Day 89, Walk for Warriors

I sat in the truck waiting for the sturm und drang to go away when someone tapped on my window. It was trucker-surfer, Ken. I rolled down the window, rain pouring in. “Hey man, how you doing?” I said to the man who stood at the door soaking wet in his bathing suit.

“I wanted to let you know I rejoined my American Legion Post yesterday. Your walk inspired me. “

“Good man. I’m really glad.”

“It was neat, there was a question about what I was interested in and I put supporting families of our wounded vets.”

“You’re going into action now. That’s all it takes.”

He went out to the water and flopped into the murky surf; another baptism gone well.

My walk was broken into two parts today per force of the rain and lightening that turned me back twice to the truck. There were few people exercising along the shore because the elements had taken control with a blackened sky and thunderous rumbling from above. The radio meteorologist said yesterday that seven people had been killed so far this year from lightening strikes so I played it safe.

There was plenty of lightening and rain to fill anyone’s excitement index for the day. It was a matter of taking breaks and waiting for the right moment to rush out to a sustained walk. I finally fulfilled my duty in the afternoon. For an hour, in between sets, I had the pleasure of listening to my neighbor at the KOA, Phil J., a Navy Vet, tell me his story.

Phil and his wife were quiet when I passed them each time before today. We nodded politely and said hello in muted voices but there hadn’t been any dialogue between us yet. When I came back from the beach Phil and his wife were sitting under their awning which was attached to their twenty foot trailer. Phil spoke first. “How was your walk today?”

“It was exciting but I had to cut it short.”

Phil’s wife excused herself saying that she had some packing to do as they were preparing to leave for North Carolina in the morning. Phil sat in a chair with his legs spread apart and his eyes facing the dirt under his feet. He told me that he and his wife live in Alpine, Texas where the Sheriff knew everyone in town. He got to talking about immigration and said, “I’m all for legal immigration. My mother came from Mexico and she took her classes and became a U.S. citizen in 1952. She really hated to hear about anyone who didn’t go through the process like she had.”

“I can see how that might have bothered her.”

“She was an incredible woman. Her family were Rancheros in Chihuahua. She was a Chavez. They owned the second largest Rancho in all of northern Mexico when she was a little girl.”

“Wow. That had to be one big ranch.”

“Hundreds of thousands of hectarias,” he answered in a mix of Spanish and English, using the metric measure of land.

“How about your father? How did they meet?”

“My father was an orphan who happened to be very smart. He graduated from university at nineteen with a degree in engineering. Dad met my mother at the University of New Mexico in the early nineteen twenties. They eloped.”

“That’s nice.”

He paused as he contemplated how much detail to launch into. He let it rip. “My mother’s mother married a German Jewish immigrant who came to Mexico at the turn of the century. He was a Wiesbrun. The rest of them were all killed in the Holocaust.”

“That’s horrible.”

“The last Wiesbrun girl actually escaped into Switzerland near the end of the war but the Swiss gave her up to the S.S. for a small sum.”

“So much for neutrality.”

Phil closed his eyes and continued his dissertation as I now sat across from him on a very uncomfortable picnic bench. “Grandfather was very successful and ended up owning the Bank of Chihuahua among other things. My grandmother hadn’t finished sixth grade but she demanded that all of her children learn French, English and one native Mexican language, Nahuatl. She lived to be one hundred and fourteen. I remember her as they would roll her out on a bed to talk to the grand kids.”

“I can see the picture. I love that she made everyone learn Nahuatl.”

“My father couldn’t find work as an engineer during the depression so he worked in a candy factory. Then grandma visited my mom and dad and started some of her mischief.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, she was a woman of action and she had plenty of means. She asked my dad, “What does it take in this country to get a job as an engineer?” she asked him earnest.

“You have to have a Master’s Degree from either M.I.T. or Caltech.”

“Then that’s what you’ll do. Go to Caltech and tell them you want to get a Master’s Degree and I’ll pay for it. This candy business is foolishness,” she said.

