The Wounds Of War

The severe head injuries to ABC anchor Bob Woodruff and his cameraman, Doug Vogt, exposed one of the signature wounds of the Iraq war — traumatic brain injury, mostly from roadside bombs.

A new generation of severely wounded veterans is now emerging among us, their brains battered, their arms and legs blown off. Many would have died in earlier wars but survived in Iraq thanks to better battlefield medicine.

Correspondent Mike Wallace talks to some of the most resilient of these veterans, who now must plan a future completely different from the one they had expected when they signed up.

While on patrol, a roadside bomb blew off Melissa's left leg.

"It didn't register that my leg was gone. I just saw blood on my leg. So I said, 'I'm hurt. Something happened to my leg. I think I'm hurt,'" she remembers.

Melissa says her leg felt as if it was burning. When a tourniquet was put on to stop the bleeding, she says she really felt the pain. "And that's also when I kinda thought to myself, 'OK, maybe something's really wrong,'" she says.

Her husband arrived while she was undergoing surgery.. He was also a soldier serving in Iraq.

"I looked at him and I said, 'I think something happened to my leg.' And he just held my hand and he said, 'It's gone. Your leg is gone,'" Melissa recalls. "And that's when I found out."

That was also when she realized she couldn't be a soldier anymore.

"And you wonder, 'Like what's my life gonna be like now?'" Melissa says. "Every amputee at one point or another has to make a decision. Do you live in the past and wonder why me and all that kinda thing? Or do you just accept it and move on? And I think I accepted it really early on, that I'm not gonna get my leg back. So I'm just gonna go on."

Melissa is full of enthusiasm for her country, her life … and now, her new leg.

Her prosthetic leg goes all the way up to her hip. Getting her new leg helped Melissa find a new calling: She is studying to be a prosthetist, to help other amputees.

"So when someone first gets injured and loses a limb, they'll come into my office and I will fit them for their prosthetic arm or leg, whatever it may be," she says. "Before I got hurt, I didn't even know what a prosthetist was."

Melissa says she now hopes to inspire other amputees. "You're a soldier, you get injured and your life doesn't end. You can have a prosthetic leg. And you can get up every day, put your leg on, have a normal day."

"Normal" for Melissa means swimming five days a week. Many amputees stay active to prove to themselves that losing a limb cannot hold them back.

Another vet, Brian Neuman, lost his left arm in Iraq. This winter he learned how to snowboard. A year ago he was leading his unit in a battle in Fallujah when he was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

"It hit me basically right at my left elbow. It took my arm completely, right off. I got out of the vehicle, holding my left arm in my right hand," Brian remembers. "I got out running with my arm in my hand. And when something like this happens, you know that you have about a minute of just dust and light and heat. And you know your brain goes through, 'OK. Something hit us.' And then you say, 'I'm alive.'"

Medics raced Brian to the hospital, where he had to face the fact that his special ops days were over.

"That's the absolutely hardest part," Brian says. "When you when you first get injured, I mean, literally you're taking a soldier who's used to being out fighting, going every day. Leading his men. And suddenly he will no longer do that. First, you go through the frustration of the fact that your guys are still over there fighting. And you aren't. You actually feel a little guilty — and then it sets in."

But the guilt is gone and Brian has a new career working for a nonprofit group called the "Wounded Warrior Project." He helps other wounded vets adjust to their new lives overcoming their wounds.

"That's my new focus," he says. "It's like my new mission. It's like I'm in the military. And the guys behind me, the guys that I work with now, are my new family. Or they're my new unit."

Brian helped lead a wounded warriors ski trip where vets could develop their skills despite their disabilities.

Another Iraq amputee, Edward Wade, had his right arm blown off by a roadside bomb. But his worst injury is one you can't see: the bomb slammed shrapnel into his head, causing serious brain injuries.

Edward had been an expert skier, a parachute jumper, a born leader on whom others depended. Now he's dependent on his wife, Sarah.

The Pentagon has identified almost 2,000 serious brain injuries so far — five times the number of amputees.

Because roadside bombs blast flying chunks of metal into heads and helmets with horrific force, recovery for brain victims can be agonizingly slow. After two years, Edward still struggles to talk.

Getting back on his feet has been an ordeal. "From lying down, I sat up. … Sat up where I could be moved into a wheelchair. … And from the wheelchair, I slowly got to where I could stand up straight and start walking for a little while," he recalls.

And as Edward continues to improve, he hopes that he can help other wounded vets.

He says he wants to help the other vets move forward. "No one expects anyone to come back from the accident that I had," he says.

Sarah Wade recalls her husband's father asking a neurosurgeon, "So what you're saying is, he's a vegetable? And the man nodded yes."

"And that 'vegetable' was skiing in Colorado recently," she says.

Doctors also worried that another vet from Iraq, Jessica Clements, might be a vegetable after a roadside bomb shot shrapnel into three lobes of her brain.

Jessica had been a model in Akron, Ohio, when she left high school to join the Army. As a staff sergeant in Iraq, she spent her days driving fuel trucks.

"I remember days driving down the road thinking to myself, 'Is today the day I'm gonna get hit?" Or, 'Am I gonna get shot today?' And just praying, 'OK, keep us safe. Let us get where we need to go without any casualties,'" she explains.

