Blood Brothers: Among the Soldiers of Ward 57

by Michael Weisskopf

Overview

Time magazine's Michael Weisskopf lost his hand in a grenade explosion while on assignment in Iraq. Sent for treatment to Ward 57, the wing of Walter Reed Army Medical Center reserved for amputees, he met soldiers Pete Damon, Luis Rodriguez, and Bobby Isaacs, and alongside them began to navigate the bewildering and painful process of rehabilitation. Blood Brothers is the story of this difficult passage, beginning with healthy men heading off to war and continuing through the months in Ward 57 as they prepare themselves for a different life. A chronicle of devastation and recovery, this is a deeply affecting portrait of the private aftermath of combat casualties.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780805078602
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	10/03/2006
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.37(w) x 9.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

A senior correspondent for Time magazine, Michael Weisskopf is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and winner of the George Polk Award, Goldsmith Award for Investigative Reporting, National Headliners Award, and the Daniel Pearl Award for Courage and Integrity in Journalism. Weisskopf lives in Washington, D.C.

Read an Excerpt

Prologue

May 30, 2005

The National Cemetery was cast in an amber light, as lonely as an old battlefield on this rainy Memorial Day morning. We walked down a narrow path, stopping at a simple headstone. My pal Pete fixed his gaze on the date of death, etched in black. His eyes closed for several minutes, then opened as he bent down and reached with his silver hook for four little American flags strewn on the ground. Pete carefully picked up each one and replanted it at the foot of the grave.

We were an odd couple of mourners, Pete and I, with just a single hand between us to dab the tears. The Iraq war had taken the other three, still leaving us better off than the nineteen-year-old buried beneath our feet in the red earth of Mobile, Alabama.

A young soldier and a weathered journalist, we certainly had our own wounds to lick, but we had lived. Living exacted a daily price in pain and angst, the dull ache of knowing how a few seconds or inches created the difference between us and the young man in the ground. Pete Damon was a thirty-one-year-old National Guard sergeant, fixing helicopters in Balad, Iraq, when a tire exploded in October 2003 and took his arms. In December 2003, I was riding through Baghdad as an embedded reporter in an army Humvee when a grenade landed, blew up, and tore off my right hand.

As Pete plunged the four flags into the wet ground, I thought of another pair of combat amputees, both living within a thousand-mile arc of Mobile. They too were spending this Memorial Day mourning comrades who fell in the killing fields of Iraq. The flags that Pete righted struck me as powerful symbols of survival, one for him, one for me, and one for each of the others.

In the little town of Asheboro, North Carolina, Corporal Bobby Isaacs hobbled onto the pulpit of the Bailey's Grove Baptist Church. Nearly eighteen months earlier, he'd been given up for dead after a roadside bomb exploded during his patrol in the northern Iraq city of Mosul. The fundamentalist congregation had invited Bobby to a special Memorial Day service that Sunday to give testimony on the loss of his two legs. But he focused instead on a higher cost of the December 2003 blast: the death of his squad leader, who had been sitting in the passenger seat of the Humvee.

"I was standing behind him," Bobby said, in a soft Carolina drawl. "If I'd been sitting, it would have killed me, too."

He stood uneasily on a pair of artificial legs, a departure from the wheelchair he usually got around in. No way he'd let a little pain keep him from honoring his squad leader's sacrifice. A patriotic southerner from a religious home, Bobby had found an ideal blend of duty and adventure in the army. Now, at twenty-four, the same age his buddy was when he died, he had literally to regain his footing. Bobby knew he had gotten the better end of the deal and wore a black metal bracelet to remind him of it. The dead man's name was engraved on it in silver.

Five hundred miles due west, Master Sergeant Luis Rodriguez brought his own Memorial Day presentation to church in Clarksville, Tennessee. He had downloaded from the Internet photos of soldiers at nearby Fort Campbell who had been killed in Iraq and burned them onto a CD. The thirty-five-year-old medic had come close to having his own picture displayed at a commemorative event like this one when his right leg was blown off in Mosul by a remote-controlled bomb in November 2003.

Rodriguez studied the photos projected on a large screen in the front of the chapel. He kept his composure until the pictures of men he recognized appeared. Then he rose from his seat and strode to the back of the room, taking wide swings with his prosthetic leg. He stood in the dark, covered his face, and wept.

The three soldiers had very different backgrounds, but I was the oddest of the lot—a fifty-eight-year-old Washington reporter who hated guns, scrutinized authority for a living, and avoided the draft during the Vietnam War. Yet fate had erased our differences. Over a fifty-day period in late 2003, all of us were seriously wounded in Iraq and sent to a place the world came to know as Amputee Alley: Ward 57 of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. No rank was recognized on the alley—not social class, wealth, age, religion, or race. We were all just gimps, fighting pain and fear.

For the public, the long corridor of our darkest days assumed an iconic status. Few news stories on the wounded missed Ward 57. Doonesbury moved in. So did politicians on the prowl for a sound bite. It became a Rorschach test of public opinion—to supporters of the war, the young amputees represented the price of freedom; to critics, they were the sacrificial lambs of misguided policy.

For me, Ward 57 was life at its lowest ebb. But it was also a place of renewal, a refuge where my three friends and I picked up what remained of our lives, never forgetting the alternative.

Copyright © 2006 by Michael Weisskopf. All rights reserved.

