Healing The Wounds Of War

This story originally aired on Feb. 12, 2006. It was updated and revised on May 28, 2006.

On this Memorial Day weekend, 60 Minutes takes another look at some young men and women — soldiers — who were severely wounded in action in Iraq. Most fell victim to roadside bombs, those lethal IEDs that battered their brains or blew off their arms and legs.

As Mike Wallace reports, many of them would have died in earlier wars. But they survived in Iraq thanks to better battlefield medicine. They also survived because of their remarkable resilience — their inner strength and determination to make the most of a future that's not at all what they'd 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.

"For just like literally three or four seconds I blacked out and I, it's very vivid still, what I remember," Melissa recalls. "It was pink and purple flowers. You know it was I remember for those couple seconds I was really happy. I was just so happy. And then I woke up being pulled out of the vehicle. It took me a couple of seconds to realize, you know, 'This is real. I'm not around pink and purple flowers.'"

They tried calling for a medivac, the helicopter that comes to pick up casualties. But the frequency wasn't working, and they couldn't get through.

So they had to drive her to the hospital — and while she underwent surgery, her husband arrived. 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. 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 recently got engaged.

"For the one thing that I have to be sad about, I have a thousand things to be happy about," he says. "Because it, this has really completely changed my life. I don't think I would have had the chance to work in the capacity that I do now, with soldiers who really need the help."

Brian helped lead a Wounded Warriors ski trip, during which vets could develop their skills despite their disabilities.

Another Iraq amputee, Edward Wade, was thrilled to be back on skis. A roadside bomb blew off his right arm 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.

"That's a very long process," says Sarah. "I think that's one of the things about brain injuries that people don't realize is [that] it's not like being an amputee where it can take a few months, it can take a year to get out and get working again. But a brain injury … I don't think people can fathom how long and what it takes to get back out there."

Out in public, people can be cruel. They get impatient when Edward is moving too slowly for them. Once when Edward was having trouble getting through a subway turnstile, he drew harsh words from a transit officer.

"And I kind of blew my cork that day, and apologized to the metro policeman that was getting impatient. Apologized that my husband, being blown up in Iraq, had to inconvenience him for 30 seconds, but that's just how it was," Sarah recalls.

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

"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.

"Did it ever occur to you that maybe, 'Hey, I don't wanna spend the rest of my life with him?'" Wallace asks.

"No, I was too scared that I wasn't gonna get that option," she replies with a laugh.

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

Asked if the United States 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 and 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 asks.

From his wheelchair, Tomas replies, "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."

No one thought Jessica Clements could ever survive after a roadside bomb in Iraq exploded under her truck, shooting shrapnel into three lobes of her brain.

Doctors put her chance of living at just 2 percent. But Jessica beat those odds with her optimism and determination. Now she wants to inspire others to recover from their wounds.

Jessica had been a model in Akron, Ohio, when she left high school to join the Army.

"It gave me such a sense of pride, putting on the uniform. And it was just the best feeling I've ever had in my entire life, putting the uniform on and knowing that I'm part of something. And I am part of something that's gonna make a difference in the world," she explains.

In boot camp, Jessica admits she got herself in a little trouble. "I had a hard time taking the drill sergeants serious sometimes. They were trying to be so mean and stern, and I would break a smile and I would laugh. So I was always doing pushups," she remembers.

As a staff sergeant in Iraq, she spent her days driving fuel trucks.

Jessica says there were so many roadside bombs she had to wear ear plugs,

"Sometimes every day you would hear them for a period, maybe three, four days in a row you would hear them," she recalls. "And then maybe there would be one day where things would be quiet. So you know the next day something was coming."

Asked if she was scared, she says, "Definitely."

"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.

The doctor put that half of Jessica's skull in her abdomen for safekeeping and to keep the bone alive.

"I could show you," she says, laughing. "He did. Placed it in there and sewed it shut so that skull piece would remain with me until I got back to the states and I was able to undergo surgery to have that skull piece replaced."

It stayed in her abdomen for four months before doctors put it back on her head. For much of that time, Jessica remained in a coma.

When she arrived in Washington, a doctor at Walter Reed Army Medical Center wrote that Jessica would probably remain in a permanent vegetative state.

"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. Every day I have some sort of pain going on in this head. But I manage it. It's not a bad thing."

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 re-learn 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. OK, great. It moved an inch. So that motivated me. OK, tomorrow, I'm gonna try for two inches, see if I can get it going again."

During the interview, Jessica smiled and was optimistic.

"After what I've been through, I can't help but to be positive about things," she says.

Asked what the source of her optimism is, she says, "Sometimes I wonder the same thing. How I'm so strong and able to get on with my day. But I just, I actually prefer myself and the person that I am now than the person that I used to be before this injury.

"What do you mean?" Wallace asks.

"I think I'm a better person now. I'm not as judgmental," she says. "I don't take anything for granted anymore."

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.".

"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."

"No matter how much it hurts. No matter how long it takes to recover," Wallace asks.

"That's right," she replies. "And for them to know that they're not alone. They are not alone."
Produced By Bob Anderson and Casey Morgan