Her luck ran out on May 5, 2004, when a bomb exploded under her truck, shooting shards of shrapnel – large and small – into her brain.

"I still have shrapnel that's remaining in my brain," she says. "This right portion here, you can see a little, the line … from where my skull was removed. The neurosurgeons physically cut the right portion of my skull and removed it."

The doctors removed a part of her skull because the swelling would have caused so much pressure that it could have killed her. They kept the right half of her skull off for four months, and for much of that time Jessica remained in a coma.

"They only gave me a two-percent chance of coming out of the coma and living, surviving," says Jessica. "Somebody has to be in that two percent, though. Why not me?"

She remembers enduring a "ridiculous amount" of pain along the way. "I hate to admit this, but there were days when I wondered to myself if I would have been better off had I not made it because I was in so much pain," she says.

Asked if she is still in pain, Jessica says, "Right now I have a shooting pain that's going from right above my ear over to this side. It's kind of going diagonally across. But it's nothing. I'm used to it."

The constant pain, sporadic seizures, and bouts of anger still can't compare with what she's already endured: re-learning how to walk and talk and more.

"Basically I had to relearn how to think again and how to figure things out. I did have to learn how to walk again," she explains. "One day I remember I sat back in bed and I moved my leg about an inch trying to get it up on the bed. I had only moved about an inch. But I had never been so happy before. I was just excited. Okay, great. It moved an inch. So that motivated me. Okay, tomorrow, I'm gonna try for two inches, see if I can get it going again."

Jessica says believes she survived for a reason and that she now knows what that reason is. "I believe that it's to help other people. So I decided to go into social work," she says.

"I would like to work for the VA or the DAV, the Disabled American Veterans association. So I can help other veterans. I'm still a soldier at heart," she says.

"I'm still a soldier. Even though I'm discharged from the Army—medically discharged, I'm always gonna be a soldier," Jessica says. "And I'm always gonna have that mentality. So if I can continue to help other soldiers, other veterans, that's what I really want to do."

What message would she like to send to other wounded vets?

"I would love to tell them just to not give up," she says. "And, no matter how bad your pain is, remember that tomorrow is a new day. Just keep that in mind, and just please stay positive. And you will get through this."

Despite the price they've paid, none of these vets question President Bush's decision to send American soldiers into Iraq.

Asked if America should be in Iraq, Edward Wade says, "Honestly, we should be there because the president has made that decision."

"I firmly believe that we are doing a very good thing to help the Iraqi people," says Brian Neuman.

"We need to finish our job. And to continue help stabilize the country," says Jessica Clements.

Melissa Stockwell says, "Time is gonna tell if the war is right or wrong. But I, for me, I think it was."

But you don't get that from everyone. Another vet, Tomas Young, told 60 Minutes that he wants to keep more soldiers from getting wounded in the first place. Tomas became an anti-war activist after he was paralyzed in Iraq. He was shot while riding through Baghdad in the back of a truck.

"I was shot underneath the left collarbone," he explains. "The bullet exited severed my spinal cord at about the chest high level."

Asked what it felt like, Tomas says, "I remember going completely numb and dropping my M16. I could remember seeing myself trying to move my hands. But at that at that moment in time, I couldn't move anything. I was just in shock. Then I figured I was probably going to be paralyzed. I spent the next few seconds trying to yell for anybody that was within earshot to take me out."

When he said "take me out," Tomas says he meant to end his life. "Make it to where I wasn't going to be paralyzed for the rest of my life. But unfortunately — or fortunately, depending on how you look at it — all that I could get out of my mouth was a very tiny hoarse whisper. And so nobody heard me."

Tomas says he is paralyzed from the nipple level down, but that he can move his arms completely fine.

Is he glad he is still alive?

"My body's not the most cooperative thing in the world to me anymore," he says. "But for the most part, yes, I'm glad I'm still alive. I have people around me who make me glad to be alive."

His wife, Brie, is especially glad Tomas is alive. The couple married after Tomas was paralyzed.

Asked why he joined the Army, Tomas says, "I called my recruiter on Sept. 13, 2001. Because I saw our president standing on the rubble of the World Trade Center with a megaphone saying that we were going to find the people that did it and smoke them out of their caves and all that rah rah. And so I wanted to go to Afghanistan to seek some form of retribution on the people that did this to us."

But instead of Afghanistan, he found himself in Iraq, which he considers the wrong war in the wrong place.

"I just don't think this war was necessary," he says.

Tomas also says speaking out against the war "helps to give me an outlet to get that the anger I feel from the war out."

He rejects the allegation that he is undermining our troops by criticizing the war.

"I have a brother who's over there right now," says Tomas. "It bothers me to think that people, I guess, try to undermine my patriotism and what not when I have a brother who's over there that I really don't want to see anything bad happen to."

"Had you not been shot, paralyzed, is it conceivable do you think that you wouldn't have been speaking out against the war?" Wallace asked.

From his wheelchair Thomas replied, "I have friends who died unnecessarily. In this war. So I would still speak out, although I probably wouldn't have as firm a leg to stand on, or a chair to sit in, if I hadn't been shot."
By Bob Anderson