Angels amoung us

In 2005 my son, Matt, was wounded while deployed in Iraq. (See Four words that stop you in your tracks) The Humvee he was driving hit a land mine. Matt’s feet were very badly wounded and he would eventually have his left leg amputated. His most serious injury was caused when shrapnel severed the artery in his left arm in three places. They did the life saving arterial graph in-country and then air lifted him to Germany.

Just after we were reunited and he was getting settled into his room at Brook Army Medical Hospital in San Antonio, I helped him go through the backpack that had traveled with him from Germany. There was basically everything in there that you need when you’ve been evacuated from a war zone with nothing. There was shaving stuff, toothbrush, tooth paste, socks, shorts, underwear, t-shirts, a comb, deodorant, even a phone card. It was really impressive. It was a plain black backpack with no markings. I asked Matt where he got it, thinking the Army had provided it somewhere along the way.

Not so. He told me he had been laying on a stretcher for a couple of hours in the back of a bus waiting to loaded onto the plane that would bring him back to the states. He was cold, (January in Germany) and his back was hurting from laying flat for so long. His wounds weren’t too bad since they had him medicated for that. He said he was laying there wishing he had a pillow and a blanket. All of a sudden he heard his name being called, then there was a lady with long blonde hair and a German accent standing beside him. She gave him a pillow covered in good wishes from a high school in Texas, a beautiful quilt made by a Navy family in Virginia, and the backpack. Then she was gone, and he hadn’t been able to understand a word she said. He said, “It’s like she was an angel of something!”

As I went through all the items in the backpack and got to the bottom, I found a business card for someone named Willie, from an organization called Soldiers’ Angles. There was an email address for Willie and a website for Soldiers’ Angels. I look up at Matt and said, “You’re right, it was an angel. Something called a Soldiers’ Angel.”

I checked out the website, www.soldiersangels.org, and learned it was started by the mother of two soldiers, Patti Patton-Bader. One of her sons, while deployed in Iraq, asked her to write letters to some of his men who had never received mail. She went a step farther and recruited her family and friends to help. Today Soldiers’ Angels have over 250,000 volunteers! The organization has many programs that help to care for deployed and wounded soldiers, and their families, as well as veterans.

All through Matt’s recovery, which took a year, the Angels were there to bolster us up with cards and letters, little packages and visits. It was amazing that people we had never met, and knew nothing about, would care so much for us. I still hear from Angels asking about Matt. (He’s doing great!)

I also sent an email to Willie, who turned out to be a German national and volunteer at Landstuhl Army Medical Center. Through the years we have continued to stay in touch and I have become a member of Soldiers’ Angels. Over the years I have adopted more than a dozen soldiers, written to many more, and recruited other Angels. Even after all these years, and all the people I have talked to, I’m still in wonder over the amazing work our Angels do, and the joy with which they do it!!

So keep in mind, where ever you go, and whatever you do, you never know when an Angel might touch your life.

Four words that stop you in your tracks

And the winner is…
Will you marry me?
We’re having a baby.
Oh shit, damn it!

There are a lot of four word combinations that can impact your life in very significant ways. The particular combination I’m talking about just happened to be, “There’s been an incident.”

If you just sit a minute and imagine all the situations in which this phrase could come up, you will undoubtlably think of minor occurrences such as spilled milk, or dire events like dropping the atomic bombs. For me these words came over the phone one evening in January 2005. They came completely unexpectedly.

Calling back on a message left on my answering machine, I reached to Department of the Army calling about my son, Matt, who was at that time deployed in Kirkuk, Iraq. I wasn’t stressed when I called, thinking it was another call to invite me to a family-of-the-troops function. Then came THE words… “There’s been an incident.”

You hear how a person’s mind goes blank and they can’t grab onto anything at times like this. That didn’t exactly happen to me. Instead, as the sergeant was talking and trying to explain things, my mind started racing with all the horrible possibilities: death, capture, impending death. Then came the four word combinations that brought some measure of relief:

No, he’s not dead.
No, he’s not dying.
He’s not a prisoner.

Over the next year Matt went through countless surgeries, including the amputation of his left leg, and much physical therapy. There were ups and downs, and steady improvement. Life is now back to normal, what ever that is, and Matt is looking at the possibility of being deployed again. Something he is up for, but I’m not sure I am.

I’d rather hear some four work combinations from him that go something like this:

She’s a great girl.
We are getting married.
We’re having a baby.
They lived happily ever after. (Ok, that is five words, but I could live with it.)