WASHINGTON — EDITOR'S NOTE: Reporter Amy Schlesing has reported extensively from Iraq and was with the 875th Engineer Battalion when the attack on Tarmiya Road occurred. She recently visited Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
Spc. Marco Robledo, waking up in a bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center a month after a roadside bomb blew him out of his gun turret in Iraq, became aware of a man sitting beside him.
As his eyes focused through a haze of sleep and pain medication, he realized the man was a priest. The news, he feared, wouldn't be good.
The priest gently told the 21-year-old Clarksville man that he had lost his left arm and left leg in the May 26 roadside bomb that killed his friend, Sgt. ErichSmallwood of Trumann.
Slowly, the chaplain filled in the previous weeks for the Arkansas guardsman. He described the blast; the air evacuation under enemy fire from that road near Tarmiya, 30 miles north of Baghdad; the Army hospital in Baghdad; Landstuhl Army Medical Center in Germany; the surgeries; and the coming year or two he would spend at Walter Reed.
Marco began crying.
He looked down and saw the sheet covering the empty space that used to be his leg. He tried to sit up, but his missing arm threw off his balance.
His face stung, pocked with gray shards of steel from the bomb. His back ached with a second-degree burn. His left eardrum had a hole in it. His lower lip was raw and shredded. He looked through stitches in his left eye from a recent surgery.
He knew his limbs were missing, but somehow he could still feel his hand. He also felt himself wiggling toes he no longer had.
"I cried myself to sleep," he said of that day in June. "I still cry every now and then. Not because of my arm and leg, but for the loss of my friend."
Almost five months later, Marco still feels the ghostly presence of his limbs and fights phantom leg- and hand-cramp pain.
But he has learned to walk again, and he's learning to write and draw and shoot - with his right hand. Marco was a lefty until the bomb hit on that clear, hot Saturday in May.
THE ROAD TO TARMIYA
An overnight dust storm cleared shortly after dawn that day, and the sun blazed bright over central Iraq. By midafternoon the temperature hovered at 120 degrees. The metal skins of the bomb-hunting vehicles manned by the Arkansas National Guard's 875th Engineer Battalion stung to the touch.
The soldiers of the 875th - its headquarters in Jonesboro - had been rolling up and down Iraq's volatile Highway 1 from Baghdad to Samarra for eight months, training their eyes on the dirt median and shoulder, looking for hidden bombs and their thin copper wires.
They knew this divided stretch of four-lane road better than their own driveways back home.
Alpha Company's 1st Platoon headed south out of Camp Anaconda - its home base at Balad - around midday that Saturday. More than an hour later the platoon turned east off the main highway to clear the thin strip of pavement that leads to Tarmiya on the Tigris River.
Tarmiya, a Sunni stronghold, once was home to a weaponstesting facility under Saddam Hussein's reign. It has never been a friendly place for U.S. troops. Countless bomb craters scar the road that leads to the town of modest earthen homes.
At one point in 2004, commanders limited use of the road to heavy armor. If it wasn't a tank, it wasn't going to Tarmiya.
The bombs grew bigger that year, peeling open an M1A1 Abrams tank and killing all four soldiers inside.
Violence on the road subsided in 2006, but smaller attacks resumed in 2007.
The 875th's Alpha Company added the road to its bombhunting route this spring to clear the way for a Stryker Brigade of infantrymen who patrolled the city.
Alpha Company regularly found bombs on the road and bombs regularly found the soldiers. Injuries had been minor.
May 26 was different. The bomb was bigger; the ambush set.
About 4 p.m. a cloud of dirt and pavement enveloped the humvee driven by Smallwood,with Marco perched in the gun turret. Shrapnel ripped through the vehicle's armor with a deafening boom as the road under the humvee erupted. Rocket-propelled grenades began roaring at them from a nearby field. Then gunfire.
Marco lay gravely wounded on the blazing pavement near the smoldering vehicle and the body of his friend.
JUMBLED MEMORIES
The blast shattered Marco's memory of that day.
He recalls moments, but isn't sure if they are things he was told or actual memories.
"I remember waking up to gunfire," Marco said. "Sgt. [Melvin] Clark was beside me shooting. It hurt my ears."
Medics worked to stop his bleeding as soldiers fought off the ambush and tried to move a vehicle between the incoming bullets and Marco.
