Seriously Wounded Soldier Recalls Trauma, Looks Toward Future (Awe and Tears and more AWE)

WASHINGTON, Aug. 20, 2006 – Army Spec. Crystal Davis proved her steely grit the night the up-armored wrecker she was driving in Iraq hit an improvised explosive devise.

Trapped in the destroyed vehicle with her right foot nearly severed, she told her cohorts she’d hoist herself out rather than risk having them come in.

“I think about it every day,” Davis told country music singer-songwriter Rockie Lynne Aug. 18, at a dinner for wounded servicemembers and their families. “Every moment that goes by a part will flash back. I tell it differently every time because I remember different things as time goes by.”

Davis was one of about 20 severely injured servicemembers from Walter Reed Army Medical Center here and the National Naval Medical Center, in Bethesda, Md., who dined on the rooftop of The Exchange restaurant here. Lynne was among the 40 or so family members, veterans and other guests who joined the troops at the dinner hosted and sponsored by Jim Nicopoulos, owner of The Exchange.

“What an inspirational story -- she’s amazing,” said Lynne, a former Army infantryman, after listening to Davis describe her experience and profess her determination to stay in the Army.

“This is such an example of how today’s battlefield is so vastly different than even the Gulf War, because now there are no frontlines. There are no support units in the rear,” he said. “In today’s military, there is clear and present danger for every single person who joins.”

Davis, 22, a native of Camden, S.C., joined the Army in January 2004 to become a track mechanic and also trained as a vehicle recovery specialist. As she put it, her job was to “pick up blown up, broke down or stuck vehicles.”

Assigned to the 54th Engineer Battalion in Bamburg, Germany, she deployed to Iraq in November 2005. At first, she said, she didn’t feel threatened being there. “I just felt like it was another day at work,” she said. “I would go outside the wire three, four, five times a week, doing different missions.”

On Jan. 21, 2006, a two-hour firefight ensued outside the wire. Her team chief remarked that he hated to go outside into a bunch of irate Iraqis.

“I just kind of laughed at him and brushed it off,” Davis recalled. “He asked if I wanted him to drive that night. I said no, I’d drive. He said we’d be taking the same route we always took so it would be all right -- but it just wasn’t all right.”

Davis was driving the second to last vehicle in a convoy doing route clearance. As she straightened out of a left turn onto the road, Iraqi insurgents detonated a remote-controlled IED.

“It was about 2 in the morning,” she recalled. “I had just taken off my eye protection because I’d been up all day and I wanted to stretch and scratch my eyes and kind of wake up a little bit. I had one hand on the wheel, and as I went to grab for the glasses I saw a red flash and heard a boom. I put my hands on the wheel and hit the gas to get out of the danger zone.”

The next thing she knew, she awoke to find the vehicle stopped. She was facing the driver’s door, but the door had been was blown off. She had glass fragments in her eyes.

“I turned and saw my weapon was still there but my seat belt had been blown off of me,” she said. “My right leg was bent backward on top of the steering wheel and my foot was hanging off – it was still connected, but I guess you could say it wasn’t there.

“I couldn’t see my left leg. I didn’t know where it was. All of a sudden my team chief said, ‘Hey Ms. Davis, are you all right? Talk to me; talk to me.’ All of a sudden the pain just hit me at once, and I said, ‘My legs hurt. I don’t know why. My legs hurt.’”

Within what seemed like seconds to the injured soldier, Sgt. Jessie Venable, Davis’ best friend and the unit’s medic, was there. “She looked at me, and I could see the tears in her eyes, but she kept everything professional and she did her job.

“She took off my helmet and my flak vest and turned to the people who were going to help her and said, ‘I don’t know how we’re going to get her out.’ She didn’t know I heard her.

Trapped in a vehicle the size of an 18-wheeler with 4-foot-tall tires, Davis told Venable, “‘Hold on a minute, let me see if I can get myself out. If I can’t then you can try.’

“I’d rather hurt myself worse than have her climb in there and hurt herself and hurt me,” she said.

Davis found her left leg crushed underneath the seat. Knowing her right foot was already lost, she put pressure on that leg to lift herself up. She grabbed her other leg and set it on the doorjamb.

“I grabbed my left leg and gently pulled it over, and as I went to go set it down somebody grabbed my foot, so I set my leg on top of my foot where it was disconnected,” She said.

Venable told Davis to fall forward and she did. Davis said she believes she fought off death shortly after she was put on an air evacuation plane. “I don’t know what happened, but I felt the medic’s lips on mine and I felt her pushing on my chest, but at the same time I was looking down at her. It was like someone was telling me, ‘You can give up now peacefully, or you can fight.’

“I’ve never quit,” Davis told Lynne. “I’ve never given up a fight. I’ll be the first one in the middle of a brawl.”

Davis said some people say she’s crazy because she wants to stay in the military. “But, there’s a reason to my madness,” she said with a slight smile. “I’m doing everything I can to push myself to the limit and past it to get there. They’re going to have to put up with me for the next 18 years.”

Her original goal was a long-term Army career. “When I signed up, I signed up for four years,” she said. “But in my mind and in my heart, I signed up for the whole 20 years.

“I joined to get a change of life, to do something better with my life than what I was doing,” she said. “My life was heading down the wrong street at the wrong time, and I wanted to live.”

