Life and limb: a journalist's account of surviving the signature injury of the Iraq war

Blood Brothers: Among the Soldiers of Ward 57 By Michael Weisskopf Henry Holt and Company, 320 pp.

Michael Weisskopf never intended to become part of his own story. The fifty-seven-year-old senior correspondent for Time magazine was in Iraq in December 2003 on a coveted assignment--to profile the American soldier chosen as Time's Person of the Year. For three weeks, Weisskopf was embedded with a platoon of the legendary 1st Armored Division, which was based in Sunni-dominated northwest Baghdad. On the night of December 10, Weisskopf was along on the platoon's routine night patrol when he heard a clatter inside the Humvee. As Weisskopf writes in his new book, Blood Brothers: Among the Soldiers of Ward 57,

   At first I thought it was a rock, the specialty of the street
   urchins--a harmless shot against an armored Humvee. But the clanking
   sound that interrupted my thoughts couldn't be ignored ... [I]t
   bounced off the steel blast wall behind me. I gazed down, then to
   the right, and spotted an object on the wooden bench two feet away.
   The dark oval was as shiny and smooth as a tortoiseshell, roughly
   six inches long and four inches wide ... [S]omething told me there
   was no time to consult the other soldiers ... I rose half-way,
   leaned to the right, and cupped the object. I might as well have
   plucked volcanic lava from a crater. I could feel the flesh of my
   palm liquefying ... [I] raised my right arm and started to throw the
   mass over the side of the vehicle, a short backhand toss. Then
   everything went dark.

The grenade never made it out of the Humvee. Weisskopf took the brunt of the blast, saving the lives of everyone in the vehicle but losing his right hand in the explosion. "I shook my right arm, trying to wake it up," he remembers. "Still no response, I elevated it to see why ... My wrist looked like the neck of a decapitated chicken. The wound was jagged, blood glistening in the light."

The week that followed was hellish: multiple surgeries were needed to clean Weisskopf's wound and relieve the pressure on his injured arm. A spray of shrapnel remained buried in his right upper thigh. An Army transport plane carried Weisskopf to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where, during a routine procedure to clean the wound, Weisskopf ended up with heart arrhythmia, which landed him in the ICU. Finally, well after midnight on December 17, a week after his hand had been blown off, Weisskopf arrived at "Amputee Alley," Walter Reed Army Medical Center's Ward 57, specially designated to treat amputees of the Iraq War. (Weisskopf, the Ward's fifty-sixth amputee since the start of the war, was the first journalist ever to be a patient at the vaunted medical facility.)

Blood Brothers is not so much a book about the invasion of Iraq. Nor is it merely a paean to the much-praised staff and facilities at Walter Reed, though it is partially that. (Blood Brothers was published before the Washington Post carried, in February, a devastating expose of shoddy facilities leased by Walter Reed to house some patients and their families.) The book is, instead, a tightly written insider account of what has become an all-too-frequent experience of those serving in Iraq: losing a limb. Doctors at Walter Reed could predict what to expect from the Iraq conflict. Because of advances in battlefield medicine--tourniquets that can be tied with one hand, blood-clotting pellets made in part from volcanic ash, better life-support systems on medevac choppers--more soldiers' lives could be saved. But that blessing would in turn mean that more would be coming back with multiple grievous injuries. Nurses were told to expect "a new breed of patient: young, in chronic pain, traumatized, and long-term."

The predictions proved correct. In Iraq, the American military has lost one for every ten soldiers hit in combat, compared to a one-in-four fatality rate in Vietnam, and one in three during the Second World War. Because of the nature of the attacks on American soldiers--primarily from improvised explosive devices (IEDs)--and more widespread use of body armor, the soldiers' extremities have taken the greatest punishment. More than half the wounded in Iraq have injured or missing limbs.

"The toll was stupefying," writes Weisskopf.

   My neighbor to the left was a twenty-six-year-old
   former all-state high
   school runner from New Jersey
   whose whole left leg was amputated
   above the knee and his right knee
   connected to his hip by a titanium rod.
   Down the hail a twenty-four-year-old
   Virginian who loved to drive fast
   cars was missing both legs above the
   knee. Across from him a twenty-two-year-old
   expectant father from Pittsburgh,
   blinded and separated from
   both his hands ... the litany of misery
   moved from bed to bed ... I recognized
   the common plight of men
   who'd come home with less than they
   had left with--the trajectory of a life
   stopped cold in a hospital bed.