Chapter 4

Just a little more Army stuff and we’ll get back to the point of this story. It’s necessary, and you’ll understand that in this chapter.

While my peers went on to advanced training in whatever MOS (Military Occupational Specialty) they had signed up for, I was sent to Fort Benning, in Georgia. I stayed there for twelve weeks that were remarkably like basic training, except this time I wasn’t in a position of student leadership and we learned different things. With the exception of field artillery, all officers are trained in the same way. They may be assigned to a branch after they are commissioned, such as Military Police, or Armor, or Transportation, or Logistics, but they’re all trained to be infantry officers. My enlisted peers went to school to learn how to be engineers, and actually use the equipment and do the tasks combat engineers to. But I was not going to be doing the “grunt work”. I was going to be leading them. I would learn a lot about engineering when was in an active duty engineering company, but I could just as easily have been assigned to be a platoon leader in an armor company, or any other kind of unit in the Army.

So that’s what they taught us to do: Be flexible, but never compromise standards, whatever kind of unit you were in.

It doesn’t matter to the telling of this tale what units I was in. The bottom line is that, roughly four and a half years after I joined the U.S. Army, and while I was on my third tour in the middle east, I was, in fact, a platoon leader in a combat engineer company in Iraq, when we were called out to deal with a suspected IED. I was no longer a Butter Bar (Second Lieutenant) and now wore the single silver or black bar of a first lieutenant on my uniform. My platoon was down four men so I went with my platoon sergeant to act in a support role, handling commo. The suspected IED was in the middle of nowhere, a dusty, trackless series of low hills the road went through. The convoy commander was anxious about being ambushed and asked us to hurry up.

You don’t hurry up when dealing with an IED. Not if you want to stay alive.

Long story short, the “IED” was an empty one gallon detergent container with some wires attached to it. The ambush, however, was very real.

I took a round from a NSV 12.7 X 108mm heavy machine gun that went through both lower legs. The round, quite similar to the US .50 caliber bullet, was probably armor piercing, and had been moving so fast that it basically amputated both legs in a fraction of a second. One of my men said I did a complete 360 degree flip before landing in a heap. I’m told they found my boots, with some leg left in each of them, but I never saw them again. Thanks to modern battlefield medicine, they controlled the bleeding and a dustoff chopper got me to a field hospital still alive.

The combat support hospital, what used to be called a M.A.S.H., cleaned up the ends of the bone and cut off the torn flesh and sent me on to Germany. I stayed in Germany only long enough for them to determine that the shock of the bullet had also damaged the tendons in both my hips and knees. My knees had been stressed, too. The ball of my right femur had been pulled out of the socket, and they put that back where it belonged.

Then it was on to the Brooke Army Medical Center, commonly referred to as BAMC, pronounced “Bam-see,” in San Antonio, Texas. I was drugged up for most of that time, and it was like a very long, very bad dream.

I’m making this sound simple, but it wasn’t. It involved multiple surgeries because lots of blood vessels and other damage had to be repaired. I had a vague idea of what had happened to me, both the cause of the injury and what they had been doing about it, but all I knew was that they were getting my legs ready for prosthetics. I hadn’t made any medical decisions, up to that point. Anyway, to keep things moving, let’s skip to after the last surgery, when I finally woke up enough to interact with the world around me. Valerie was there. She was curled up in a chair beside my bed, reading a magazine.

I had seen her several times since arriving back in America. I’d been wacked out on drugs each time, but I remember thinking that everything would be okay, because she was there, kissing me. That’s about all I remembered, though. When I realized she was there again, I tried to sit up. I was groggy, but it didn’t feel like it had in the past, when the world drifted in and out and I felt like I was trapped in a dark room.

It turned out that trying to sit up was a bad idea. Everything on my body hurt when I moved. I decided to talk, instead.

“Hey,” I croaked. My mouth was dry.

“You’re awake!” she yipped. She reached for something and I saw a nurse’s call thingy in her hand. She pushed the button. “How do you feel?”