Every bone in Davis’s left leg was broken. Her heel, ankle and nerves were crushed. Today, she said she has partial feeling in her foot. She cannot wiggle her toes. She can move her foot up and down a little and side to side. She said it looks like the doctors took a handful of screws and put them in her foot. She has a plate holding her heel together. She also got a prosthetic right leg she’s been walking on since mid-March.

“I wouldn’t take back a thing,” Davis said. “I believe that even if I wasn’t in the military that this would have happened to me some way or another somewhere down the line. I’m glad I was in the military because they can pay for it.

“It’s a miracle that I’m here, and I thank God every day,” she concluded.

Posted on Wed, Jun. 14, 2006
Father finds joy helping daughter learn to walk for the second time
By Frank Greve
Knight Ridder Newspapers

WASHINGTON - Jimmy Davis made it up from South Carolina to Walter Reed Army Medical Center half an hour before his daughter, Crystal, arrived from Landstuhl, Germany.

Military doctors there had amputated her right leg below the knee after a roadside bomb blew up her tow truck in Iraq. They'd also set her multiply fractured left leg.

That was in January. Since then, the feisty 22-year-old Army mechanic and her father have grown inseparable in the rehab units at Walter Reed.

"Long as she's here, there's no place I'd rather be," said Jimmy Davis, 60, a retired BellSouth technician from Camden, S.C., with a trim beard and a modest belly over his jeans. A friend back in Camden keeps an eye on his house; his real home these days is a small apartment close to Walter Reed that he shares with his daughter.

"He can't get old till I get better," Crystal Davis said recently, smiling wanly as she and her prosthetic leg went through their umpteenth adjustment. The key was the right thickness of sock for her stump, fitter David Beachler said, so her father pulled a bagful from the rear pouch of his daughter's wheelchair and sorted through them with the eye of an athletic trainer.

He's a rarity in Walter Reed's bustling world of military amputees. Mostly, the parents who show up daily to coach their kids through rehab with their love are mothers. But he's been a de facto single parent since he divorced a year ago. And like a lot of dads in his position, he tries to deliver to his child the inner strength that fathers usually convey along with the emotional support that mothers do.

He pushes her and soothes her. He cooks for her and lets her make mistakes. He grills her surgeons and makes her laugh.

It's a partnership, really, and Crystal Davis could say about her father what he says about her: "She's done so well. I think if she were down all the time about what happened, there's no way I could take it."

Her mother, Caroline, who's decided to stay back home, said: "I couldn't be prouder of her." As for her ex, she added, "He's doing a fantastic job."

For any parent, helping a child through rehab is an intense and tricky business, said Col. William J. Howard III. He runs a therapy unit with a model apartment in back where Walter Reed's amputees practice transferring from wheelchairs to tubs and toilets, as well as cooking, cleaning and the other skills they'll need to return, as Crystal Davis assumes she will, to independence. She's also among those who intend to re-enlist.

"The parents who help the most try to make their kids independent-minded," Howard said. "They figure out what the balance is between supporting their child and hovering, and they let their kids discover what they can do and, sometimes, can't do."

The experience reminds him, Jimmy Davis said, of "watching a baby grow up again: crawling, walking, running."

He and his daughter share a gritty Southern mindset that mixes acceptance, self-deprecation, a pinch of fatalism and a lot of good humor.

"He's here to do what I want him to do, and if he doesn't want to do it, we agree on something else," as she put it.

The results are impressive. She made it out of Walter Reed's amputee ward two months earlier than her doctors had predicted. Using a walker and a prosthetic leg, she took her first steps in March, three months early, just in time for her father's birthday.

"I want to see her run a marathon with her hand bike," her father said recently within her earshot.

"I HATE the hand bike," she protested.

But she continued to grind away on the upper-body cycle, a pair of rotating face-high pedals. She's one of those stubborn people who, when they find something hard to do, do it more.

"Reminds me of me when I was young," her father muttered happily.

She's an outpatient at Walter Reed now, a brunette with a short sporty ponytail and large brown eyes who just happens to have one leg that ends in a stump. Her other leg is still wreathed in pins; an 8-foot transparent plastic wound-drainage tube trails from her heel.

Weekday mornings, her father drives her to Walter Reed in his Silverado pickup, her collapsible wheelchair tossed in back.

There, she exercises, visits the medical clinic to have her wounds and meds checked, exercises some more, consults with her prosthetist and maybe gets in a little recreational flirting with other amputees.

Her father disappears at such moments. Sometimes it's to go outside and smoke. Other times it's to buttonhole doctors, who hope she'll be up on her prosthesis and running by Christmas.

"I'll ask them what her limits are, then try and go one step past them," he explained. "I want her to do more than she thinks she can."

The tactic is no secret to his daughter. Once they've agreed on a goal for her, "he mostly stands back and watches," she said. "It's a lot more supportive than having somebody all over you."

According to her, her father's an upbeat stoic. "He doesn't like to show his good days and his bad days. He stays up for me because I need it," she said.

"Sometimes I cuss the pain in my left leg, and he'll change the subject and make me talk about this guy, Jason, that I'm dating."

The effect of the distraction is clinical, she explained.

"If I get emotional and start crying, the pain is three times as bad," she said. "If I breathe heavy, the pain rises. But if I can keep myself breathing normally, the pain is not that bad."

She confessed: "I'm a very independent person for the most part. But going through something like this, I'm a dependent."

Her father offered a confession, too: He and his daughter, though close while she was a teen, hadn't spoken much or seen each other in the two years before she showed up at Walter Reed.

"The days since then," he said, "have meant a whole lot to us."

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