Wounded in Iraq, tortured by delays
WASHINGTON, D.C. - The pain pinched his face as Sgt. Curtis Mills pulled on the weight machine inside the Walter Reed Army Medical Center's physical therapy annex. His right shoulder, a jagged maze of red and purple scar tissue, crackled with each pull as if packed with sand and gravel.
But that's not what made this veteran soldier cry.
"What's happening is . . . you see, I'm not fit for duty anymore, so they're going to medically put me out," Mills said, his voice breaking as tears mixed with his sweat.
Wiping his face with a towel, he took a deep breath and continued.
"I love my country. I love the military. I'm proud to serve," he said. "But being here is a tough pill to swallow because I feel I've given the Army everything they've ever asked of me . . . and I feel like that's not happening here."
In other words, Mills feels shortchanged. He understands that his career as a soldier effectively ended that night last September when his three-vehicle patrol, part of the U.S. Army Reserve 94th Military Police Company, came under attack on a road outside Ramadi, Iraq. He'd like nothing more than to leave the single Army hotel room in which he, his wife and their two kids have lived for months, and go home to Shapleigh and whatever civilian life has to offer.
But he can't. This 30-year-old reservist, who's spent fully half of his seven years in the military deployed to El Salvador, Bosnia and Iraq, is fighting a bureaucratic battle with no end in sight.
"You're told by everybody not to let them put you out until they're done fixing you," Mills said. "They owe you that."
Ten months after a roadside bomb ripped into the side of his Humvee and peppered the right side of his body with shrapnel, Mills still talks about it in the present tense:
"After the IED (improvised explosive device) goes off, I grab the mike and I'm able to call in that we've been hit. At the same time, I'm looking at my gunner, who is now slumped over in his seat. And my driver is yelling and driving, so I'm like, 'OK, he's good.' And I'm trying to tell them that I've been hit and I'm getting no response from my gunner."
That's when the pain from his own injuries - a compound fracture of his upper right arm, massive shrapnel wounds to his upper right leg, no feeling whatsoever below his right knee - washed over him.
"I drop the mike . . . and they came back (on the radio) and I need to call back on them again . . . so I end up grabbing another mike - instead of being just on the platoon (frequency), it was squadronwide. I didn't care, I had to let them know. Then I finally get the other mike by grabbing the cord and yanking it up."
He paused and let out a long, hard breath.
"We continue driving and we stop underneath the bridge with the other two trucks - one is pointed one way and the other's pointed the other way and we pulled in between. And I'm telling them to get my gunner out of the turret - and they pull him up out of the turret and they're trying to clamp on his neck because he's bleeding."
While some soldiers tended to the gunner, Spc. Christopher Kotch, 21, of Brunswick, others began assessing Mills' wounds.
"They start trying to work on my arm and my leg. But when they're cutting away at my shirt, the bone is sticking out. So one guy's working on my arm and another on my leg and I know I'm bleeding out my back but I've got all this stuff on . . . and what's going through my head at this point, out of everything else, I'm thinking 'medevac.' "
His comrades finally got through on the radio. The news wasn't good.
"They say it's going to be 20 minutes. No way. We can't wait 20 minutes for no damn medevac. The other thing is that it's dark and I can't see down by my legs and I can't feel. . . . I'm actually anticipating my foot is gone - it's blown off. And I'm trying to psych myself up to look, 'cause I gotta look, right? I need to look so I can tell them if I need a tourniquet on my leg. But at the same time, I need to be ready to see it because I don't want to go into shock. Shock at this point could kill me too."
Finally, he grabbed a light and flashed it on his right foot. It was still there.
"There was just so much pain. Every part of me is numb and hurting and I'm talking and trying to help them work on my arm and finally, like, we've gotta get out of here. We can't wait 20 minutes for a medevac to get here."
With that, the convoy started back to its base. The right front tire of Mills' Humvee - the one right under him - was destroyed. The vehicle was riding on its wheel rim.
As they sped through the site of the first attack, another roadside bomb went off. Then, from somewhere in the darkness, snipers opened fire.
Mills, who is right-handed, picked up his M-16 with his left hand, balanced the barrel as best he could and fired back as the stricken Humvee tried to keep up with the rest of the convoy.
"My driver loves talking about that," he said with a smile. "He goes, 'There was shooting coming from everywhere and all of a sudden I can distinguish shooting directly to my right and I look over and there's Mills shooting!' "
He didn't realize it at the time, but as they passed through the second attack, an enemy bullet hit Mills in the right thigh, passed completely through his buttocks and lodged in his upper left leg.
