Fighting to return to normal 11/28/04)

Fighting to return to normal
BY MICHAEL MARTZ
TIMES-DISPATCH STAFF WRITER
Sunday, November 28, 2004

WALTER REED ARMY MEDICAL CENTER, Washington The physical-therapy room was filling up when Dean W. Schwartz walked in, a slight hitch in his gait from the blue titanium leg fitted to his left thigh.

The leg was temporary. So was his time here, six months after a rocket-propelled grenade blew off his leg on a bomb-pocked road in Mosul, in northern Iraq.

Sgt. Robert Faulk motioned toward an empty cot next to an older veteran with graying temples and no right leg. "You can have a spot here if you like, next to Superman," Faulk said.

RELATED
Soldier offers up-close view of deadly attack
Surviving another's sacrifice
Fog of war led to severe depression
Fighting to return to normal

Schwartz's T-shirt read "Paradise Lounge," a memento of a trip to San Diego for a triathlon featuring "challenged athletes." He's one of them now, a wounded veteran learning to run on an artificial leg and carry on with his life. In just a few days, he will have completed the New York City Marathon on a hand-cranked cycle in a little more than 2 hours, 46 minutes.

The physical-therapy room at Walter Reed is one place where the sacrifice of war comes home. Here, the scope of it is revealed in the soldiers who return wounded and changed - more than 9,000, according to the Pentagon's estimate. An untold number return with their bodies whole, but their minds in peril, their hearts in darkness.

Here, the wounds are apparent. One veteran hobbled the length of the room slowly on crutches. His lower right leg was gone. His mangled left foot was set in a cage-like brace.

"Oh, that's so hard," the man whispered to the therapist trailing him.

This is the world that cartoonist Garry Trudeau studied firsthand and depicted in the "Doonesbury" saga of B.D., who, like Schwartz, lost a leg in an RPG attack in Iraq. In fact, Schwartz met Trudeau more than once in the amputee ward and physical therapy department at Walter Reed.

The mood, though, is more like a locker room than a hospital. The staff stays upbeat, and so do the guys, some of them double-amputees, all of them sweating out their exercise routines. The humor can be rough.

The older guy next to Schwartz yells at a teasing orderly, "You know I'll get up and beat you with this stump!"

Schwartz is 22. He wrestled and played football in high school in Charlotte County. He kayaked and climbed mountains in college in Wise County.

He's ready to get back to something like normal. When Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld visited him in the amputee ward at Walter Reed, Schwartz told him, "I can't change what happened. I'm going forward. I'm going back to college."

But Schwartz also knows that the world outside Walter Reed won't always understand him the way the people inside do.

"You've got people [here] you can relate to," he said. "It's kind of hard when you leave. . . . Everybody back home doesn't know about all this stuff."

One day after the presidential election, Walter Reed had treated 194 amputees since the beginning of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Based on the Soviet Union's experience in Afghanistan two decades ago, the hospital was bracing for as many as 500 to 1,000.

But that was before the U.S. assault on the Iraqi insurgent stronghold of Fallujah and the counterattacks in other parts of the country, including Mosul, where Schwartz's company, part of the Virginia National Guard's 276th Engineer Battalion, is stationed.

Four members of the 276th, including one in his company, suffered minor injuries recently during attacks in and around Mosul. Soldiers in the battalion have received 26 Purple Hearts since arriving in Iraq in March.

U.S. military and veterans hospitals are "not prepared right now," said his mother, Deanna Schwartz, from their home near Keysville in Southside Virginia. "They've never had this many coming home wounded instead of dead."

Her son probably would have been among the dead if he had received this wound in Vietnam, she said. He probably would have bled to death. As it happened, he needed five units of blood and a heroic effort by the men in his platoon to survive.

Schwartz was wounded on May 8. His platoon, part of B Company, was fixing a road that had been cratered by a remote-controlled bomb. Two soldiers had been killed in that explosion.

That wasn't a good omen. Neither was the absence of the Iraqi work crew that was supposed to meet them there. "They never showed up," Schwartz said. "They obviously knew something was going to happen."

Normally, Schwartz operated the machine gun on the 5-ton armored truck. He had switched places with Eric Turner, a Guardsman from St. Paul in Southwest Virginia.

Schwartz thinks the grenade was fired at the truck from a junkyard near the road. "Nobody saw it coming," he said. "Nobody heard it coming."

