My Men are My Heroes

by Nathaniel R. Helms

  On the 14th, Kasal was put on an Air Force C-17 evacuation flight bound for Germany. The plane was filled with Marines and soldiers too severely wounded to recover inside Iraq.

  Kasal certainly qualified. His right leg was nearly severed from his body by gunshot wounds. His buttocks were perforated by both shrapnel and bullet holes, including three lacerations approximately ½ inch wide, 3 to 4 inches long, and 2 inches deep. The back of his legs, buttocks, lower back, groin, and arms were also filled with shrapnel holes. Doctors eventually determined that Kasal had seven gunshot wounds and 44 shrapnel wounds.

  BACK IN THE USA

  On November 18 Kasal arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, where he would spend the next two months as a patient in Ward 5C. From his admittance until just before Christmas, Kasal says he was pretty much “out of it” from pain medications. He was enduring surgery every other day to clean out his wounds. There were a few days, however, that he does remember—such as the time his family came to see him for the first time since he had been wounded.

  On November 23, Kasal’s family—Mom, Dad, and brothers Randy, Kelly, and Kevin—came to visit. “They stayed until Thanksgiving Day before they had to return home. It was good to see family and it gave me a respite from the hospital life.

  “My little brother, Kevin, I remember, was heavily focused on a piece of shrapnel in my right foot that was working its way back to the surface. It was just under the skin so I let him dig it out, much as you would a splinter. He kept it as a souvenir and I looked at it as one less piece of shrapnel in my body.”

  His father, Gerald Kasal, remembered the visit just as vividly. He had been terribly worried about Brad since the Marines notified him of Brad’s injuries. He notified the local papers that Brad was wounded and received many concerned telephone calls from his relatives and Brad’s childhood friends. When Lucian Read’s famous picture showed up on the front page of the Omaha-World Herald and the Des Moines Register, the Kasal home was flooded with more calls. When Gerald actually got to see Brad for the first time, he was relieved to see that his son did not look as bad as he had imagined.

  “He was a little pale and looked thinner, but he didn’t look too bad except for his leg,” Gerald recalled. “He was very quiet. He was pretty drugged up from the pain medications they had given him, but he wasn’t completely out of it. He just seemed very tired. He even joked around some, especially when Kevin was fooling with his foot.”

  Gerald added a father’s emphasis to a sentiment shared by many back home: “I am very proud of him.”

  After his family left Thanksgiving Day, Kasal didn’t do any feasting. He was in the operating room before dinner was served. When he came to the ward dinner was over and he was receiving a celebrity visitor.

  FAMOUS GUESTS

  “That afternoon, Arnold Schwarzenegger and his family came to the hospital to visit all the wounded Marines and sailors,” Kasal recalls. “I remember thinking very highly of Mr. Schwarzenegger, that he spent his Thanksgiving at the hospital with us.”

  During the holidays a number of famous people came to visit America’s wounded warriors at Bethesda. It was a thrill for Kasal and all the patients they visited. Despite their fame and status Kasal found these people to be warm, friendly visitors who genuinely cared for the wounded veterans.

  “From the time I arrived to the hospital on November 18th and through New Year’s 2005, we were flooded with support,” Kasal says. “I want to thank all the people who spent their free time and even their holidays to come and visit the other wounded Marines and me. We had celebrities from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Cher, Hilary Duff, Donald Rumsfeld, Brian Dennehy, ZZ Top, the cast from The Sopranos, and many, many more. But it was the everyday, average people who really were the best. People just came to show their support and I will always remember them.”

  Still the most memorable visitor to Kasal’s bedside was President George W. Bush. He came to visit quietly and without fanfare during December when the patients at Bethesda were feeling their bluest. Many of their families were far away and even Kasal had to resist the urge to feel down about his situation. The president’s visit went a long way to lift his waning spirits.

  “There was a certain aura about him,” Kasal says. “And the first thing he did was show leadership right off the bat. I had a roommate at that time who was a junior-ranking Marine. He was also severely wounded but my bed was closest to the door. Yet President Bush did what any good leader would do and walked past me stating, ‘I’ll get to you next, First Sergeant,’ and he went first to the junior Marine.

  “He spent about five minutes with the young Marine and then came to me. He also spent five minutes with me, making a joke, asking me how I was doing, and wishing me well. Two things I will always remember about his visit are his deep sincerity and the fact he did not come into the room with an entourage.

  “I was expecting reporters and people in suits and a big crowd with him. I’m sure they were around. But President Bush came into the room with just himself and his photographer to take a picture with each Marine to send to the families and one close personal friend. I’ve been a leader at various levels for over half my life, and I sensed nothing but leadership and sincerity from the president that day.”

  All that time Kasal really missed the men in his battalion and felt as if he should be with them. The feeling was mutual: Lopez and the other staff NCOs from Weapons Co. still in Iraq were just as anxious to talk to Kasal. Things just weren’t the same without him, Lopez says.

