Posted on 10/12/2004 8:07:04 PM PDT by Laurita
Later this week Army Cpl. J.R. Martinez will leave his Dalton home for his next appointment with pain.
Martinez will return to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio for his 28th surgery.
On April 5, 2003, the Humvee he was driving near Karbala, Iraq, triggered a land mine. The explosion trapped him inside the wreckage and burned more than 40 percent of his body, with the worst damage to his face and head.
The next operation will involve doctors stretching what little good skin remains on the right side of his head around the back to the left side. Martinez hopes the painful, laborious process will eventually lead to live skin on his skull and, perhaps, hair transplants.
"In three or four months I'll be doing that gel thing on my hair," he said with an easy laugh as he ran a hand over his scarred head.
Martinez is one of more than 7,700 U.S. soldiers who have been wounded in Iraq, nearly 4,200 of whom were not able to return to duty within 72 hours, Pentagon figures show.
Many of the more seriously injured have lost limbs or been blinded or badly burned by roadside bombs.
But while the dead are mourned and memorialized, the wounded often are left to suffer in solitude and silence.
Martinez wants to change that. With the Army's blessing he has become the unpaid military spokesman for a nonprofit group called Salute America's Heroes. He regularly talks to other wounded service members who come through the medical center, trying to get them to look at their lives from a new and more positive perspective.
"I'm not supposed to be here today. I'm a walking miracle," he said.
Lessons from Mom
Martinez has battled his own demons and depression during recovery. He faces up to 10 more operations in the next 18 months.
He attributes much of his optimism to his mother, Maria Zavala, who moved to Dalton in 2001 to work in a carpet mill.
A native of El Salvador, Zavala left in 1982 at the height of her country's civil war to find a new and safer life in the United States.
"My mother has been through a lot in her life, but she taught me a lot of the values she has," said Martinez.
The young man decided to join the Army after graduating from Dalton High School in June 2002. Assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, Martinez found himself in Iraq in March 2003.
On April 5, while elements of the Fort Stewart-based 3rd Infantry Division were pushing into Baghdad, Martinez and three other soldiers were part of a security detachment for a 94-vehicle convoy traveling through central Iraq near Karbala.
Martinez said he and his buddies were joking with one another about how cool it would be to go home with a Purple Heart medal for a combat wound.
Without warning, an explosion under the left front tire shredded the armored Humvee. The three other soldiers were thrown clear, all with relatively minor wounds. Martinez was trapped inside.
"I felt my hands burning and my eyes were swelling up and I was having problems seeing. Then I felt my face burning and I was going through a tremendous amount of pain," he remembered.
Unable to free himself, Martinez resigned himself to dying. It was then, he said, that he saw the image of his younger sister, Anabelita, who had died years before at age 9.
"She came to me and said I couldn't die because my mother needed me. And I saw a funeral and a soldier handing my mother a folded flag and I knew I didn't want her to go through that. She was my angel that day," he said of his little sister.
Martinez eventually was pulled from the wreckage by his squad leader, Sgt. Chris Valdez, who sat in the sand, cradling Martinez's head in his lap, rocking him like a baby as the Dalton soldier screamed in pain.
"What's wrong with me? My face is burning!" Martinez screamed at Valdez.
"It's going to be OK," Valdez kept telling him. "It's going to be OK."
Martinez knew differently.
"I could hear the fear in his voice. I could hear the emotion. I knew it was something really, really bad," Martinez said.
He was burned on his head, face, arms, hands, knees, thighs and hamstrings. His left ear was burned off. He also had a broken right arm, a broken nose, broken ribs and nerve damage in his right hand.
Martinez was conscious throughout the ordeal. Not until a medical evacuation helicopter arrived and he was given morphine did he pass out, the pain at last blotted out.
For the next three weeks he was kept alive on a ventilator as he went from the battlefield to Kuwait, to Germany and finally to San Antonio, where his mother was waiting at his bedside when he awoke.
"I reached out and grabbed her hand and told her I loved her," he said. "And I said to her: 'I told you was was going to come home.' "
Staring down the pain
For the next 2 1/2 months, there was constant pain. And there was depression, especially in the days after he first looked in a mirror and saw the red and purple scars that covered his face and head. He worried about being stared at and pointed at in public. He worried about ever having a girlfriend.
"I said if I have to live this way the rest of my life, I don't want to live," he recalled thinking.
His mother talked to him, telling him that what was important was on the inside, not the outside.
"That was the turning point for me," he said. "I started looking at what happened to me as a blessing. It made me realize if people wanted to be with me, they were going to do it for who I am, not what I look like."
He tries to pass that message on to other soldiers, helping them heal emotionally even as he heals physically.
And, in an election year in which political divisivenessseems to have reached unprecedented levels, the young soldier has become a passionate and outspoken advocate for nonpartisan support of the troops.
"It's not about whether you are going to vote for [President] Bush or [John] Kerry," Martinez said. "It's about the individual troop that puts on that uniform every day. Troops feel people sometimes forget their sacrifices when they see them spending so much time talking about politics. But support plays a big role in a troop's recovery."
Martinez is now being sought after for motivational speeches.
"Seventeen months ago life challenged me," he said. "Now, I'm challenging life to see what else it can throw at me."
AMERICA'S WAR WOUNDED
Spanish-American War (1898): 1,662
World War I (1917-1918): 204,002
World War II (1941-1946):671,846
Korean War (1950-1953):103,284
Vietnam War (1964-1973): 153,303
Persian Gulf War (1990-1991):467
Iraq war (2003-Present): 7,730 (as of Oct. 8)
Source: Department of Defense
pretty low casualties compared to other wars.
The American people were spoiled by the Gulf War. Too many believed it was supposed to be that easy, yet it still wasn't easy for those relative few who were wounded. There's a price, we pay it, it's worth it.
The mission in the Gulf War is NOTHING like the mission we have now, our mission then was just to kick Iraq out of Kuwait not to take a country over.
your right, we already took it over won the war captured Saddam and handed Iraq's sovereignty back to them. We are no there at their request for security.
The number of wounded is so high because medical science is today saving soldiers, Marines, and airmen who otherwise would have died and gone over into the "KIA" category. In a horrible sort of way, a high number of wounded is a positive.
ACTUALLY WE DON'T HAVE A HIGH NUMBER OF WOUNDED COMPARED TO OTHER WARS!
Korean War 34,428 wounded per year
Vietnam 17,033 wounded per year
In other words, it could be a lot worse, and the same sorts of wounds would have been fatal if they had occurred during Vietnam, or even a dozen years ago during Desert Storm.
Good point. I hadn't thought of that.
My late father was in the Signal Corps in the Philippines, where he won two Bronze Stars and a Silver Star though he was only carrying a camera. You serve in a worthy branch of the Armed Forces, my dear. Thank you; God bless and keep you.
~ Rocky's daughter
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