Cheating Grim Death

Defence & Arms
Cheating Grim Death
By Nancy Shute, U.S. News 20/11/04
Nov 21, 2004, 09:21

LANDSTUHL, GERMANY--"Mom, is that you? I'm alive."

When Pat Coleman heard those words in a midnight phone call, she knew her son had been wounded in Iraq.
David Coleman, a 20-year-old Marine lance corporal, was calling home on a satellite phone to Butte, Mont., from a hospital in Baghdad. He didn't know how badly he was injured. Only later would he learn that he'd nearly bled to death, that the improvised explosive device that ripped open his armored humvee on September 23 had shattered both his legs, and that he had only a fifty-fifty shot at not having his right leg amputated. At that point, the young marine knew only that he was about to be evacuated to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany and that everyone said if you made it to Landstuhl, you were going to be OK.

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