Saturday, January 21, 2006
One wounded Marine
The NY Times has a detailed feature article about the recovery of one Marine who suffered horrendous injuries in Iraq. This is the price of Li'l Georgies Glorious War.
It has taken hundreds of hours of therapy, but Jason Poole, a 23-year old Marine corporal, has learned all over again to speak and to walk. At times, though, words still elude him. He can read barely 16 words a minute. His memory can be fickle, his thinking delayed. Injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, he is blind in his left eye, deaf in his left ear, weak on his right side and still getting used to his new face, which was rebuilt with skin and bone grafts and 75 to 100 titanium screws and plates.I have to include one more piece of information before you go and read the whole thing.
Even so, those who know Corporal Poole, say his personality - gregarious, kind and funny - has remained intact. Wounded on patrol near the Syrian border on June 30, 2004, he considers himself lucky to be alive. So do his doctors. "Basically I want to get my life back," he said. "I'm really trying."
But he knows the life ahead of him is unlikely to match the one he had planned, in which he was going to attend college and become a teacher, get married and have children. Now, he hopes to volunteer in a school. His girlfriend from before he went to war is now just a friend. Before he left, they had agreed they might talk about getting married when he got back.
"But I didn't come back," he said.
His unit was among the first to invade Iraq. He was on his third tour of duty there just 10 days from coming home and leaving the Marines, when he was wounded in the explosion.
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