  “I remember when we evacuated him, he talked to Major Rob Belknap on the telephone. Belknap assured him that everything was going to be good and that we would stay in touch. After he went back to the States, to Bethesda, all the staff NCOs got on the satellite phone, and we all called him. He wasn’t feeling sorry for himself; he wanted to know about his Marines. We got a new first sergeant eventually, but it wasn’t First Sergeant Kasal.”

  TREATMENT OR TORTURE?

  December was memorable for another reason as well. That’s when Kasal was fitted with a diabolical-looking contraption called an Ilizarov frame. Dr. Girard says the Ilizarov frame, named after the Russian orthopedic surgeon who invented it, has helped mend millions of broken and deformed legs. The device is also horribly painful and ungainly, especially when the patient has a hole in his leg big enough to put both hands in.

  That’s a memory Kasal can’t shake: “The orthopedic surgeon came into the room and started taking these big metal rings and holding them up against my leg. I asked him, ‘What the hell is that?’ He said, ‘This is what’s going to go on your leg.’” Kasal’s leg still had the fixator that had been installed in Iraq. He couldn’t imagine this new device taking its place.

  On about December 7 doctors used a skin graft from Kasal’s hip to mend some of the gaping wound on his leg. “It closed up some of the hole; then they were able to sew the rest of the wound together,” he says. “A couple of days after that they took my metal fixator off and put the Ilizarov frame on.”

  A 4-inch piece of donor bone was used to replace the bone in his lower leg that had been shattered beyond repair. The eight metal rings of the Ilizarov frame attached to the bone sections by rods, wires, and screws to hold the pieces together. Steel rods similar to bicycle spokes were drilled into both ends of his tibia and into a bone graft the surgeons hoped would grow between them. The screws were adjusted one turn every day while the bone was healing to obtain the required length and shape.

  “The fact that he had a large soft-tissue wound made the procedure more complicated,” Girard says. “It speaks a lot to his strength of character. Most people would not be able to endure this treatment. Kasal was able to see far enough down the street to see it ultimately helping him.”

  Not that Kasal actually embraced the device. After the surgeons finished the installation he had plenty of questions about the bizarre contraption.

  “My first question was ‘How am I going to drive?’ Kasal says
. “He replied, ‘You don’t!’ ‘How am I going to go to the gym?’ ‘You don’t!’ ‘How am I going to do this?’ ‘You don’t!’ Everything I came up with that was normal to me, he said, ‘You don’t!’”

  In addition most of the doctors Kasal spoke with told him he would probably be wearing the contraption for 12 to 18 months. It was very disheartening news, Kasal recalls.

  “During my recovery phase I had a second opinion from a civilian doctor. She didn’t recommend that procedure. She told me to amputate but that I would never run again.” In true Kasal fashion, he says, “I didn’t want to accept that. I had to try.”

  Kasal continues: “I said there was no driving, no this, no that. How was I going to survive? I live alone; I am single, blah, blah, blah. My main orthopedic surgeon was more optimistic; he said he thought it would be off by April. At the time that sounded good to me, but it wasn’t going to come true.”

  As difficult and painful as the wounds and surgeries were, Kasal says they were nothing compared to the long road of recovery. “I’m a warrior and a very independent person,” he says, “but just like that, in the blink of an eye, my whole world changed forever. One minute I was as strong and hardy as they get, and in a split second I was a bloody, broken mess.”

  FIERCELY INDEPENDENT

  His fierce independence and pride would sometimes jeopardize his recovery. But ultimately he credits those traits for helping him fight back—against indignities as well as against the effects of his wounds.

  “Many times before I was wounded I used to joke that if I ever became injured or sick I’d try to maintain as much of my dignity as I could,” he says. “And one thing I swore I’d never do was to use a bedpan or have someone else helping me with the bathroom. But suddenly there I was, lying in a field hospital—a bloody and broken person with one leg hanging by flesh and gaping wounds in my backside. I still got up on crutches and used the bathroom on my own. And I kept doing that even throughout my long hospitalization at Bethesda Naval Medical Center.”

  Even right after a surgery, Kasal would hobble into the bathroom on his own, leaving the lights out so the nurses wouldn’t know. “They had given me direct orders to never get out of bed on my own,” he says. Of course whenever the nurse came in and saw his empty bed, it was obvious there was only one place he could be. “So I’d hear this knock on the door followed by stern warnings to never do it again,” he says. “As painful as this was, my own sense of dignity and pride were more important to me. You can break a Marine’s body but never his spirit.”

  The severity of his wounds forced Kasal to accept treatments that tore at his pride. The lacerations across his back and buttocks were too deep to simply stitch shut at the surface. So each day Kasal had to roll over as a nurse came and packed his wounds with gauze. He had to endure this treatment daily or every other day for about five months before the wounds finally healed enough to need no further dressings.

  “There’s not much dignity in this procedure,” he says.

  But Kasal insisted on doing as much for himself as was possible, often to the chagrin of the nurses whom he appreciated and respected. “I felt the only way I was going to get better was to keep my spirit and be as strong as I could,” he explains. “I figured I had two choices: be stubborn and do everything I could to get back to health or give up and let the grim outlook come true. I chose to fight.”

  His motivation was as direct as an order: “I wanted my life back,” he says simply. “I wanted my Marines back. And no matter what it took I was going to win.

