Walter Reed to Close

Walter Reed to Close

WASHINGTON - Siding with the Pentagon, the base-closing commission voted Thursday to shut down the Army's historic Walter Reed hospital and move about 20,000 defense workers miles away from their offices just outside the nation's capital.

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Double amputee feels generosity of a California town

Double amputee feels generosity of a California town
Group gives 4-year scholarship to soldier who lost his legs in Iraq

By Lisa Burgess, Stars and Stripes
Mideast edition, Sunday, August 21, 2005

ARLINGTON, Va. — When Sgt. Manuel Mendoza hopped into the M113 armored personnel carrier on Oct. 3, 2004, he thought he was in for a quick delivery trip to Baghdad’s Sadr City.

What he didn’t know was that he was on the edge of a new journey.

Mendoza was serving his fifth year in the Army as an engineer with the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment’s 58th Combat Engineering Co. when he made that trip. Thirty days later, he woke up at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington to learn that an insurgent’s roadside bomb had taken both his legs.


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"My boot was lying in my lap."

"I looked down and my left leg, below my knee, was pointing back up at me," said the 21-year-old reservist with Jackson-based Echo Battery, 2nd Battalion, 14th Marine Regiment. "My boot was lying in my lap."

-Aaron Rice

A Time To Heal

A Time To Heal

A Siouxland soldier and his family are recovering from a devastating explosion in Iraq. Back in June, Private Second Class Bart Tucker, originally from Sioux City, was on his way back from the Syrian border in Iraq when he missed an improvised explosive device outside of Baghdad. Driving a Humvee, Bart hit a second device He's now recovering at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington DC.

Lynda Tucker remembers little about the time span between when she found out her 19-old year son Bart was injured in Iraq on June 23 and when she finally got to see him on June 28.

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Bart Tucker

A place to start again

A place to start again
Wounded Tennessee vet readies himself for an altered life

By MICHAEL E. RUANE, The Washington Post
August 8, 2005

WASHINGTON -- The packing boxes scattered throughout Room 454 are filling with books, videos, clothes and gifts -- the amazing amount of things that piled up during eight months at the hotel. They will be shipped home first.
A few days later, Trish Autery will gather her suitcases, take some tissues to dry her tears and walk out the door that has a tiny American flag hung near its number.

And that will leave just Marine Lance Cpl. Ryan Autery, 20, the son she has cared for all these months, to pack what remains, close the door for the final time and catch a plane home, from Washington to Nashville.

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Seminar for hurt GIs outlines their options

Seminar for hurt GIs outlines their options
Web Posted: 08/07/2005 12:00 AM CDT
Sig Christenson
Express-News Military Writer

IRVING — Anesi "Maverick" Tuufuli talks of a glorious past in the lobby of an upscale hotel, the stump of his amputated left leg aching from all the walking he did the night before at a Texas Rangers game.

He once was "the legend," the fastest loader in his 1st Armored Division artillery battalion, able to fire two rounds in 45 seconds - half the time required by the Army - but has come to a weekend seminar in Dallas knowing this is a closed chapter of his young life.

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Up Close: Recovering from the wounds of war

Up Close: Recovering from the wounds of war
By Ron Trevino

As the American casualties continue to mount in Iraq, more and more injured soldiers are finding themselves at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio -- one of the military's top hospitals.

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Wrestler a legend among hurt troops

Wrestler a legend among hurt troops
By Thom Loverro
The Washington Times
Published August 3, 2005
WASHINGTON -- Mick Foley is known in professional wrestling as "The Hardcore Legend," one of the wildest, funniest and most violent men in the history of the business.

In the corridors of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington and the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, though, Foley is better known for a hard-core commitment to wounded veterans of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Foley has visited troops at the hospitals or made other trips for the United Service Organization (USO) in and around Washington 20 times in a 20-month period. Last night, for example, Foley took 11 injured servicemen to the Washington Nationals' game against the Los Angeles Dodgers at RFK Stadium.

[Alex Nicholl]

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Coalition Soldier helps Iraqi amputees

Coalition Soldier helps Iraqi amputees
August 3, 2005

INTERNATIONAL ZONE, BAGHDAD, Iraq (Army News Service, Aug. 3, 2005) - It is not unusual for Staff Sgt. Chris Cummings to have plaster stains on his desert camouflage uniform and boots, especially after visiting amputee patients in the prosthetic clinic at the Iraqi Forum and Convention Center.

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The Iraq Infection

Matthew Herper, 08.02.05, 6:00 AM ET

NEW YORK - Military doctors are fighting to contain an outbreak of a potentially deadly drug-resistant bacteria that apparently originated in the Iraqi soil. So far at least 280 people, mostly soldiers returning from the battlefield, have been infected, a number of whom contracted the illness while in U.S. military hospitals.


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[Sean Locker]

Army Medical Center Gets Rehab Center

Army Medical Center Gets Rehab Center
San Antonio Express | August 01, 2005
WASHINGTON - A $30 million physical rehabilitation center for combat veterans will be built at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, officials announced Thursday.

The public-private venture will be funded by the nonprofit Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund and designed and managed by the U.S. armed services and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Officials said the Center for the Intrepid, the National Armed Forces Physical Rehabilitation Center, will be a state-of-the-art facility located at Fort Sam Houston.

"We are committed to building the $30 million Center for the Intrepid as quickly as possible to provide for the critical needs of America's wounded and disabled military personnel," said Arnold Fisher, honorary chairman of the Intrepid Fallen Heroes Fund.

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