Full of Heart: My Story of Survival, Strength, and Spirit

by J. R. Martinez

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  A Long Road Home

  It was the spring of 2004. I strolled through the sliding-glass doors of the hospital like I always did, but it was obvious this wasn’t a regular day. You’d have thought the president was paying a visit. The lobby was closed off to regular visitors and patients, and military guards were stationed throughout for security.

  “I’m one of the soldiers Oprah’s going to interview,” I told the sentries at the door, and they parted so I could go to the elevator, which I took to the fourth floor.

  I’d been chosen as one of five troops she’d speak to, and I was very excited about the opportunity. A few nights prior to the event, I lay awake all night channel surfing for her show. I wanted to understand her interview style so our meeting would be powerful and I’d make a good impression on her.

  The star hadn’t yet arrived, so the other soldiers—all amputees—and I hung around waiting. And waiting. And waiting. I was starving, but I couldn’t leave the floor to grab a bite because Oprah might show up while I was gone. I didn’t want to keep her waiting, did I?

  Finally she turned up. She greeted us brusquely.

  “I can’t believe I’m meeting you!” I said.

  She smiled and turned to her producers. “Here we go,” she said.

  Then it was back to business as usual. My mother had visited but gone back to Dalton, and I found myself sitting in my room night after night with only the television screen for company. I played Halo on Xbox, using a headset to compete online with players around the world. I’d watch sports, mostly basketball—I loved the Sacramento Kings with Mike Bibby, Chris Webber, Peja Stojakovic, and Vlade Divac.

  The boring routine was broken up again one day when the owner of the Dallas Mavericks invited eight troops from BAMC to fly on his private jet to see his team play, and I was one of the lucky ones. I got to meet Steve Nash and Dirk Nowitzki, the star players, as well as Tony Delk.

  I’d checked back into my room at the guesthouse some weeks earlier after returning from Fort Campbell. I felt independent and somewhat content. Most people can’t wait to get away from the hospital, but to me it was almost like coming home. No one on the campus ever gave me strange looks, because they were accustomed to seeing people with burn injuries.

  When I was subsequently offered a room at the Fisher House, a so-called comfort home on the grounds of BAMC, I jumped on it. Single troops normally weren’t invited to stay there; it was geared toward families who needed to be close to their loved ones who were being treated. Fisher House 2, room 9, became my new home.

  A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in my room when a box arrived for me. Inside were signed pairs of Nikes from Webber and Delk and a pair of Jordans from Bibby. Awesome.

  I settled in for a long stay, because I was in line again for a major procedure. I’d talked with my plastic surgeon about addressing the cosmetics of my injury—I really wanted to have hair on my head. I didn’t want to walk around for the rest of my life bald with my scalp grafts visible. I was so self-conscious about my head that I rarely left my room without wearing one of my many baseball caps, all in different colors representing different teams. I chose my hat each day to match my outfit.

  The surgeon wanted to place an expander on my skull beneath the area where hair still grew. We could increase that section, he believed, to create more skin with hair follicles, which then could be used for the rest of my head. The expander would form a huge bubble and would stay implanted for about four months.

  I’d seen pictures of other patients with head expanders, and no way was I going out in public like that. I’d need to figure out how to cover it up. Also, the doctor was clear that, although the new skin could give me hair, it might not be the hair I once knew—it could be very thin and grow in different directions. I decided I didn’t care. Hair is hair, and I had to have it (and I got it).

  I also agreed to allow the surgeon to reimplant an expander in my chest, hoping for better results this time. The skin that grew from that site would be grafted onto the left side of my face, which was the most badly damaged area. Major surgery was required for both of these implants, so I asked my mother to come back to San Antonio for it.

  Around summer 2004 a guy named Aaron was assigned to be my suitemate at Fisher House. Aaron, a twenty-four-year-old specialist from central California, had been a fuel truck driver in the Army. His accident occurred in Iraq about four months after mine. His vehicle, the second in a 173rd Airborne Brigade convoy on a supply run, was blasted by two rocket-propelled grenades. He suffered third-degree burns and a broken arm, among other injuries.

