[Mb-hair] NYTimes.com Article: Paralyzed, a Soldier Asks Why

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Paralyzed, a Soldier Asks Why

October 15, 2004
 By BOB HERBERT 



 

DALE CITY, Va. 

Sunlight was pouring through the doorway to the furnished
basement of the neat two-story home on Reardon Lane. The
doorway had been widened to accommodate the wheelchair of
Army Staff Sgt. Eugene Simpson Jr., who was once a star
athlete but now, at age 27, spends a lot of time in his
parents' basement, watching the large flat-screen TV. 

I asked the sergeant whether he ever gets depressed. "No,"
he said quickly, before adding, "I mean, I could say I was
sad for a while. But it didn't really last long." 

Sergeant Simpson's expertise is tank warfare. But the Army
is stretched thin, and the nation's war plans at times have
all the coherence of football plays drawn up in the
schoolyard. When Sergeant Simpson's unit was deployed from
Germany to Iraq, the tanks were left behind and the
sergeant ended up bouncing around Tikrit in a Humvee, on
the lookout for weapons smugglers and other vaguely defined
"bad guys." 

He said he felt more like a cop than a soldier. 

One
evening last April, Sergeant Simpson was the passenger in
the lead vehicle of a four-vehicle convoy on a routine
patrol in Tikrit. "It was a little housing area," he said.
"We were just there to show a presence." 

Iraqi soldiers were in the second vehicle of the convoy.


"I looked back and the Iraqi truck had stopped for some
reason," Sergeant Simpson said. 

He waved the driver forward, but the truck remained
motionless. "That was odd," he said. "They wouldn't follow
us. Then I happened to look down between two houses and I
saw an Iraqi guy standing in the alley with like a remote
control key for a car. And that was odd because there were
like no cars in the whole little housing area." 

Sergeant Simpson had been taught that key remotes can be
used by insurgents to set off explosives. "So I knew right
then something was wrong, and I raised up my gun to fire at
him. But before I could get my weapon all the way up he
pushed the button." 

The bomb hidden in the road exploded with terrific force
just a few feet from Sergeant Simpson. 

"When I saw the explosion go off, I tried to jump back into
the center of the Humvee for more protection," he said.
"Everything went in slow motion for about 15 seconds. I saw
scrap metal and dust and everything flying by me, and I
felt it hitting me all in my legs and my back. It felt like
hot metal burning my skin everywhere." 

The driver of the Humvee fired at the attacker, who
vanished. Sergeant Simpson was in agony. "It hurt so bad, I
couldn't cry," he said. 

The sergeant's spinal cord had been severed. On the short
drive back to their home camp, he felt as if he was dying.
"I would open and close my eyes," he said, "and all I could
see was my family." 

Sergeant Simpson is paralyzed from the waist down. He said
he remembers hearing, as he was airlifted from Baghdad back
to Germany, the moans and the cries and the weeping of the
many other wounded soldiers on the plane. And he remembers
the grief of the severely wounded soldiers in the military
hospital in Landstuhl, where most of the evacuees from Iraq
are taken. He saw amputees, and soldiers who were paralyzed
or had suffered brain damage or other crippling injuries. 

"Some of them never wanted anybody to come into their
room," he said. "They never wanted to talk to anybody. The
ones with the lesser injuries - you know, maybe got shot in
the arm, that kind of thing - they were more upbeat." 

Sergeant Simpson is married to a German woman, Shirley
Weber, and they have two children. He is trying to get his
family into the U.S., but the red tape is formidable. "The
separation from them - that's the hardest thing to deal
with," he said. 

His feelings about the military, at the moment, are
ambivalent. "Of course, I still wish I could walk and still
be in the military," he said. "That's what I love to do." 

But when I asked if he still loved the military itself, he
paused and then said: 

"Not as much. That's basically because we were over there,
all these young guys, doing our jobs, but we really didn't
know why we were there. I ask myself, 'What was our
purpose?' And to this day I still can't figure out our
purpose for being there." 

He said he accepted his obligation, as a soldier, to fight.
He is not resentful. But he would have appreciated a little
more clarity about what he was fighting for. 

E-mail: bobherb at nytimes.com


http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/15/opinion/15herbert.html?ex=1098861877&ei=1&en=e8e8e997f079006a


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