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| Injured veterans say the war was worth it |
| 2004-03-24 |
| WASHINGTON—When they arrive at the private banquet room at the back of Hal Kastor’s downtown restaurant, the co-owner stands behind the bar offering a personal, gregarious welcome to each one. There’s a big hello for Larry Gill, a muscular 43-year-old Alabaman with close-cropped hair, a greeting for Chuck Bartles, 26, a hulk of a man with a shaved head from a little town in South Dakota, kind words for Susan Sonnheim, a wisp of a woman from Franklin, Wisc. But an interloper at the weekly private gathering at Fran O’Brien’s Stadium Steakhouse treads more cautiously. In greeting Staff-Sgt. Gill, you ask him to sit, so as to relieve the strain on his left leg, the back of which was blown away, arteries, nerves and all, in a Baghdad grenade attack last October. To shake Sgt. Bartles’ hand, the only one he has left, one must reach awkwardly beyond the prosthesis where his right arm used to be. An explosive device cost Bartles that limb in Baquba last fall. And in your chat with 45-year-old Sgt. Sonnheim, you must remember the bomb that tossed her frail body five metres through the air in Baghdad — a month to the day when Bartles watched his arm dangling by a shred of muscle — and left her without normal hearing and blind in her left eye. These are the men and women of Walter Reed Army Hospital, some of the most badly wounded of the more than 3,200 American casualties during a year of war in Iraq. One night last week — the anniversary of the Iraq invasion — no one among the 50 or so gathered at Kastor’s restaurant was marking the milestone. As they clasped beers in hooks where once there were hands and ambled about on artificial limbs, prosthetics supplanted politics as the topic of conversation. These men and women know they fought in a war that has split this country, but they’d go back in a second. They believe they were there for the right reasons, and they believe those opposed to the war can distinguish between obvious valour and anti-war values. They harbour no bitterness. "It wasn’t the United States government or President Bush who set off that bomb," says Bartles, a civil affairs specialist with degrees in Eastern European studies and Russian and a future as a lawyer. Before that, however, he’ll have to deal with troubling cysts on his face and the rebuilding of a crushed cheekbone, the result of bomb blasts. Kastor, a helicopter door-gunman in the Vietnam war, throws his restaurant open to these vets every Friday, in a show of solidarity. "Walter Reed is their assigned post now," Kastor said. "Right now a lot of these guys are feeling bad. "I hate it when I see this war get politicized. They begin to think they lost an arm or a leg for nothing when they hear that kind of talk." ....... "Their eyes were just blood red with hate," Gill says, remembering the Iraqi protesters he’d been assigned to control the night an unseen grenade changed his life. He says he should have died that night, but his thoughts were with his wife Leah and three sons. "I refused to leave my children fatherless," he said. Sonnheim, the first Wisconsin woman to receive the Purple Heart, saved four Iraqi policeman the night her life was shattered. "I’d love to go back," she said. "My company is there." |
| Posted by:Chuck Simmins |
| #2 God bless them and God bless Kastor for taking care of our own. |
| Posted by: Cyber Sarge (VRWC CA Chapter) 2004-03-24 6:20:48 PM |
| #1 I can't thank these soldiers enough for what they have done. They exemplefy what is best about this country. I will do all that I can to support them in the years ahead. God bless them. |
| Posted by: remote man 2004-03-24 4:23:57 PM |