The explosion ripped open the side of the truck and blew out Schwartz's right eardrum. The grenade sheared off his left leg below the knee and peppered his right forearm with shrapnel.

The heat of the blast was so intense that it cauterized and deadened the nerves in his shattered leg. Initially, he didn't feel much pain. He even tried to stand up to respond in case of small-arms fire.

Turner was hit with shrapnel and couldn't stand. Timothy "TJ" Richey, a former Midlothian High School football star and classmate of Schwartz at the University of Virginia's College at Wise, jumped into the truck and manned the gun.

The driver, Cpl. Bobby Hall of Richlands, was hit, too. He later told Schwartz that he blacked out. Somehow, though, he made the 20-minute trip to the field hospital in eight minutes.

Meanwhile, Schwartz's comrades were working to save his life. He remembers fumbling with the bandages from his kit. Sgt. James Spurlock, a Big Stone Gap resident who wasn't even supposed to be on the mission, "slapped the bandage out of my hand and took his belt off," he recalled.

Spurlock cinched the belt around Schwartz's leg. Another U.Va.-Wise classmate, Joel Williamson, who joined the Guard the same day in early 2002, worked on the leg as they drove.

"I was telling [Spurlock], I was a little sleepy," Schwartz said. "He said, 'You're not going to sleep.'"

In Keysville, Deanna Schwartz woke suddenly at 4 a.m., about the same time of the attack, eight hours ahead in Mosul. "All I said was, 'God be with my boy,'" she said.

Dean is one of six children in a military family. His father, Ed Schwartz Jr., spent 20 years in the Navy. One brother, Ed Schwartz III, or "Trey," is in the Navy. Another brother, Kenneth, was in the Marines. The four of them had their picture taken together in uniform last Christmas, before Dean left for Fort Dix, N.J., on his way to Iraq.

The day after Dean was wounded, the Schwartz family was together, celebrating Deanna's new master's degree in English from Longwood University. It was Mother's Day and her 91-year-old father was visiting from Hampton.

The phone rang. Ed Jr. answered. It was Dean, calling from Kuwait.

"All of a sudden, I saw my husband's face drop," Deanna Schwartz said.

Dean told his father that he had been hit the day before but "90 percent of him was all right," his mother said. When his father asked about the "other 10 percent," Dean replied, "It's still in Iraq."

. . .

Dean Schwartz walked along the 50-yard line to midfield at Carl Smith Stadium at U.Va.-Wise on the first Saturday of October, homecoming weekend. TJ Richey walked next to him, home on furlough.

They were two of the 24 students honored by the college for service in Iraq and Afghanistan. Three members of the football team, including Richey, were among the names read.

In the stands, Deanna and Ed Schwartz couldn't hold back the tears. "That was rough," Ed Schwartz said afterward.

They had good reason to cry. Dean had walked to midfield without a cane, the first time he had walked unaided since losing his leg in May. He just had left Walter Reed Army Medical Center on leave after almost five months of surgery, recovery and rehabilitation.

The grenade had taken his leg off below the knee. Doctors at Walter Reed removed the knee to the thigh. They fitted him with a computerized artificial leg, a temporary measure until what was left of his real leg became stable enough for a final prosthesis.

Dean and TJ's homecoming was emotional for the school, too. Many of its students are members of the National Guard. Most of them need financial aid; many are the first of their family to attend college.

Guard service is one way to pay for school and one reason that, despite the financial need, U.Va.-Wise has the lowest average debt per student on graduation of any liberal-arts college in the country, according to rankings by U.S. News & World Report.

That's why Schwartz joined the Guard on Feb. 11, 2002, as the country prepared for war in Afghanistan against the terrorists who had struck with such devastating success exactly five months earlier. His tuition would be paid, as well as part of his room and board.

His best friend, Andy Corbett of Poquoson, and Joel Williamson, who later helped save his life, joined the same day. Another classmate, Todd Winstanley, was supposed to be with him but his car broke down; he joined three days later, on Valentine's Day.

Traditionally, service in the Guard requires camp in the summer and one weekend of service a month. Members of the Guard usually help manage natural disasters - floods, fire, and hurricanes, such as Isabel in September 2003.

"This is called the National Guard, not the International Guard," Deanna Schwartz said.

She worries that cutbacks have left the military without enough people for the jobs facing them abroad. She worries about a "back-door draft" that is putting reservists in harm's way in foreign wars.

