At first he lay on his back silently, worried that any sound might attract the attention of the insurgents who had planted the bomb. He started thinking what might happen if the wrong person found him. “If I get captured, I could end up in some video getting my head sawed off,” he thought, “and then it’ll be all over the Internet for my family to see.”
As time passed, Radke found himself worrying less about the insurgents and more about his own condition. He could feel the blood running down his face, but he couldn’t feel anything else. The blood from his head wounds had poured into his eyes, leaving him unable to see. He tried to sit up, but couldn’t. He could feel panic starting to rise up. Finally, he screamed for help, and, seemingly out of nowhere, the team’s medic appeared.
“Everything’s OK, everything’s OK,” the medic said as he opened one of the rear doors. “Help is on its way. Let’s get you out of here.”
He grabbed Radke under the arms and tried to pull him out. But Radke was stuck. He couldn’t feel his legs. He thought, “Oh my God, my legs are gone.”
The medic said, “I need you to push with your legs.”
“I can’t feel ’em, Doc,” Radke shot back.
“Just push, just push,” Doc encouraged.
Radke started to think that maybe his legs were indeed still there. He willed them to push, and finally Doc was able to pull him free. For the first time, Radke screamed in pain. Then he lost consciousness.
When Radke came to, he was on the ground. Another medic was cutting off his clothes and patching up whatever wounds he could. The medic kept repeating, “Stay with me, stay with me.”
A hail of molten metal from the IED had pierced whatever flesh Radke’s body armor didn’t cover. Five pieces of shrapnel had lodged in his brain. Hundreds of other shards had lodged in his face, neck, arms, and legs. One of them had nicked his carotid artery. His jaw was fractured. His left forearm was broken in two places and the wrist was shattered. His right index finger was hanging by a shred of skin.
As Radke lay on the ground, his squad leader periodically came to check on him and to reassure him. “You’re doing good—just hang in there,” the squad leader said as he knelt next to Radke’s head. “The medevac is on its way. We’re getting you out of here.” Two soldiers loaded his stretcher onto the hood of a Humvee and climbed up beside Radke to steady him during the drive back to the highway.
His vision, which had been coming and going, had not returned for a while. He heard the rotors as the medevac helicopter approached and then felt the wind coming off its blades when it landed. He felt himself being lifted off the Humvee and carried onto the chopper. After the door slammed shut, he felt the chopper lifting off the ground. Every time he would lose consciousness during the short flight, medics would shake him awake.
When the helicopter landed, he heard the door open and then, over the roar of the rotors, he heard some female voices. He felt himself being carried off the chopper and had the sensation he was being wheeled into a hospital. In the operating room of the 86th Combat Army Support Hospital, a nurse kept prompting him for his name. He sensed a very bright light above him. For a while, he focused on the light. But then, everything started to fade to black. The bright light above him got smaller and smaller, until it was just a pinpoint. Then there was nothing.
• • •
Nova Radke had spent a restless night. Again and again, she’d been jolted awake by terrifying nightmares. Each time, she would see something horrible happening to her husband—Brian being shot, Brian being blown up, Brian being captured and tortured—and then she would wake up in a cold sweat. As morning broke and the Arizona sun rose high enough to start warming the cool desert air, Nova’s terrier shot up, circled at her feet, and began to whine.
Nova woke briefly, then slipped into a kind of waking dream. She had the sensation that Brian had just entered the room and then she felt his presence, his warmth, as he came closer to her.
“I just need to come to bed,” she heard him say. “I’m tired. I need to go to sleep.”
She scrunched her eyes tight, and said, “No, you need to go back! Don’t lie down! Go back to where you were and fight! You’ll be alright.”
He disappeared as quickly as he had appeared, and Nova opened her eyes. She rolled over to look at the alarm clock and saw it was exactly 9:00 A.M. She was still looking at the clock when the phone rang at 9:02. She glanced at the caller ID, saw that it was an Army number, and immediately grabbed the phone.
“Nova Radke?” a female voice asked.