  When I met Aaron, he was covered in skin grafts, several of his fingers had been amputated, and his hands curled into claws like mine. He was a smart guy, kind of quiet, and we spent a lot of time together hanging out—watching TV, usually.

  We amused ourselves with burn humor that we could never have expressed in front of other people, like how his truck had become a fireball after it was hit or how crazy my expanders made me look—comments that would only be funny to another burn survivor.

  Many a night I’d use the bathroom we shared and accidentally leave the door on his side locked when I went to bed. In the middle of the night I’d hear Aaron banging on my door or ringing my phone to wake me up so he could use the toilet.

  Although I liked having Aaron for company, sometimes his presence triggered my insecurities. When his girlfriend came from California to visit him, I knew enough to make myself scarce so they could have time to themselves. I’d sit in my easy chair, alone, and feel sorry for myself, grappling with surges of emotion brought on by a sad song or even a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

  To ease those feelings, I’d jump in my car and drive aimlessly, the windows down and the music pumping to drown out my thoughts. Alternately, I’d take a quiet walk to the park.

  I wouldn’t call my mom for help. I knew I could, but I wouldn’t. Little did I know, she was in a tough stage herself.

  For some time, she’d been having a delayed reaction to my accident, and now she was in a downward spiral of depression and anxiety. This crisis had reminded her of so much she’d left behind years before.

  My mom was born in 1956 in a rural village near Canton Carpintero in El Salvador, a tiny nation with the highest population density in Central America. People worked very hard, tending small plots for their rice, corn, and beans. They got their water for drinking and bathing not from faucets but from the river. They cooked by candlelight without the benefit of gas or electricity.

  Staying healthy could be tricky and people were plagued by malnutrition and vitamin deficiencies and uncontrolled diseases such as malaria. With limited access to health care, Salvadorans frequently used house medicine to heal—a flower, a root, the bark from a tree. Sometimes these remedies worked; many times they didn’t.

  My mom was one of ten kids born to Paula Zavala, only six of whom lived past the age of four. My mom was “made in jail.” Her father, Pio, had been behind bars for eighteen months for fighting and drunkenness; my grandmother visited him there and conceived my mother. My grandfather was still incarcerated when my mom was born, and he remained largely absent from her life thereafter.

  My mother still remembers one night when she was a very little girl and a man burst through the front door of their home. She watched as the man, obnoxious and unsteady, lurched around the room. She was frightened of this loud, drunken stranger. The man lost his balance and went down at my mother’s feet. She screamed as blood dripped from a cut on his chin.

  “That’s your daddy!” my grandmother hollered. “That’s your daddy!”

  Not long after this incident, my grandfather took up with another woman and moved with her to the neighboring nation of Honduras, leaving my grandmother with a houseful of kids. Overwhelmed and impoverished, my grandmother sent my mom to live with an adult niece named Angela and her man.

  The couple was better off financially than my grandmother, but ta
king in the little girl wasn’t an act of generosity. With no children of their own, they needed help with the chores. In exchange for room and board, the four-year-old was put to work minding the livestock. She milked the cows; fed the chickens and the pigs. For the next ten years her life was dominated by work and tears. There was no escape or distraction—no TV, no books save for the Bible, no toys. To this day, when anyone asks my mom what she’d like for Christmas, she requests dolls. She keeps them in a glass-front cabinet.

  The community schoolteacher pressured Angela to register my mom for school. Reluctantly, the couple sent her off every morning, barefoot, minus the few centavos the students were prompted to bring for milk and crackers. My mom had to watch the other children eat their snack every day while she went without.

  After finishing the third grade, my mom walked home clutching the certificate for entrance to the fourth grade. Someday, she thought, she might even go to college. But when the new school year began, Angela refused to buy my mom her uniforms or supplies. That was the end of my mom’s formal instruction.