Phil could have talked for hours and I would have let him but I had to get back to my walk or else. He continued anyway as I walked to the truck to get a drink or a handful of peanuts. At times I would get up from the hard bench to stretch and Phil kept on tickin’ like a Timex. Gnats whirred around his head and occasionally he would swat them but he never lost his train of thought.

Thunder and lightning crashed all around us and darkened the skies at least three different times during the monologue but I was transfixed and he was in a kind of family historical orbit that kept pulling old stories out of the thick, storm wrecked air.

Finally, Phil told me the story of how Pancho Villa had harassed the Hacendados of Chihuahua; his ancestors. This was a story with which I had some familiarity, but not this part. “My great uncle Roberto Chavez was actually shot by a firing squad when he was discovered on a train by Villa. His general wanted my great uncle’s uniform so they lined him up and shot him and five others that day.”

“Pancho was one bad hombre,” I said squeezing in a response.

He continued of course. “An old Indian woman scavenged through the bodies looking for anything left behind by Villa’s men and she found Roberto alive. He lived his whole life with a bullet lodged in his neck and died in his eighties.”

“Incredible.”

Gathering himself for a finale of sorts, Phil began to tie the bow of the story. “Some years later, Roberto’s son organized a group of men to help him assassinate Villa at Parral. They had their intelligence and they waited for Villa to come into town driving his Ford Roadster which he drove with the top down.”

I sat there wondering why I hadn’t brought a tape recorder with me on the trip. Phil had set the hook, now he was about to reel me in.

“Gabriel stood in the window of the bank as his men waited across the bridge over the creek at the end of town. Villa drove into town as predicted with the top down. He gave the sign and the men across the bridge opened fire on Pancho Villa, riddling him with fifty caliber bullets. Gabriel, it is said, hopped onto the running board, put his 1911 Colt to the top of Villa’s head and let off a final shot.”

Generally my sentiments run with the campesinos especially where Mexico is concerned but Phil told his story with such genuine family pride that I could listen to it with great relish.



Army Surgeons have been doing incredible work near the battle field since the War in Afghanistan began. This featured doctor is a stud who went to Afghanistan to do top quality surgery where it is needed most. Dr. Richard Slusher and his partner, Dr. Kenneth Azarow are the first to see their patients after a field medic. You can only imagine what comes next.



Originally Published: 4/18/2007 3:07:00 PM
Army Doctors Saving Lives in Afghanistan
From Football Field to the Battlefield: Army Surgeons Now Saving Lives in Afghanistan
________________________________________
By DENIS D. GRAY Associated Press Writer
The Associated Press

QALAT, Afghanistan -

U.S. Capt. Richard M. Slusher of 541st Forward Surgical Team, operates on a wounded Afghan soldier at a U.S. military field hospital in Lagman, southeastern Afghanistan, Wednesday, April 11, 2007. It was a dream job for a sports medicine specialist

It was a dream job for a sports medicine specialist: repairing the battered knees and shoulders of the Cincinnati Bengals and other athletes. Major trauma was defined as missing a season to injury. Two years later in Afghanistan, Capt. Richard M. Slusher doesn't get to practice his much-loved specialty. The trauma he confronts now carries the gravity of life or death. One recent morning, Slusher could do nothing to save an 8-year-old boy, carried in after his brain was shattered by a bomb unexploded ordnance litters the landscape here.

Hours earlier, Slusher and a fellow surgeon, Col. Kenneth Azarow, amputated the legs of an Afghan policeman scythed down by a roadside bomb. Four others lay nearby, riddled with shrapnel. A sixth was dead.

It's a long way from small incision, computer-guided arthroscopic surgery on a linebacker's knee to "blood, tissue, bones, everything blowing up in your face."

"I'm not used to people dying on me," the 37-year-old orthopedic surgeon said. "I'm seeing things I've never seen in my career. I've done more amputations in six months here than in my whole five years of residency," Slusher said.

And things aren't likely to ease up during the second half of his yearlong tour with the U.S. Army's 541st Forward Surgical Team.

