My Men are My Heroes (37 page)

“That brought my spirits up tremendously,” he says. He used his new mobility to visit with young Marines recuperating in rooms nearby. “Seeing and talking with them made me feel like a leader again,” Kasal says. “That was a great help.

“I would even go get them food if they were unable to get out of bed. Every day for the next month I went from room to room to reassure them, talk to them, and just ask how they were. This was my best time.”

Christmas was still a rough ordeal emotionally. By then he had been hospitalized for 42 days and was still mostly bedridden. An
hour or two of mobility each day couldn't get Brad Kasal where he needed to be.

“I only wanted to be one place that Christmas,” he says, “and that was back in Iraq with my Marines. They were still over there spending their Christmas engaged with the enemy and away from their families. That was the only place I wanted to be, and it was tearing me up that I couldn't be with them.”

But there was no escaping Christmas. Holiday decorations were everywhere and Christmas scenes were on every television set. And the images only reminded Kasal of his far-off Marines.

“There was no place to forget,” he says, “only to think. And it was the worst place to be.”

In early January Kasal got word that his unit was going to be coming home at the end of the month. “All I wanted was to be there to see them home,” he says. “I kept telling my doctor, Commander McGuigan, that he had to get me out of there and back home to Camp Pendleton by the end of January or I would push my bed out of the hospital myself and find a way home!”

The medical team responded to Kasal's determination. On January 22, he was cleared to go home. Follow-up hospitalizations and surgeries would be at Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego. “As anxious as I was to leave,” Kasal says, “I also felt a tinge of sadness as I had grown very close to the nurses and staff at Bethesda and realized how much I would miss them. They were truly committed to their jobs and cared greatly for each patient. I will forever be grateful for their care.”

On at least one occasion, however, he had been able to take care of them as well. “I became very loyal to my nurses and corpsmen,” he says. “I remember one instance in particular where I had an older roommate who was having a kidney stone removed. Being right next to him for two days, I heard every piece of advice the nurses gave him. It was all right on. And I saw the patient ignore them and not follow their advice. On the third
night of his stay he started complaining very loudly to the nurse on deck about pain and the inability to go to the bathroom. His complaining started about 11 and continued until around 2:30 in the morning.

“Each time he got worse and louder, and each time the nurse tried to remain polite and professional with him, giving him instructions that he had to drink water and other things he failed to do, which were causing all his symptoms. I saw how rude and mean he was being to the nurse each time and how professional yet frustrated and rattled the nurse was becoming. Plus the rude patient was keeping me awake with his consistent whining. So I politely asked the nurse to leave and close the door behind her. She did, and once the door was closed, I grabbed my crutches, painfully got out of bed, and walked over to my roommate's bed.

“I pointed my crutch at him and said, ‘Listen to the nurse. She's right. And if I hear one more peep out of you the rest of this night, I'm going to shove this crutch up your ass and give you some real pain to complain about.'

“With that said, I got back into bed and fell asleep. I never heard one more word from him the rest of the night, and he quietly got up the next morning and left to go home without a word.” Kasal pauses. “Those were my nurses, and nobody gives them a hard time.”

After more than three months in Maryland the day finally arrived for Kasal to return to his home in California. On January 22, 2005, he began a two-day journey aboard an Air Force medevac flight. The first night he landed at Travis Air Force Base and spent the night there. Early the next morning he left Travis for Marine Corps Air Station North Island, followed by a short ambulance ride to Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton (NHCP).

“When I arrived at NHCP the first thing I saw when I pulled up and they opened the doors was a welcoming party,” Kasal says. “There were a whole bunch of my former Marines who had been wounded and were sent home early waiting for me. They found out I was being flown in and they all showed up at the hospital.

“That was pretty emotional and touching. It was kind of overwhelming because that was the first time I had seen any of them since I got wounded.”

After getting a quick physical and a careful examination of his leg, Kasal was discharged to go home. As eager as he had been to return home, he realized that his physical needs and his pride were going to make for a difficult transition to recovery in California, where he would have to rely on the help of friends.

“Again, being as independent as I am, it was very hard for me to ask for or accept help,” he says.

Since his high school days, Kasal had always seen himself as the helper or the protector. “I'd help any way any time but never asked for help. And now I realized I'd have to become almost reliant on others. It would be a long time before I could drive, run errands, cook, or even clean my own house. That was the hardest part, having everything you know stripped away from you.

“Fortunately I was blessed with so many friends, fellow Marines, and volunteers who for the next 14 months did everything I was unable to do. Of course, I'd still try to do anything I could possibly do on my own. And sometimes friends would give me an ear full, telling me I was risking my health and to just let them do it. What they didn't understand was how my health actually depended on my taking these risks. Anything I could do for myself, even if small, helped me feel like I was getting back to normal.”

Dr. Girard was assigned to treat Kasal after he settled into his new life as an outpatient at the Balboa Naval Hospital. Navy doctors like Girard specialize in making wounded service members whole again, but it is a tough environment for both the
patients and the doctors. For Girard it is never an easy task to treat otherwise healthy young men who have gone from being perfectly normal to permanently injured in the blink of an eye. “Unfortunately,” he says, “it is getting a little easier now. The only way that you see these injuries are in wartime. They are only associated with military rifles and blast injuries. At the beginning of the war it was a little more startling. My colleagues and I—and Navy medicine as a whole—are on the forefront of treating these kinds of injuries.”

Before Dr. Girard could move forward with his plan for treatment, he had to make sure Kasal understood the tremendous hurdles he would have to climb over just to keep his leg, much less stay in the Marine Corps.