“I did feel like shit, if you want the truth,” I said. “But it’s all better now. You make it all better.”

She was kissing me when the nurse came in.

That nurse was none other than Aoibheann O’Malley, my mother-in-law. She was also the charge nurse on the ward I would call home for the foreseeable future.

I had known Eve was a nurse. I had not known she worked for the Army. I’m not sure Valerie knew that either, at least not before I got hurt. All she knew was that, after we got married, her mother moved to San Antonio and was a nurse, there.

“How do you feel?” asked Eve, looking at machines and poking and prodding me.

“Like a Terrier ran over me,” I said. She looked confused, so I added, “The vehicle, not the dog.” She still didn’t know what I was talking about, but “vehicle” was enough. It occurs to me as I write this that the reader might be confused, too. A Terrier is sort of a tank with a bucket and a digging arm on it. If you Google “Army Terrier” you can see a picture of it.

“You’ve been through hell,” said Eve.

“How are my legs?” I tried to lift my head, but was too weak to do so.

“Healing.” She fussed with my blanket. “How much do you remember?”

Before I could answer her a doctor breezed in, trailed by two residents. They poked me and prodded me and looked at X-Rays.

“You’re looking good,” said the doctor, with a patently false smile. “We’ll get you started on physical therapy and as soon as the stumps heal enough, we’ll see about some starting prosthetics.”

“Oh boy!” I said, with patently false enthusiasm.

“You’re lucky. Both amputations were below the knee, and in six months nobody will be able to tell you’re wearing prosthetics unless you wear shorts.”

“I sort of doubt there are lots of shorts in my future,” I said.

“That’s up to you,” said the doctor. He had other things to show his residents, so he smiled at me and left.

He hadn’t said a word to either Eve or Valerie.

I didn’t care, though, because as soon as he left, Val basically tried to crawl in bed with me. Her mother put a stop to that, and she had to settle for giving me about a hundred kisses, all over my face.

“That’s enough for now,” said my nurse, who fussed with tubes and checked screens and such.

“Mom, you can talk to him anytime you want to,” said Val, gently shoving her mother aside. “I can stay another day, but I have to get back. I’m scheduled to take the bar exam next week.”

“Then that is what you must do,” I said. “If anybody understands that you need to go off and do something important, I do.”

“I want to stay with you,” she moaned.

“I know. But bear with it. I have a feeling I’m going to get to see more of you, Honey.” I looked at Eve and she nodded.

“Why?” asked my wife.

“I’m pretty sure my military days are over,” I said. Eve nodded again.

“I don’t care. In fact, I’m glad! They almost got you killed!” she said.

“They saved my life,” I corrected her.

“Don’t argue,” said Eve. “Don’t waste the time she has with you by arguing.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” I said, lifting my hand to complete a very sloppy, weaving salute.

Eve left us alone and I spent the next hour getting Val to tell me everything I’d missed in her life. I was just happy to be able to talk to her. When I was deployed (which seemed like most of the time) I’d gotten to see her on leaves. I had 30 days per year of leave, but I tried to take it a week at a time. Val was living in a little apartment off campus now, and a week with her was precious. We had talked (dreamed) about her getting a job after law school, where I was stationed, so we could actually live together. At least when I wasn’t deployed. Still, living with her for 90 days between deployments would be vastly better than what we’d been doing. And I did not intend to re-enlist when my six years was up. That much I knew. By then the Army would have served its purpose (from my viewpoint, anyway) and I could go back to school while my wife supported me, instead of the other way around.

My injury, however, was going to change all that. Medically, they had put Humpty Dumpty back together again, sans a few pieces of shell. Whether Humpty would actually function well, in the future, was still a big question mark. Both Valerie and I knew that. We also both knew that there would be months of physical therapy ahead of me. I was already positive I’d walk again, but I also knew that was an emotional decision, and that my mindset was only part of my recovery. I just didn’t know how long it would take to get there, but I had no interest in spending a lot of time in a wheel chair, especially not in the extended future. I was immensely glad that the surgeries were ended, but I was nervous about PT, not to mention learning to walk on prosthetics.