Marco tried to roll back and forth, the hot pavement burning his bare skin. Even today, months later, those burns - believed to be from the blast and from the pavement - still mar his lower back and buttocks.
"The burns are much better," he said with a smile, pointing to his wheelchair seat. "They gave me a $400 cushion to sit on."
Marco's youngest brother, Jose, and the rest of the closeknit Robledo family arrived at Walter Reed three days after Marco. They stood vigil for weeks, watching doctors wheel the soldier in and out of multiple surgeries and waiting for him to wake up.
They watched as he learned to roll over again with the help of a special shirt outfitted with weights to make up for themissing heft of his amputated arm. Within days he learned to sit up. A month later he was practicing with prosthetic limbs.
"Marco is the strength of his family," said Adele Levine, Marco's physical therapist. "He was still an inpatient, with tubes running in and out of him, and he was wheeling around the ward helping his parents deal with things."
Marco and his family moved to one of the many recuperation houses at Walter Reed a couple of months ago. The house for recovering amputees has eight family-sized apartments with a communal family room and kitchen.
Most of Marco's family members returned to Clarksville last month. They had to return to work after relying on the generous donations of strangers for four months, allowing them to stay at Walter Reed.
"I thank everyone for praying and thinking of me. It makes me feel that I matter," he said, mentioning some of the various fundraisers thrown on his family's behalf. "My dad doesn't want to take advantage of that, so he's going back to work."
Now only Jose remains.
"He's my little brother," Marco said. "He's taken really good care of me. He fed me. He bathed me. ... He's been with me all along."
Jose is a quiet young man who doesn't feel the need for idle chat. He's Marco's constant companion, his cheerleader and friend.
"I couldn't imagine it at first. I couldn't imagine the therapy, the progress," Jose said. "But then I saw my brother work at it. I saw the therapists work with him and something I saw as impossible became possible."
LEARNING ALL OVER AGAIN
Jose sat with his brother in occupational therapy and watched the former left-hander carefully draw a picture of a scuba diver with his right hand. The image will be used on Tshirts for the Walter Reed scubadiving team, a group of amputees learning to dive as part of their physical therapy.
"I'm going to put a shark here and over there to show that [the diver's] brave," Marco said, and then he started erasing one of the legs he had just drawn. "I need to make one of his legs a prosthetic."
Minutes later a great white shark appeared on the paper. Then a hammerhead. Marco, critical of himself, drew lightly,erasing here and there to make it better.
"I never thought he'd draw again," Jose said of the hobby his big brother always loved. "Hey, show her your tattoo."
Marco lifted up his right shirt sleeve to reveal an image of a rifle, helmet and halo. Under the tattoo were the words, "En tu manos," which means "In your hands" in Spanish. Marco sketched the image on a piece of paper during a briefing at the Jonesboro armory and had it tattooed on his arm just days before he deployed to Iraq.
He created it as a symbol of his faith. It's become his motto for survival.
"The way I see it, we're injured," Marco said, referring to him and other war amputees. "We lost some limbs. But life goes on. You can't just quit."
FOCUSING
Soon Jose, 18, will return home to start college.
Marco won't be alone, though. He is surrounded by friends and men overcoming similar injuries who have all seen the reality of war.
That reality stays with them.
As Marco walked sideways up a ramp in the physical therapy room one day and chatted with a friend practicing walking on his dual prosthetics, a Marine across the room dropped a weight he was using.
Every man in the room froze and stared with wide eyes toward the thump of the weight hitting the mat. It sounded like a distant explosion.
"It's an instinct," Marco said with a nervous chuckle as he started walking again.
The man next to him shook his body as if to shake off the moment.
"There's a program where they'll fly in my friends to visit, but I'm not ready for that yet," Marco said later while sitting at a machine that builds hand-to-eye coordination. "I can't walk well enough yet. I need to focus. I take this therapy pretty seriously."
Marco believes every day he works at his therapy brings him one day closer to going home.
He turned back to the machine, grabbing the handles with his right hand and left prosthetic hook and turning them to steer a race car on the monitor in front of him.
In the amputee ward of Walter Reed, physical and occupational therapists spend up to two years with each soldier, sailor or Marine who has lost a limb. In that time, they focus not only on everyday tasks such as walking, cooking,writing and opening doors, but also on confidence.