"I think the National Guard is going in a different direction now than it ever did before," she said. "I think they need to prepare the families."

Good information was hard to get for the Schwartz family after they learned of Dean's injury. His mother knew one of his lungs had collapsed and he was running a high fever in Germany, but said she ran into a wall because of medical-privacy law.

They found out indirectly that Dean was being flown to Andrews Air Force Base near Washington for treatment at Walter Reed. When he landed at Andrews, four days after being wounded, his mother said he was listed as still being in Mosul.

"Parents are going in blind," she said. "We were told, do not show up at the hospital until you get permission. . . . We went anyway."

The Schwartzes got to Walter Reed at midnight the day Dean arrived. The next day, Deanna Schwartz walked into the room, past the doctors to her smiling son. "Give me a hug, kid," she said.

. . .

Autumn had settled over Southside Virginia. In Charlotte County, the high school homecoming parade is a ritual combining school spirit and Halloween theatrics.

Dean Schwartz perched atop the back seat of a red convertible as the parade's grand marshal. While waiting for the parade to begin, he goofed with old friends from Randolph-Henry High School, most of them buddies from his wrestling team.

He was showing off his $80,000 artificial leg. "It turns around, too," he joked, twisting the leg, with sock and shoe, backwards and up. "Halloween's coming up. Maybe we can scare some people."

It wasn't all joking, though. "I never realized just how much my knee did," he told Josh Hunsucker, a wrestler who graduated from Randolph-Henry last year and expects to be deployed abroad next spring with his Air Force unit.

Schwartz had driven to Charlotte County from Walter Reed that day with his girlfriend, Emily Phipps of Abingdon. All week he had been learning to run on his new leg and preparing to become "a 22-year-old retiree."

At his home near Keysville, he showed Emily the wooden cabinets his grandfather had built. A blue banner was draped ceremoniously over a chair in the front room of the log cabin. Part of the script was in Arabic. In English, it said, "Operation Iraqi Freedom, March 1May 8, 2004. To Dean Schwartz, the last deep blue hero."

The banner, echoing a line from the movie "Armageddon," came from Andy Corbett, Schwartz's best friend and fraternity brother at U.Va.-Wise. Corbett is still in Iraq with the 276th Engineer Battalion. Schwartz talked to him not long ago, but the conversation was brief.

"After about 15 minutes, he said, 'I've got to go. The mortars are coming.'"

Schwartz has been making the rounds as a wounded war hero. He gave the Veterans Day speech at his old high school. A few days later, he spoke to the local American Legion chapter. He represented the National Guard at a ground-breaking ceremony this month for a new prosthetic and advanced-rehabilitation unit at Walter Reed.

He's met some interesting people along the way, such as "Doonesbury" cartoonist Trudeau and comedian Robin Williams. His mother has a priceless picture of the family laughing with actor Tom Hanks after he sat on a whoopee cushion that Schwartz slipped into his chair at Walter Reed. He's been honored at the national headquarters of Wal-Mart, his old employer, where he met Hollywood stars Antonio Banderas and Melanie Griffith.

But Schwartz is getting tired of the attention and the demands, the hurrying and the waiting. "I'm looking forward to staying in one place for a little while," he said during one of his visits to Walter Reed.

He's trying to resume his college education. He has finished only three semesters because of two Army deployments (the first resulted in a five-month stay at Fort Eustis). He needs to complete work on four courses to be ready for next semester. He has bought a trailer in Wise and started making it home.

"It's frustrating," his mother said. "He wants to get back . . . to normal life. For Dean, the college is normal life."

After much paper-shuffling, Schwartz retired from the Army and the Guard on Nov. 6. He'll receive 60 percent of his active-duty pay while waiting for the Veterans Affairs system to assess him and establish a new level of disability pay.

His mother worries about the stress and trauma that may lurk beneath his placid, imperturbable surface. She has noticed that his temper is shorter. He's less open to chatting and prone to the occasional fit of panic. He's tired.

"I'm kind of backing off and letting him do what he wants. He needs me to back off now."

The man who makes and fits the artificial legs, Dr. Dennis E. Clark, said Schwartz will come through the ordeal better than most.

Clark, owner of an Iowa-based prosthetic practice, has spent four-day weeks at Walter Reed for more than a year, working with Schwartz and others who have lost arms and legs to combat wounds.