Every time Val tried to talk about what had happened to me, I steered things back to her. She was nervous about taking the bar exam. I tried to convince her it would be a piece of cake, because she was the smartest lawyer I knew.

“I’m the only lawyer you know, you goof.”

“You’re also the most beautiful lawyer I know,” I said.

Her face got serious. “I want to live with you all the time, and sleep with you whenever I want. Are they really going to let you out of the Army?”

I shrugged. “This kind of injury usually leads to that. I won’t know for sure until after I complete physical therapy. Then somebody way above my pay grade will make a decision.”

“I got a job offer,” she said. “I have to pass the bar, though.”

“You’ll do fine,” I said. I was thinking that a new job would keep her occupied while I went through physical therapy. I wasn’t going to be good company during that process. Everybody I knew who’d been through it had hated it with a passion.

“It means I’ll have to move,” she said.

“Wherever you live, that’s where I’ll live,” I said. “It doesn’t matter where you go.”

Her hand drifted to my stomach.

“I can’t wait to sleep with you,” she said, softly. She frowned. “That bullet didn’t hurt you ... that way ... did it?”

“They didn’t shoot my dick off, if that’s what you mean,” I said.

“Don’t be crass,” she said. “This is important.”

“Well, seeing as how I’ve had a catheter in me since I was at the evac hospital, I haven’t had a chance to try things out,” I said.

“Try things out?” Her eyebrows rose.

I made jerking off motions with my hand and she slapped it.

“You are so gross,” she said.

“I’m just horny.”

“Really?” She was happy again. This girl could flip-flop like a congressman.

“You make me that way,” I said. I felt the urge to shift in bed, and tried to do that automatically. Whatever they’d given me to knock me out had worn off and incredible pain lanced through my lower torso. I couldn’t suppress a groan.

Val jerked and looked horrified before she ran from the room. She was back with her mother within a minute.

I told her what had happened and she injected something into my IV tube. Almost instantly I felt the fog begin to surround me.

“I love you,” I slurred.

“I love you, too, Baby,” cried my wife.

Then I went to sleep.

I don’t want to recount the details of my time in physical therapy, because I don’t want to have to remember or even think about it. But it was pivotal to the relationship I developed with my mother-in-law, who was also one of my nurses. I had many nurses, but Eve was there a lot, and took care of me a lot. I wouldn’t find out until later that she was actually a shift supervisor, and in theory, wasn’t directly responsible for my day-to-day care. Only at a much later date would another nurse tell me Eve was visibly more involved with me as a patient than anyone else. But they all knew I was her son-in-law, so everybody cut her some slack.

I’d been flat on my back for over two months by the time my physical therapist, hereafter referred to as Vlad (The Impaler), began to torture me. One of the first things they did was just sit me up in bed, which doesn’t sound so terrible, until you remember that the hip bone is connected to the (re-located) thigh bone and the upper body bone is connected to the (reconnected) hip bone and all the fucking muscles are connected, too. So the mere act of sitting up pulled on all the muscles associated with all the surgeries they did. It even hurt in my knees!

I admit it. I cried like a baby, like a little girl who has lost her favorite dolly. I whimpered and groaned and moaned and cursed.

And that was just about sitting up in the fucking bed. I had done thousands of sit-ups in the past, but I’d always had legs when I did them. Now, if I tensed my abs, my stumps shot up in the air like they were on springs. I had to learn a completely new way to sit up.

Next was rolling onto my side to use a bed pan. They wanted the catheter out.

It was day two of Vlad’s “do sit-ups in bed” routine and Eve came strolling in.

“I just did it ten minutes ago,” I groaned.

“I’m not here for that,” she said. “It’s time to get that catheter out of you so you can pee like a man.” Aoibheann had elected to be the nurse who removed the catheter.