  “I’d take the pain of the wounds and the many surgeries any day over the emotional pain I was feeling about being away from my Marines and from doing what I loved most, which was leading Marines. My body may have been broken, but it was nothing compared to the pain I felt in my heart from not being with my Marines. I actually felt guilty lying there in the hospital.”

  A WHEELCHAIR FOR CHRISTMAS

  Kasal spent the holidays laid up in his room at Bethesda. But after a month of every-other-day surgeries, just days before Christmas, he was finally able to get out of bed and use a wheelchair for an hour or two at a time.

  “That brought my spirits up tremendously,” he says. He used his new mobility to visit with young Marines recuperating in rooms nearby. “Seeing and talking with them made me feel like a leader again,” Kasal says. “That was a great help.

  “I would even go get them food if they were unable to get out of bed. Every day for the next month I went from room to room to reassure them, talk to them, and just ask how they were. This was my best time.”

  Christmas was still a rough ordeal emotionally. By then he had been hospitalized for 42 days and was still mostly bedridden. An hour or two of mobility each day couldn’t get Brad Kasal where he needed to be.

  “I only wanted to be one place that Christmas,” he says, “and that was back in Iraq with my Marines. They were still over there spending their Christmas engaged with the enemy and away from their families. That was the only place I wanted to be, and it was tearing me up that I couldn’t be with them.”

  But there was no escaping Christmas. Holiday decorations were everywhere and Christmas scenes were on every television set. And the images only reminded Kasal of his far-off Marines.

  “There was no place to forget,” he says, “only to think. And it was the worst place to be.”

  In early January Kasal got word that his unit was going to be coming home at the end of the month. “All I wanted was to be there to see them home,” he says. “I kept telling my doctor, Commander McGuigan, that he had to get me out of there and back home to Camp Pendleton by the end of January or I would push my bed out of the hospital myself and find a way home!”

  The medical team responded to Kasal’s determination. On January 22, he was cleared to go home. Follow-up hospitalizations and surgeries would be at Balboa Naval Hospital in San Diego. “As anxious as I was to leave,” Kasal says, “I also felt a tinge of sadness as I had grown very close to the nurses and staff at Bethesda and realized how much I would miss them. They were truly committed to their jobs and cared greatly for each patient. I will forever be grateful for their care.”

  On at least one occasion, however, he had been able to take care of them as well. “I became very loyal to my nurses and corpsmen,” he says. “I remember one instance in particular where I had an older roommate who was having a kidney stone removed. Being right next to him for two days, I heard every piece of advice the nurses gave him. It was all right on. And I saw the patient ignore them and not follow their advice. On the third night of his stay he started complaining very loudly to the nurse on deck about pain and the inability to go to the bathroom. His complaining started about 11 and continued until around 2:30 in the morning.

  “Each time he got worse and louder, and each time the nurse tried to remain polite and professional with him, giving him instructions that he had to drink water and other things he failed to do, which were causing all his symptoms. I saw how rude and mean he was being to the nurse each time and how professional yet frustrated and rattled the nurse was becoming. Plus the rude patient was keeping me awake with his consistent whining. So I politely asked the nurse to leave and close the door behind her. She did, and once the door was closed, I grabbed my crutches, painfully got out of bed, and walked over to my roommate’s bed.

  “I pointed my crutch at him and said, ‘Listen to the nurse. She’s right. And if I hear one more peep out of you the rest of this night, I’m going to shove this crutch up your ass and give you some real pain to complain about.’

  “With that said, I got back into bed and fell asleep. I never heard one more word from him the rest of the night, and he quietly got up the next morning and left to go home without a word.” Kasal pauses. “Those were my nurses, and nobody gives them a hard time.”

  FRIENDS AND COMRADES

  After more than three months in Maryland the day finally arrived for Kasal to return to his home in California. On Januar
y 22, 2005, he began a two-day journey aboard an Air Force medevac flight. The first night he landed at Travis Air Force Base and spent the night there. Early the next morning he left Travis for Marine Corps Air Station North Island, followed by a short ambulance ride to Naval Hospital Camp Pendleton (NHCP).

  “When I arrived at NHCP the first thing I saw when I pulled up and they opened the doors was a welcoming party,” Kasal says. “There were a whole bunch of my former Marines who had been wounded and were sent home early waiting for me. They found out I was being flown in and they all showed up at the hospital.

  “That was pretty emotional and touching. It was kind of overwhelming because that was the first time I had seen any of them since I got wounded.”

  After getting a quick physical and a careful examination of his leg, Kasal was discharged to go home. As eager as he had been to return home, he realized that his physical needs and his pride were going to make for a difficult transition to recovery in California, where he would have to rely on the help of friends.

  “Again, being as independent as I am, it was very hard for me to ask for or accept help,” he says.

  Since his high school days, Kasal had always seen himself as the helper or the protector. “I’d help any way any time but never asked for help. And now I realized I’d have to become almost reliant on others. It would be a long time before I could drive, run errands, cook, or even clean my own house. That was the hardest part, having everything you know stripped away from you.