“From the beginning he understood that pain was going to be a big part of his life,” Girard says. “He had been on pain medication until he got out of Bethesda. After that he was trying to step that down so he could be more and more lucid. It is unusual for people to do this if you look at the population as a whole. But for the part of the population Brad is in, it is less unusual than it is in the civilian sector. Trying to get off medication is a common thread to folks like him.”

Girard sees Kasal as a model for other severely injured patients. “How he has dealt with this shows his tremendous strength of character,” the doctor says. “I use his story a lot when I meet these guys. I use him and some other Marines of equal caliber as examples that people can get better.”

Kasal's public strength of character was sometimes clouded by his secret reservations about what lay ahead for him and many other Marines who had suffered similar fates.

“I didn't know if I was fighting a battle to lose,” he concedes. “The doctors talked to me about amputation. They told me, ‘If
you amputate we can have you back running in six weeks.' I would always second-guess and wonder if I should just do that. My whole life consisted of fear of the unknown and second-guessing. Should I get it over with and just amputate?”

Girard said the ghosts that secretly haunted Kasal and other wounded warriors during their odyssey of pain are not unusual among men struck down by debilitating injuries in their prime.

“These young men—strong, healthy go-getters—are injured in an instant and their life is changed,” he says. “They don't have any time to accommodate or get used to what is going on. Their expectations are naturally very, very high. They want to get back to right where they were a split second before they were shot. Generally it is not realistic.”

Realistic or not, Kasal was determined to regain his independence, his strength, and his career. But for the next 14 months he would have to rely on friends and volunteers for almost everything he needed. They shopped for him, drove him to appointments, cleaned his house, helped with his laundry, and did myriad other tasks he simply could not do himself. It was both a gratifying and humbling experience for a proud, self-reliant Marine.

Some of his helpful friends were his comrades-at-arms from Iraq. Wade helped a lot, as did Mortimer and his wife, Chris; Fox and his wife, Sarah; Lopez; and a large group of civilians who volunteered to help Kasal and other wounded Marines who were flooding into Southern California from the combat zones and needing special personal care the Marine Corps could not provide.

Among these volunteers was Lou Palermo, a former airline flight attendant and museum worker who just wanted to meet a real Marine; Ed Sparks, a retired Navy chief; Geoff and Clyrinda Milke; and Jim Arslanian, a retired Massachusetts cop and one-time sailor, and his wife, Linda. They all remain close friends and
often visit each other. Linda still likes to cook for Kasal. He and Jim share sea stories, conversation about books, and all the other things that make Kasal such an interesting man.

Recovery brought a series of new challenges into the life of Brad Kasal, including doubt and depression. “A lot of the depression was caused because I had always been independent and now all of a sudden I could hardly do anything for myself,” he says. “I was used to being active—skiing, mountain climbing, running, camping, scuba diving, just always on the go. Now all of a sudden my life consists of watching TV, playing video games, and watching movies. I was in constant pain and everything else, so depression was a big factor that would kick in sometimes.”

A lot of that depression was caused by fear of the unknown, Kasal says: “For most common injuries, the doctors can tell you what to expect. If you tear your ACL, for example, doctors can predict what you'll experience and how you'll recover. But my injuries were so severe and uncommon that it was mostly guess work. And none of the guessing was promising.

“Throughout my long and painful recovery, every doctor said that I'd never run again, that I would walk but with a cane, and I'd never be normal again. And that was their good news! I got numerous recommendations to amputate my leg and get on with my life. But I chose to gut it out. I chose to fight and prove everyone wrong.

“But sometimes doubt and fear would set in, followed by depression. And sometimes I wished I would have died back in that house on November 13th. At least then I would have gone with dignity and honor rather than wasting away in a bed and relying on others for even the simplest of tasks.

“And I'd wonder: What if the doctors are right? What if I will never be normal again? What if I'm enduring this long, painful
process just to fail in the end and have them be right? I wondered if maybe I should just amputate and get it over with.

“Then as quickly as the doubt crept in, I'd dismiss it, bite down, and just get more determined. And I'd do something, anything, to try to make myself better. Even if all I could do was grab the phone book and curl it in bed to get stronger in some way.”

Doubt and fear of the unknown are powerful enemies, Kasal says, but in the end the heart is an even more powerful force. “I became determined to get my life back and get back into uniform, no matter what it took. I had never failed anything before and I wasn't going to fail now with so much at stake. “

Still, progress came slowly, one goal at a time. Kasal was in a hospital bed for 14 months unable to lie flat on his back or on his side. He had to lie with his head and legs constantly elevated. “When I was finally able to lay in a normal bed for the first time, it was like heaven,” he says. “At 15 months I drove for the first time and after 17 months I finally walked without a crutch or cane.”

And after 18 months of misery and indignity, Kasal dared to challenge himself and challenge what every doctor had said he could never do: run. “I wanted to try to run just 50 feet to see if I could do it,” he says. “But I wanted to do it in privacy, because I was embarrassed about my condition.”

He sought out an empty parking lot behind a Kmart store. With a bad foot and grim determination, Kasal charged forward. “I made it for five minutes of a kind of shuffling run,” he says. “It was such an awesome feeling. It was just 50 feet, but I had come so far! Being able to shuffle for five minutes after what I went through felt like completing a marathon.”

Since then Kasal has kept pushing. And on November 9, 2006—almost two years to the day from when he was wounded—he ran a Marine Corps physical fitness test consisting of a 3-mile run, pull-ups, and crunches! Kasal not only passed but earned a first-class score.