PALO ALTO, Calif. -- It has taken hundreds of hours of therapy, but Jason Poole, a 23-year old Marine corporal, has learned all over again to speak and to walk.
At times, though, words still elude him. He can read barely 16 words a minute. His memory can be fickle, his thinking delayed. Injured by a roadside bomb in Iraq, he is blind in his left eye, deaf in his left ear, weak on his right side and still getting used to his new face, which was rebuilt with skin and bone grafts and 75 to 100 titanium screws and plates.
Wounded on patrol near the Syrian border on June 30, 2004, he said he considers himself lucky to be alive.
So do his doctors.
"Basically, I want to get my life back," Poole said. "I'm really trying."
But Poole knows the life ahead of him is unlikely to match the one he had planned, in which he was to attend college and become a teacher, get married and have children. His girlfriend from before he went to war is now just a friend. Before he left, they had agreed they might talk about getting married when he got back.
"But I didn't come back," he said.
Transforming wounds
The survival rate among Americans hurt in Iraq is higher than in any previous war: There are seven to eight survivors for every death, compared with two survivors per death in World War II.
But these survivors are coming home with serious injuries that will transform their lives: combinations of damaged brains and spinal cords, vision and hearing loss, disfigured faces, burns, amputations, mangled limbs, and psychological ills such as depression and post-traumatic stress.
American deaths in Iraq numbered 2,225 as of Jan. 20. Of 16,472 wounded, 7,625 were listed as unable to return to duty within 72 hours. Many who survive explosions - more than half - suffer head injuries. More than 1,700 of those wounded in Iraq are known to have brain injuries, half of which are severe enough that they might permanently impair thinking, memory, mood, behavior and the ability to work.
Jill Gandolfi, a co-director of the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit of the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, where Poole is receiving therapy, said, "We are looking at an epidemic of brain injuries."
Such injuries can knock out specific functions, such as vision and speech, and might cause epilepsy and increase the risk of dementia. So many military men and women are returning with head injuries combined with other wounds that the government has designated four Veterans Affairs hospitals as "polytrauma rehabilitation centers" to take care of them. The Palo Alto hospital where Poole is being treated is one.