“Yes,” Nova answered nervously as she stood up and started walking aimlessly around the room.
“This is Colonel Spear from the Arizona National Guard. Brian’s been hurt in an accident. We don’t have much more information about what happened. I’m en route to your home—”
“Ma’am, is it OK if you don’t come over?” Nova interrupted. “I just need to be by myself for a few moments. I will call you back.”
She let the phone drop into the cradle and sank to the floor, weeping. She sat there for a few minutes, thinking about her life and how, in an instant, everything had changed. Still in a daze, she picked up the phone and dialed Spear back.
As soon as the colonel picked up, Nova asked the all-important question: “Is he alive?”
“Yes,” Spear answered.
Nova hung up and called Brian’s cell phone, hoping that someone might pick up. She called over and over again, but it just kept dumping into voicemail. Remembering that a friend’s husband was stationed in Baghdad with Brian, she called him. The soldier on the other end reassured her, “Brian’s at the CASH, they’re working on him, and he’s stable.” Another friend supplied a phone number that gave her direct access to the 86th Combat Army Support Hospital. A doctor there told her about the shrapnel, the lacerations, the broken bones, and the severed index finger. He told her that Brian had lost a lot of blood, that he’d had a stroke, and that twice his heart had stopped and they’d had to shock him back to life.
A team of eight surgeons had worked on him for twelve hours to get him stabilized, the doctor continued. Because of his head wounds, Brian had been medevacked sixty miles north to the military’s frontline trauma center at Balad for evaluation by brain injury specialists. There, doctors decided to leave the five pieces of shrapnel in his brain because surgery to remove them might do more harm than good.
Once Brian was stable enough to travel the two thousand miles to the U.S. military’s main foreign hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, he was placed on an Air Force cargo plane specially outfitted to provide the same critical care as a land-bound intensive care unit. At Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, he coded again as doctors were getting him ready to fly back to the United States. At that point, one of the doctors called Nova and suggested she fly to Germany with Brian’s parents. Nova knew what that meant: the doctors didn’t think Brian was going to make it home alive. “No, I’m going to see him on American soil,” she insisted.
Five days after the explosion, Brian was back on one of the Air Force’s flying ICUs, headed home. He was still in a medically induced coma, but at least he was alive and on his way to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where the most seriously injured soldiers are sent for state-of-the-art treatment.
When Nova heard that Brian had arrived at Walter Reed, she raced over to see him. As she walked across the hospital’s dark and deserted parking lot, she thought, “This all feels so surreal.” The silence gave the night a dreamlike quality that followed her down the empty hallways leading to the ICU. As she approached Brian’s bed, the bevy of nurses bustling around him jolted her back to reality. The closer she got to his bedside, the faster her heart beat. The sight of him lying there so still suddenly brought home the overwhelming reality of his wounds. His face was so swollen that he was barely recognizable. It seemed as if there were stitches and tubes everywhere. His red and raw neck made her think of ground hamburger meat. Staples ran all the way from his righ
t ear to his collarbone. Bandages ran from his fingertips to his armpits and from his toes to the tops of his thighs.
Nova could hear the ventilator steadily breathing for her husband. As she watched his chest rising and falling in rhythm with the machine, her own breathing started to quicken. Suddenly she had the sensation of hot water pouring over her. She felt the heat flow from the top of her head, over her shoulders, and down to her waist. Then she crumpled to the floor, unconscious. The next thing she knew, she was sitting in a chair and a nurse was asking, “Honey, are you OK?”
The following day, Nova was sitting across from the doctor in charge of Brian’s care. The doctor explained that he wasn’t very optimistic after looking at Brian’s brain scan. He said that there was extensive damage to the right frontal lobe and that there was even a possibility that her husband might end up “a vegetable.” He then asked Nova if she had any questions.
“Yes,” she said. “Will he still be able to have children?”
“Oh yes,” the doctor nodded reassuringly, “those muscles still work.”
“No, I mean mentally,” she exclaimed, starting to laugh for the first time since the distressing call from Colonel Spear. “What is he going to be like when he wakes up?”