Table of Contents

Prologue     1
Toy Soldier     5
Ward 57     21
Cutting Time     43
Hooks and Hearts     67
Hornbook for the Handicapped     93
New Muscles     121
A Hero's Welcome     141
"Look Back, But Don't Stare"     167
Standing Up     191
Anniversary     209
The Unconscious Mind     231
The Prize     247
Notes     273
Acknowledgments     285
Index     291

Editorial Reviews

Reporter Weisskopf, at 58, was accompanying a patrol in Baghdad in 2003 when he picked up a grenade that flew into his Humvee. This book relates the consequences, beginning with a detailed account of a medic's emergency treatment of Weisskopf's shattered hand, his speedy transport to an aid station, helicopter flight to a front-line hospital, flight to the trauma center in Germany and, finally, to amputee Ward 57 of Washington's Walter Reed Hospital. Readers quickly learn that amputees make up 3% of Iraq's wounded-twice that of previous wars-thanks to the Kevlar helmets and sturdy body armor that protect all but the soldier's limbs from otherwise fatal explosions. Besides recounting his own successful recovery from the trauma of losing a hand, Weisskopf adds stories of three American soldiers who also endured months of torment before adjusting to new lives, though they were not necessarily typical. Other patients mentioned in passing do very badly. Pain is universal; many amputees suffer numerous operations and take narcotics for years. Modern prostheses are ingenious but heavy and difficult to use. Readers with a low tolerance for inspirational stories will still find plenty of technical and medical details of one tragic, little-publicized consequence of the Iraq war. (Oct. 3) Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

On December 10, 2003, Time senior correspondent Weisskopf was seriously injured while on assignment as an embedded reporter in Iraq, losing his right hand when attempting to toss a grenade from the army vehicle in which he was riding. He underwent treatment and outpatient rehabilitation in Ward 57 of Walter Reed Medical Center, the wing for army war amputees (a waiver allowed him to be treated there although he was not in the armed forces). While Weisskopf could have written an interesting book simply about his own experience, he has written an even better one by including accounts of three soldiers undergoing treatment at the same time. As part of all of their stories, he discusses such issues as "phantom pain" and how medication becomes the only way to deal with it, the stress and strain of having to adjust to the loss of limbs, as well as how to reenter regular life. He writes of how the soldiers had to deal with the military bureaucracy and how the military influenced each of them. Weisskopf describes the arc of each soldier's experience, ultimately showing how each is coping now. Unlike much of the current literature on the Iraq war, little of this book discusses the political aspects of the conflict. Weisskopf recognizes his own experience in that of the soldiers, making for a wonderful story of tragedy and recovery. Strongly recommended for both public and academic libraries. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/1/06.] Joel W. Tscherne, Cleveland P.L. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

Stark, candid memoir by a Time correspondent severely injured while covering the war in Iraq. A hand grenade tossed into the back of his Humvee turned Weisskopf into a casualty of war. Flinging the explosive out of the vehicle, he lost his right hand and embarked on the odyssey toward his recovery, searingly chronicled in these pages. With high-level help, Weisskopf ended up at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Ward 57 for amputees. There, he found himself uncomfortably trapped between his journalistic detachment and some who wanted to put him on center stage, hailing him for saving others in the attack. He struggled with rehab and with the injury's impact on his career. This may not be an easy story to read, but it is only one story among many, he reminds us. Describing the backgrounds and experiences of three soldiers also in Ward 57, juxtaposing the similar paths to recovery followed by each man, the author finds other voices and fresh perspectives. Weisskopf was the odd man out in this group: much older, a civilian, a journalist. Haunted by the uncertainty of his actions on that fateful day, he delivers a work of fluctuating tone-sometimes clinical, sometimes cynical, sometimes critical. The real heroes, Weisskopf would have it, are the medical staff, the soldiers convalescing alongside him and the friends and family members who support them all. The journalist has a job to do here, and he does it well. Ward 57 becomes a metaphor for the horrors of war and the triumph of the human will. An unflinching depiction of the aftermath of war and of the spirit of those who live through it.

Kirkus Reviews

This book is a modern masterpiece. The spirit, wit, and searing honesty that have marked Michael Weisskopf's life and career as a world-class correspondent shine through on every page as we follow his passage among the amputees of Ward 57. Blood Brothers is an unforgettable account of what happened, physically and emotionally, to Weisskopf and these men after the war.” —David Maraniss, author of They Marched into Sunlight

“Blood Brothers is unsparing, unsentimental, and unflinching, a story of pain but also a tale of redemptive courage. Michael Weisskopf has written a book unlike any other to emerge from the long war in Iraq. Read it and weep.” —Rick Atkinson, Author of In the Company of Soldiers and An Army at Dawn

“This is a real war story. It is not about victory or defeat, or the heroism of men in combat, it is about loss and pain and learning to live with a body terribly maimed. The story of Time correspondent Michael Weisskopf's grave injury and survival parallels the experience of many soldiers: He went to Iraq with a specific short-term task, and came home with his body and his life permanently altered. Like the fine writer he is, Weisskopf understands that parallel, which is what makes Blood Brothers something much more than a story of injury and survival.” —Mark Bowden, author of Guests of the Ayatollah and Black Hawk Down

“Walter Reed's Ward 57 is often in the news, but always viewed from the outside in. Blood Brothers gets it right because its author actually shared in the torments of the amputee warriors he befriended during his stay. Weisskopf's story is theirs, with the unyielding pain, the acute sense of loss, and the deep need to recover a personal narrative that makes that loss bearable.” —Garry Trudeau

From the Publisher