"He gets it," Clark said of Schwartz. "He's got the physical, mental, and emotional capacity to manage his way through this.

"He will have no constraints in his life."


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Guard units
Virginia Army National Guard active federal deployments serving overseas

About 179 soldiers from the 3647th Maintenance Company entered active federal service on Dec. 7, 2003 and are serving in Iraq. Unit hometowns are Blackstone and Richmond.
About 525 soldiers from the 276th Engineer Battalion entered active federal service on Dec. 18, 2003 and are serving in Iraq. Unit hometowns are: Headquarters and Headquarters Company, Richmond; Company A, Powhatan County; Company B, Richlands; and Company C, West Point.
About 25 soldiers from the 54th Field Artillery Brigade entered active federal service on Feb. 29 and are serving in Afghanistan. Unit hometown is Virginia Beach.
About 570 soldiers of 3rd Battalion, 116th Infantry entered active federal service on March 1 and are serving in Afghanistan. Unit home towns are: Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 3rd Battalion, 116th Infantry, Winchester; Company A, Manassas; Company B, Woodstock and Warrenton; Company C, Leesburg.
Nine soldiers from Joint Force Headquarters-Virginia entered active federal service on June 22 and are serving in Afghanistan. The unit hometown is Blackstone. Virginia Army National Guard units that have deployed and returned from active federal service
About 350 soldiers from Headquarters, 29th Infantry Division (Light), 224th Aviation, and 229th Engineer Battalion returned in April 2002 from Bosnia-Herzegovina, where they participated in the NATO peacekeeping mission in the Balkans. Unit hometowns are 29th Infantry Division, Fort Belvoir; 224th Aviation, Sandston; and 229th Engineer Battalion, Fredericksburg.
70 Soldiers of Company B, 3rd Battalion, 20th Special Forces Group returned from Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in November 2002. Unit hometown is Fort A.P. Hill, Bowling Green.
Four soldiers of the Engineer Brigade, 28th Division served in Bosnia-Herzegovina in support of NATO peacekeeping operations in the Balkans from November 2002 through April 2003. Unit hometown is Fort A. P. Hill.
Five soldiers from 2nd Battalion, 224th Aviation deployed to Bosnia-Herzegovina in November 2002 and were released from duty in June 2003. Unit hometown is Sandston.
Seven soldiers of the Virginia Army National Guard Data Processing Unit served in Kuwait in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. They returned to their home station in September 2003. Unit hometown is Manassas.
About 325 soldiers of 2nd Battalion, 116th Infantry were mobilized in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in November 2002. After completing post-mobilization training at Fort Bragg, N. C. they deployed to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. They returned to their home stations in October 2003. Unit hometowns are Lynchburg, Charlottesville, Lexington and Harrisonburg.
Eight soldiers from Detachment 26, Operational Support Airlift Command entered active federal service on March 3, 2003 and served in Kuwait. The unit returned to its home station October 2003. Unit hometown is Sandston.
About 35 soldiers from the 1030th Engineer Battalion entered active federal service on March 15, 2003 and served in Iraq until it was released from active federal service in January 2004. Unit hometown is Gate City.
About 170 soldiers from the 1032nd Transportation Company deployed to their mobilization station at Fort Eustis on Feb. 10, 2003, and served in Iraq. The unit was released from active federal service in April 2004. Unit hometowns are Gate City and Bristol.
About 120 soldiers from the 229th Military Police Company entered active federal service on Feb. 10, 2003 and served in Kuwait and Iraq. The unit was released from active federal service in April 2004. Unit hometown is Virginia Beach.
Virginia Air National Guard active federal deployments

About 45 airmen of the 192nd Fighter Wing and the 200th Weather Flight are deployed at locations throughout the United States and around the world in support of Operation Noble Eagle, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Air Expeditionary Force operations. Unit hometown is Sandston. Virginia Air National Guard units that have deployed and returned from active federal service
About 190 airmen of the 192nd Fighter Wing, completed a 45-day overseas deployment to Al Udeid Air Base, Qatar, and returned to their home station in Sandston on Oct. 20, 2003.
About 115 airmen of the 203rd Red Horse Flight stationed in Virginia Beach entered active federal service in March 2003 and deployed to Iraq. The unit returned to its home station in October 2003.

Contact Michael Martz at (804) 230-4952 or mmartz@timesdispatch.com


This story can be found at: http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%2FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031779385948&path=!news&s=1045855934842