“Until he comes out of the coma,” the doctor said, “we just won’t know.”
Stunned, Nova sat silently for a few long moments, a rush of new worries tumbling through her brain. “What if he wakes up and tells me he doesn’t love me anymore?” she thought. “What if he doesn’t even know me?”
The doctor told her that the only thing she could do for Brian while she waited for him to wake up from the coma was to sit by his side and talk to him. So Nova essentially moved into Brian’s room. She slept and showered there, going out for just a few hours each day to clear her head. Knowing how much he loved sports, Nova made sure his TV was tuned in to whatever game she could find. When there wasn’t a game, she would sit next to Brian and reassure him that he was home now and that she would take care of him. Periodically she would try to bring him out of the coma by loudly calling his name.
One day, about a week after he had arrived at Walter Reed, Brian suddenly opened his eyes and looked straight at her. Even though his jaw was wired shut and he shouldn’t have been able to speak with the trach in his neck, Brian somehow managed to utter the words: “I promised. I promised.” Nova saw one big tear well up in his left eye, and as it trickled down the side of his face, she knew he was going to make it back to her. Then his eyes closed and he again slipped into a coma.
Brian’s words brought Nova back to the day, two weeks before the explosion, when the promise was made. He’d returned from Iraq for R&R and had traveled with Nova to visit his family in his hometown of Vancouver, Washington. As they stood on the patio of his parents’ house holding each other’s hands in the shadow of Mount St. Helens, Brian and Nova talked about the future and their fears for his safety. Brian told her that no matter what happened, he’d come home to her, “I promise.”
For the next couple of weeks while he remained unconscious, nine teams of doctors took turns putting Brian’s broken body back together again—one day placing rods in his shattered forearm, another day removing the bigger hunks of shrapnel from his legs. When he finally did come out of the coma for good, he was disoriented. He thought that he was still in Baghdad and that only a day had passed since the explosion.
He was still trying to piece together memories of the blast when Nova walked into the room. She was dressed all in black, her slight five-foot-three frame swallowed up by the bulky Army-issue poplin jacket, her face, tanned dark by the Arizona sun, barely peeking out from under a scarf beanie. “Hi, honey,” she exclaimed, happy to find him finally awake.
“Get out!” he screamed. “Get the hell out of my room, dammit, you little Iraqi S.O.B.!”
Nova reached over to touch his shoulder, hoping to reassure him. But Brian pulled away and yelled, “Help!” Again she tried to comfort him, and he growled, “Quit touching me! Quit touching me!”
Hearing the commotion, several nurses rushed in and took Nova aside. “He doesn’t recognize you,” one of them explained. “You need to go out and take your hat and jacket off.” Nova left the room and shed the offending articles of clothing. When she returned, she found Brian bolt upright in the bed, his eyes wide open. He looked at her and exclaimed, “I’m so glad you’re here. Some Iraqi kid was trying to take my body parts.”
Relieved as Nova was to be recognized, she was frightened by the implications of what she had just seen. “Oh my God, is he going to be like this forever?” she thought. “If he’s like this all the time, how am I going to live and deal with it? Am I going to lose my husband?”
It would take several months before Brian consistently recognized his wife. Even on the days he didn’t know who Nova was, he was happy for her visits. “Well, I don’t know who she is, but she’s hot,” he’d think. “She’s nice. She hasn’t hurt me. She wants to take care of me. I’ll stick with it.”
• • •
On a warm September day almost a year later, Brian Radke was in the vast physical therapy room at Walter Reed seated across the table from a therapist, working to regain strength and flexibility in his shattered left wrist. Nearby, a gaunt teenager in a wheelchair was raising and lowering an exercise ball behind his head while another soldier was flipping through the latest issue of Amputee Golfer magazine.
The once-muscular physique that had made Radke a star high school and college athlete—a quarterback and shortstop who went on to play two years of minor-league baseball—was now wasted by the loss of nearly sixty pounds from his six-foot-one frame. A baggy ARMY T-shirt tucked into formfitting sweatpants accentuated his unintended trimness. Shrapnel had marred his chiseled features, leaving scars slicing across both cheeks and several small dents just above his thick, dark eyebrows. He was clean-shaven and still wore his brown hair short in a military-style fade.
