Now there's something you don't see everyday. Or maybe it's more common than we suspect - wounded vets who want to return to combat duty.
Tim O'Brien, of Parade Magazine, reports on The War They Still Fight.
“The explosion,” Major Jason Waggoner says, “blew me up in the air, and I landed inside the crater. I just lay there thinking, ‘What happened to me?’ I didn’t want to look at my legs. It felt like a baseball bat hit me.”
Asked about the war to which he has sacrificed a leg, Waggoner gazes down at the red, white, and blue carpet. “I didn’t lose my leg to this war,” he says slowly. “I lost it in support of the soldiers on my left and right. I’d do it a hundred times over.”
He hopes to rejoin his unit, which is still in Iraq. “My mission right now,” he says, “is to get well.”
In February 2007 in central Iraq, Staff Sgt. Shilo Harris’ vehicle rolled over an improvised explosive device. “The fireball was like a tornado,” says Harris, 33, of Coleman, Tex. “I looked down and saw my body smoking.”
“Lying on the ground, looking up,” Harris says, “I could see the sheer horror on my roommate’s face. I knew from his eyes I was pretty messed up.”
Like Waggoner, Harris expresses no ambiguity over serving in a confusing and increasingly unpopular war. “I was trying to get the job done,” he says. Harris goes silent for a moment. “I’m determined,” he says quietly. “I might want to stay a soldier.”
In my time at the center, what repeatedly strikes me is that these terribly maimed soldiers are all volunteers. They seem more wholly in the military and more wholly of the military than those I remember. They talk about “getting the job done” with an unambiguous, no-shades-of-gray certitude that differs from my own combat experience.
Yet Nick McCoy touches on one constant. “Our country has mixed feelings about the war,” he says, “but regardless of your opinion, if you see a wounded soldier, we appreciate it when you say, ‘Thank you.’ ”
Amen.
