EDITORIAL: The Heroes Who Live in Pain
By Victoria Advocate, Texas
Jul. 17–In a somber, moving article by Associated Press writer Sharon Cohen, readers of the Advocate last Sunday got a rare look behind the scenes at the Brooke Army Medical Center’s burn unit in San Antonio. As her story began, Cohen told of the long journey taken by five U.S. soldiers wounded and horribly burned in Iraq, treated at first in a German hospital, then arriving at Brooke.
The hope was that their devastating burns could be treated, and healed.
These five brave young men are just the latest names on the interminable list of wounded Americans from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And, regrettably, they sometimes seem to be soon forgotten.
We can scarcely go a day without reading the latest count of war dead in Iraq, now up over 3,600, according to AP.
But seldom do we see a recounting of those who live — maimed and in constant pain — to lie unremembered and often unsung in a veteran’s hospital bed.
Modern medicine is wonderful, but it is not godly. Blown off limbs can be replaced by prosthetics, but a prosthetic hand cannot feel the strands of a lover’s hair, or the soft skin of a newborn who smiles upward into a parent’s eyes. Scar tissue and skin grafts can eventually take away most of the pain of severe burns, but a face blasted by 5,000-degree heat will never look the same to a spouse, parent, child, and tendons and muscles singed and poisoned by burning will never again stretch and function as they once did.
These men and women served their country, and they deserve to be remembered every day in our thoughts and prayers, especially our prayers. It is entirely appropriate and necessary to bow our heads and revere the memory of those who have given their lives in the service of their country.
But in their own way, the men and women who lie maimed and suffering in hospital beds, with never a mention on any plaque or memorial, also gave everything they had to give.
In Sharon Cohen’s story, a doctor at Brooke was telling a nurse of how one of the incoming five soldiers got up after a roadside bomb blast had felled he and his comrades, and heroically ran to help the other wounded, despite his own injuries.
As that soldier was wheeled in, the doctor pointed and said, “This one’s the hero.”
The nurse quickly replied, “They’re all heroes.”
Four of those five soldiers died.
Pray for them, and for the lone hero left behind.
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Copyright (c) 2007, Victoria Advocate, Texas
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