As he finished up his exercises, Radke started thinking about what he was going to say to the two reporters he was scheduled to meet after the morning’s physical therapy session. If he was going to give them an unvarnished view of what life was like for brain-injured soldiers coming home from the war, he would have to be completely honest about how the explosion had changed his own life. That would mean being candid about the profound memory loss still plaguing him and the behavioral problems that were whittling away at his relationship with his wife. For a man with a strong sense of privacy, it was going to be a challenge.
Radke hobbled into the lounge where the reporters were waiting, introduced himself, and carefully eased his body onto a couch. As he started to tell his story, his face was expressionless and his voice so dispassionate that he could have been reciting the details of someone else’s horrific ordeal. He impassively told the reporters about the click he heard an instant before the explosion, the image of his best friend’s decapitated body, and the molten metal that had pierced so many parts of his own body—and his brain. Then he began to describe all the enduring repercussions from the blast, both the obvious injuries to his body and the far less visible wounds to his brain.
Since that fateful October day in 2005, Radke’s body had been constantly under siege. He suffered from relentless headaches and extreme sensitivity to light. High doses of painkillers had become a routine part of his life. He had undergone some sixty surgeries. There was one to replace a damaged nerve in his arm, another to repair a mangled knee, dozens to remove the shards of metal embedded in his arms and legs. Even a year after the blast, he still had more than five hundred pieces of shrapnel in him. Every so often, his body would expel one of the small steel shards. Last winter, on his thirty-first birthday, he was eating a grilled cheese sandwich with Nova in the hospital cafeteria when he suddenly started to choke. He brought a napkin up to his face and coughed up a small rounded hunk of steel that had worked its way through the lining of his throat and into his mouth.
As distressing
as the injuries to his body were, they worried Radke far less than what had befallen his brain.
Before the blast, Radke said, he had been easygoing and quiet. Now, he was moody and quick-tempered. “Some days I’ll get really emotional,” he said. “This past Sunday I cried for seven hours, and I have no idea why. I don’t know from one minute to the next how I’m going to feel. I’ll go from being in a good mood to being upset. Some things that didn’t bother me before drive me crazy now. In sixty seconds, I can go from happy to ‘I wanna kick your butt.’ ” He said he had also lost the ability to censor ugly thoughts. Once something popped into his brain, he’d need to say it even if it hurt the feelings of those closest to him, like Nova. “It’s almost like having Tourette’s, I guess,” he said with a smile. “That’s what my wife says when we’re joking about it.”
Worse yet, the brain injury had left Radke with slowed mental processing and with problems focusing and organizing his thoughts. Expressing them was even more difficult. After months of speech therapy, he sometimes still had trouble stringing together coherent sentences. Occasionally he’d stumble over a word and then lose his train of thought, unable to remember what he’d just been saying. His inability to keep track of verbal exchanges was causing trouble with Nova. “A lot of times my wife and I will be talking and we’ll get into an argument and she’s like, ‘You said da-da da-da,’ and I’m like, ‘What? You’re crazy. I did not say that.’ And that just fuels the fight.”
Those kinds of short-term memory problems extended to every part of his life. Before the explosion, he was always able to keep his schedule in his head. Now, he needed to write down every detail in a day planner and still he’d forget the purpose of appointments or miss them entirely. In fact, he said, just this morning he’d had a typical memory lapse as he was starting the therapy for his shattered wrist. After noticing that his watch was getting in the way, he decided to bring it over to where he had stashed his belongings. By the time he got there, he’d forgotten that he wanted to drop the watch off. So he returned to the table where his therapist was waiting, only to realize that he was still wearing the watch. There would be three more futile trips across the room before he finally came up with a strategy: he took the watch off and carried it over in his hand as a concrete reminder to leave it behind.
The Concussion Crisis Page 10