"We want them to learn to live independently," said Don Vandrey, spokesman for Walter Reed.
According to Walter Reed's office of strategic communications, more than 680 troops have lost limbs in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Of those, about 130 are multiple amputees like Marco. The loss of multiple limbs often is fatal because of the extensive trauma.
Arkansas has at least two surviving double amputees from the war in Iraq and about 10 amputees from the war on terror.
The vast majority of amputee patients have roamed the halls of Walter Reed as Marco does today.
"You figure out new ways to do things," Marco said, moving up the hall from the physical therapy room, using a cane to steady himself, concentrating on every move. His leg was amputated at mid-thigh.
Deliberate movements accompanied each step. Every day he spends more time walking than riding in his chair, memorizing the movements, trying to make walking automatic again.
"I'm still at the point I have to think about every step," he said. "It's hard."
Then a beaming smile moved across his face.
"I went to see a movie this weekend," he said. "I walked up the stairs and sat right in the middle [of the theater]."
He also climbed four flights of stairs in physical therapy, a milestone that left him bruised and sore for days.
"Marco's the hardest-working patient that we have, by far," Levine said, following him down the hall, eyeing his movements. "He's doing really good."
Marco spends every moment he can in physical and occupational therapy, practicing walking and grabbing things, working on techniques for housecleaning and cooking. He would rather be here, working on recovery, than sitting in his Walter Reed apartment.
He dreads weekends, when the therapy clinic closes.
"I don't want to be here for a year and a half to two years," he said. "I don't want to rush things, but I want to do what I have to do while I'm here and go home, get on with my life."
Marco, who was certified as a mechanic just before being deployed to Iraq, hasn't decided what he will do once he does get home.
CONFIDENCE
"Confidence is 80 percent of it,I think," Marco said.
Learning to live without a limb is a constant battle, fought by therapists and patients alike.
Jose tries to help Marco, but he doesn't push him too hard.
"But if it's something I know he can do, I push him pretty hard to help him become more independent," Jose said.
Harvey Naranjo, Marco's occupational therapist, walked up to the table one day and placed a hand on Marco's back. He reminded him to fill out paperwork for a ski trip to Colorado planned for December. Getting the patients out to learn new things is a major weapon in the battle for confidence. Marco hesitated. Naranjo pushed.
Finally Marco agreed.
"When I was still in the ward, still learning how to sit up and roll, he'd come up there and say, 'Let's go, Robledo,'" Marco said.
Marco finds courage in the memory of the man who died the day he was wounded, his friend Smallwood, who was 23.
"He wouldn't want me to give up," he said.
It's something Marco has to remind himself of every day.
"Last week I couldn't do it, I couldn't seem to get the confidence up to trust my prosthetic to step over a cone," Marco said. "Then I got angry with myself. I used to look for bombs, and now I'm scared to step over a stupid cone.Three days later I did it."
The shrapnel in his face and his left ear, which is partially missing, bothers him more than the stares his missing arm and leg get.
"I went to try on clothes, and you know the big mirrors in there, well, my face is pretty beat up. It was really depressing. It's hard not to notice it when I look in the mirror. It's me."
Laser surgery will pull out most of the gray specks and smooth out his left cheek. He'll also eventually have a small prosthetic ear.
The phantom pain of amputation may never go away, though. Amputation traumatizes the body's nervous system, causing patients to feel things that no longer exist. Marco's phantom pains make him feel as if his amputated foot and hand are frozen or cold, locked up in a massive cramp.
"Sometimes it's intolerable pain," Marco said.
Unlike a cramp or pain in a hand, there's no way to work it out or walk it off.
"Taking painkillers for something that's not there, that just doesn't seem right," Marco said of the intense pain.
Instead, he uses a series of mirrors that reflect his right hand as if it's his left. He flexes it and moves it while looking in the mirror, trying to trick his nervous system into believing he's working out a cramp in his missing hand.
"It's a mind trick, but it seems to work," he said.
For him, it's just another day in his new life, just another problem to work through.
"I believe there's no other challenge greater than this," Marco said. "Because it's not something you do in a day."
He plans to be home by next month, in time for Clarksville's Veterans Day parade.
"I'll be able to walk at a steady pace by then."
Front Section, Pages 1, 17 on 10/28/2007