"I expect this will be a very busy spring and summer. We're getting ready," said Azarow, echoing warnings that Taliban insurgents soon will intensify ambushes, raids and bombings in Zabul province and other areas.

The 10-man unit is half the size of a standard Army surgical team. It treats U.S., coalition and Afghan military personnel as well as civilians. "Anyone who needs our help," Azarow said.

A U.S. soldier seriously wounded at one of Zabul's remote bases can be flown by helicopter to the team at Qalat, the provincial capital, and within an hour undergo surgery and be airlifted out, first to the coalition air base at Kandahar and then to a major military hospital in Germany. All within 24 hours.

"We don't have the capability to support a critically injured patient for more than a couple of hours," Azarow said. "Here, we do life and limb-sparing surgery stop bleeding, control contamination, stabilize the patient."

As a comment on the medical situation in the dirt-poor province, Azarow said his understaffed unit, housed in two small rooms, is the most sophisticated facility in Zabul.

The 47-year-old from Tacoma, Wash., says the biggest fear after losing a patient is that the unit will be overwhelmed by casualties. That's nearly happened several times.

In February, nine seriously injured soldiers were rushed in from the crash in Zabul of a U.S. Chinook helicopter in which eight troops died. Within eight hours, all nine, including ones with severed spinal cords and severe trauma, were evacuated and survived.

More recently, 17 Afghan soldiers, caught in a deadly Taliban ambush, swamped the facility. Then the only surgeon, Azarow rapidly operated on three of the critically wounded while outsiders at the base helicopter fuelers, Dutch communication specialists, Romanian medics reinforced his overtaxed men.

"If you don't work as a team you are truly lost," said Azarow, one of only two pediatric surgeons among the roughly 4,200 physicians on active U.S. Army duty. Twenty-six doctors are serving in Afghanistan.

Almost everyone on the team comes from an airborne unit, carrying some of the esprit and style of elite paratroopers, whom Slusher doctored at Fort Bragg, N.C., on his last assignment. ("An 18,000-man football team, they're crazy," he said.)

Prior to that, the regular U.S. Army officer had his year in the field of dreams a break from normal Army duty for a sports medicine fellowship with the NFL football team and others in Cincinnati. Slusher loved it so much that after 17 years in the service he is planning to retire and go into a private sports medicine practice.

"I assisted in many of the surgeries that got some of the players back on the field. That was a very satisfying experience for me to see a person get back to doing what they enjoy doing," he said. "The experience of getting a soldier back on the battlefield is also the same. Seeing a child injured and getting him or her back to their family is more gratifying."

Slusher doesn't regret the year in Afghanistan, although he and Azarow say recruitment and retention of doctors has become harder because of the long deployments to overseas war zones.

"Most folks are fine with their initial deployment, it is the second and third that become extremely difficult for a variety of reasons, some personal and some professional," Azarow said.

To ensure it has enough medical personnel, the Army is offering bonuses and helps pay off student loans in exchange for commitments. For example, the National Guard is offering health care professionals $30,000 in bonuses for three-year commitments.

To ease tensions, "we goof off, we play around. But we do the job," Slusher said, donning a Goofy hat his 5-year-old son gave him on a trip to Disney World while he was on leave two weeks earlier. Wearing the hat, the burly, athletic doctor bounces into the ward to prepare for the incoming wounded policemen.

Slusher unwraps the bandaged legs of the most severely wounded. Both are a mash of shredded flesh, tendons and exposed bones. A foot dangles on the end of the victim's left leg, and Slusher cuts if off with a scalpel, placing it in a blue plastic wash bowl.

"Come Sail with Me," "American Woman" and 1970s rock pulsates from speakers connected to an iPod. Male nurses and assistants mix brisk efficiency and banter.

Then a grinding sound cuts through the room as Slusher and Azarow bend over the patient, neatly amputating both his legs below the knee with a wire saw.

All five that night are saved.

"Unless you come to us totally mangled, destined to die, you are not going to die," Slusher said. "This is our storming the hill, taking the objective. We are proud of that."

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