television but seems distracted. It’s no longer his primary fight.
His combat in Iraq ended in the spring of 2007. Today his fight is with his own body. In a little room along Ward 57 of the Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation Unit, he sprawls across an unmade bed in a pair of short pants. Thick surgical stitching criss-crosses his left knee, which is now the furthest extension of his left leg.
“What’s with the sign?” Turhan Robinson asks Ferguson. Robinson’s the Civilian Aide to the Secretary of the Army for Maryland. He’s pointing to a hand-written sign on the wall opposite Ferguson. It’s a list of doctor’s orders. Among them: No cartwheels.
It’s a little joke, laughter in place of tears. No cartwheels, indeed. But it’s a hint of Ferguson’s resilience, too. The roadside explosion that penetrated the door of his truck took away the bottom half of Ferguson’s leg in April. By December, he says, he had a prosthetic leg and was walking and “getting close to running.”
But the body is given to various rebellions. The army can supply a limitless number of prosthetic limbs, but the dimensions around Ferguson’s knee keep shrinking. Every three weeks, he says, he needs a new socket. He’s had bone infections. He’s now been through five different prosthetic legs below the knee.
The wars go on in their different guises. In Iraq and Afghanistan, it means bombs going off and people getting killed. In hospitals, it means soldiers dealing with the after-effects of the fighting. The White House will downsize the fighting forces, but the struggle with ruined bodies grows indefinitely.
“We can’t forget about these soldiers,” says Lt. Ashley Booth. She’s a nurse in this rehab unit, an Annapolis native. “The war might wind down, but their fight continues. We can’t put them aside emotionally.”
“We try to make them as comfortable as possible,” says Janet Frazier, a traumatic injury nurse. “But some of these soldiers, it’s not just their bodies but their minds. Some of them can’t comprehend what you’re saying to them. They can’t recognize family or friends. It’s pretty hard when they can’t recognize their own parents.”
In such a setting, Ferguson figures he’s one of the lucky ones. He is 30, married, the father of a son and two daughters, all of them pre-schoolers. He mind is clear. He says he wants to continue active duty. He talks about becoming a military instructor. He says this as the television by his bed shows the latest fighting from the presidential race. There on the TV is Sarah Palin, Senator John McCain’s vice presidential running mate.
“I met her,” Ferguson says. He was stationed at Fort Richardson, Alaska, when he came home from the war. He went to the Ididarod, the great dog sled race. Palin, he says, was “making the rounds.”
“Everybody says she was this blind choice for vice president,” he says, “but people in Alaska were already talking about her running for vice president months ago. She was walking around shaking hands at the Ididerod. When she came to me, I said, ‘Am I shaking the next vice president’s hand?’”
It’s a prescient remark, and an odd one inside the hospital. Returning vets indicate they steer their conversations away from politics – including the politics of the war. They’re more likely to talk about their own wars, to compare notes on their injuries, and their recuperation.
“Some of them come in here,” says nurse Frazier, “and they’re almost not alive. They’ve had amputations, breathing problems, intestinal issues. One marine died three different times. He had brain injuries, he had amputations. His colon had been removed and then attached outside his body. So then you’re dealing with self-esteem issues.”
The war arrives in many manifestations, but few of them command our fullest attention these days. The presidential candidates debate the deep philosophical intentions of a phrase about lipstick and a pig while the TV networks tell us almost nothing about the daily fighting half a world away.
And, in the places like Walter Reed, you have those struggles of war which will linger across the years: the deepest insults to the human body, and the young soldiers quietly attempting to make the best of a bad time.
For more Baltimore Examiner stories about Walter Reed and veterans’ care, look at the following stories:
From the horrors of war come medical miracles
3 Minutes with Lt. Col. Otha Myles
At Walter Reed: A second chance at life