  In a Catholic country where religion is paramount, Angela rarely took my mom to church and the little girl never received the first sacrament. She was left to learn about God by listening to other people discuss their faith. Craving the comfort of a spiritual life, she would gaze up at the clouds and pray, “Please, God, can you show me who you are?”

  At fourteen, my mother was sent back to my grandmother’s house, where the relentless chores continued. Her back ached from carrying buckets of water home from the river. She made soap for washing from the seed of the soap-nut tree and cooked on a wood fire against the wall of the house, preparing meals for the family and the field workers.

  My grandmother never told her daughter she loved her, never offered a kiss or hug. She had a heavy hand and an even heavier tongue. Her nicknames for her oldest daughter weren’t endearments such as “sweetie” or “honey,” but bruising curses like “stupid” and “ugly.” When my mom had a minute to herself, she’d sit beneath a tree and cry, asking God, “Why are you making me live here?” As her teenage years passed she listened for an answer, but none came.

  Escape was all she could think about. When a young man from her village named Edelmiro showed interest, she thought he was her ticket out. She didn’t particularly like him, but it didn’t matter. The two of them ran far away to an orchard where Edelmiro could find work.

  At twenty years old, my mom was finally out of the reach of her mother. She became pregnant, and by the time baby Maria Consuelo was just seventeen days old, it was clear that Edelmiro wasn’t much of a provider or father. Defeated, my mom returned to my grandmother’s house, stinging with the regret that her daughter would probably never know her father, just as my mom had never really known hers.

  As though fate could sense her sadness, my mom got word that her father wanted to see her after all those years. Without a moment’s hesitation, she bundled up infant Consuelo and hopped a bus for Honduras. My mom was elated to see her father and shocked to see how much she resembled him. No wonder my mother is so mean to me, she thought. I remind her of this man she hates so much.

  The eight months my mother spent with her father and his partner, Lola, were some of the happiest days she’d ever known. As though making up for lost time, my grandfather lavished his daughter and her child with attention and affection. Maybe this could be her new life, my mom thought.

  On New Year’s Day 1978 my mother’s Honduran respite came to a sudden end when her father was murdered by a drunken acquaintance who slashed him twenty-four times with a machete. Devastated and again without options, my mom returned to her mother’s home in Carpintero, one-year-old Consuelo on her back. She found a job as a maid at a house in town, working for a teacher who paid my mom to cook and clean for the family of six. That job led to a better one, in San Salvador. She rode a dusty bus for five hours to the capital, leaving Consuelo with her grandmother.

  Soon my mother allowed herself to be pulled off track by another man and became pregnant again. In this very Catholic part of the world, there was no birth control or sex education. If you were with a man, you were going to get pregnant. In September 1980 she gave birth to my second sister, Anabel.

  The timing couldn’t have been worse. A year earlier, a military junta had deposed President General Carlos Humberto Romero after years of human rights abuses by the government. Now the country was in the midst of a civil war that pitted the military-led government of El Salvador against the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front (FMLN), a syndicate of left-wing guerrilla groups. In March, Archbishop Oscar Romero, a vocal opponent of the government’s repression and use of violence against its citizens, had been assassinated while giving mass in a hospital; at his funeral, attended by more than a quarter of a million people, snipers had slaughtered dozens of mourners.

  Two times my mother had found herself in the middle of a guerrilla shootout in San Salvador. Twice she’d had to drop to the floor, put her hands over her head, and pray for salvation.

  With chaos all around and two little girls to raise, my mom managed to keep her heart full of hope. She decided she would go to America for a year to make enough money to open a business of her own later in El Salvador. Her mother agreed to look after my mom’s girls while she was gone.

  My mother found a coyote who was taking a group through Guatemala and Mexico to the United States for four hundred U.S. dollars, a steep sum for a woman who at best earned about one hundred dollars a month. But she managed to scrape it together from a relatively wealthy aunt, whom she would eventually repay, and a few neighbors, just in time for her departure on June 11, 1982.

  At two o’clock that morning, she rose from her bed. She slid into one of the two dresses she owned, a blue one made of thin cotton, and folded a pair of jeans and a blouse into a shopping bag.

  Two-year-old Anabel was sleeping, unaware that her own life was on the cusp of change. But Consuelo woke, sensing something was up.

  “Mommy, where are you going?” she cried.

  “I’m going to work, baby. Go back to sleep like a good girl and Mommy will bring you a pretty dress when I get back.”

  My mom tucked the little girl back into her bed and crept out. Her own mother didn’t get up to say goodbye, instead calling, “God take care of you, wherever you are.”

  On June 30, having gone through pastures, deserts, and checkpoints; over hills and mountains; and across rivers that threatened to drown her, my mother, exhausted and frightened, arrived in Houston, Texas.

  In September, she met Jose Martinez, and less than a year after that, I showed up.

  Now, two decades and countless hardships later, my mom was finally buckling under the stress. Celestino seemed to be reaching his limit of concern for her. He told my mom that he didn’t know what to do with her, which only made her push him away. After work one night she came home and fell asleep for a few hours. She woke up and began a heart-to-heart with Celestino.

  “I can’t do this anymore,” he told her. “Do you want me to bring you a priest or someone from our church?”

  My mother told him she didn’t want anybody to come. “I just want Jesus to come here and tell me why he’s doing this to me.”

  Finally, Celestino said again, “I can’t do this anymore.” He’d already rented a new apartment.

  Back at BAMC, my phone rang. It was my mom, and she sounded upset.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked her.

  “I’ll let Cele tell you,” she said. I could hear her hand him the phone.

  “It’s too much,” he said. “I try and try but I don’t know what to do. I’m moving out.”

  I hadn’t had any idea about the troubles at home. My mom hadn’t let on.

  “She needs you. You can’t bail on her,” I told Cele.

  To my surprise, Celestino unpacked his suitcase and stayed. He continued to be the supportive partner she’d needed all along.

  Maybe a year later I got quite
a different phone call from my mom. She was giggling on the other end of the line. “Guess what we did!” she asked, like a kid calling to tell her dad that she’d gotten caught toilet-papering someone’s house.

  “What’s up?”

  “We got married at city hall!”

  I was relieved and happy—they apparently were in a better place together. And now my mom would always have someone to lean on, I thought.

  After the surgery to implant my expanders and after some time in the hospital post-op, I relaxed at the Fisher House with my mom, who had come back to BAMC to be with me for that operation. A few days later, public affairs invited me to attend an event in which a few troops from the hospital would be treated to lunch on the River Walk. A gentleman would be talking to the guys about an opportunity to start a nonprofit to help troops. A couple of our commanders asked me specifically to listen in to make sure none of our guys made any hasty decisions or commitments.

  I stressed that I was recovering from surgery and didn’t really feel up to it. They pressed, so I went.

  We were all taken downtown in a van and dropped off at a hotel. I leaned up against a pillar in the lobby and listened as Doug Plank described his vision. With a partner, he wanted to start an organization that would assist service members. After he talked, we were directed to a boat for a lunch cruise.

  My interest was piqued, and after the cruise ended, I stayed behind to speak with Doug. I wanted to share my insights and see whether they meshed with his ideas. I told him about my mother; I wanted to close the financial gap for families who were summoned to the hospital to be with their loved ones and the economic blow they took doing so. My mom obviously couldn’t work—and therefore didn’t earn any money—when she was by my side in San Antonio. She had struggled to pay her rent, utilities, and other bills. She’d had to rely on my income from the Army and help from Celestino to subsidize her time by my side.

  Our family’s tight situation hadn’t gone unnoticed by the community of Dalton. A woman named Mary Rose Threet, whose son Jeffeory had been the kicker on my football team, instituted a support fund at a local bank, inviting any and all donations. They poured in. It was overwhelming for both of us to witness the generosity of our neighbors, especially when I’d lived there for only one year before I enlisted.