It's still there.
Upon arriving back at their base, Mills and Kotch, who survived a severed carotid artery in his neck, were immediately loaded onto a medical helicopter. Five days later, after stops at military hospitals in Iraq, Kuwait and Germany, Mills woke up at Walter Reed.
Except for occasional trips home on postoperative "convalescent leave," he's been there ever since. So have his wife, Penny, and their son, Conan, 2, and, since July 4, their daughter, Jessica, 16. They share one room in Mologne House, an Army hotel for outpatient soldiers adjacent to Walter Reed's sprawling medical buildings.
And they want to go home.
"It's definitely bonding time," Penny said gamely last week as Jessica kept an eye on Conan, who had just picked a handful of flowers for his dad.
The problem is, as the anniversary of the attack fast approaches, Mills can't go home. He now finds himself with a paralyzed lower right leg, a shoulder and left thigh that still require additional surgery and a military bureaucracy that seems reluctant to either perform the surgery or "medical board" him out of the Army so he can have the procedures done in Maine.
In short, he wants to get on with his life. But the system, much to his unpleasant surprise, won't let him.
"Curtis was one of the first guys we got back from Iraq," said Solomon Montgomery, the physical therapist who first met Mills the day he arrived. "His attitude toward recovery is excellent."
Five days a week, Mills reports to the physical therapy annex, created earlier this year to handle the steady stream of injured soldiers coming back from Iraq. Walter Reed has treated an estimated 3,300 soldiers from Operation Iraqi Freedom and many - including a startling number who have lost arms or legs or both - end up in physical therapy.
Under Montgomery's watchful eye, Mills rotates among a series of weight machines designed to increase his strength and balance. The exercises often leave him doubled over, gasping for air and, most noticeably, wincing with pain.
"He works hard," Montgomery said, noting that at best Mills will have 70 percent use of his right shoulder. "But his thing is that he's a little disappointed about some of the red tape he has to go through as far as the military is concerned."
As well he should be.
Ask Mills how many operations he's had since last September and he'll smile, look upward and reply, "I don't know . . . three, six, nine, 10, 11, 12 . . . more?"
The last one, to allow better movement in his shoulder, took place on St. Patrick's Day. But because his arm and shoulder bones continue to send jagged spurs out into his muscle tissue, Mills said, doctors have told him he'll need at least one more surgery to "clean it all up."
There's also the issue of the bullet still lodged in his leg. Despite X-rays from Germany that revealed its presence, Mills said, it took doctors at Walter Reed days to even acknowledge it was there. Then they told him it wasn't posing a medical threat, so there was no need to remove it.
"Now it's moving around and it's cutting and it's killing me," Mills said. "It's like I'm getting stabbed with a knife when I'm walking - and this is my good leg."
All he wants, Mills said, is for doctors at Walter Reed to operate on the shoulder and the leg, medically retire him from the service and send him home to Maine, where he hopes to go back to his job as a carrier with the U.S. Postal Service.
But the doctors "don't want to do the surgery here," he said. "They said, 'We're going to med board you out and you can have it done back in Maine by the VA (Veterans Administration).' "
Mills said many military friends, some with far more experience than his, have warned him, "For God's sake, don't let them do that. Make sure everything I need gets done here, not by the VA."
Thus, he insisted for months that the surgeries be done before his medical discharge. Then, earlier this year, he began to have second thoughts.
The room at Mologne House was getting smaller by the day. Penny and Conan had seen every tourist attraction in Washington, D.C., "right down to the botanical gardens." And with Jessica spending most of her sophomore year at Massabesic High School living with extended family and friends, her parents wanted the family reunited back in Maine in time for her junior year - at the latest.
All of which prompted Mills to finally tell hospital officials, "If you're not going to operate, then please just go ahead and med board me out. I've got to get out of here."
That was seven months ago.
The delays are, in a word, torture.
One day, after waiting four weeks for a single form to be signed by one of his doctors - the secretary had told Mills, "Once it's signed, I'll get back to you." - Mills confronted the secretary and demanded that she hand over an unsigned copy of the medical form.
"I then took the paperwork, walked to the other end of the hospital, went up three floors, went into the doctor's office and said, 'Here, can you sign this?' He signed it and I brought it back and said, 'Thanks for wasting a month.' "
Then in June, during one of his frequent inquiries about the status of his medical discharge, Mills was told "they were waiting for a bit of information from this one doctor - and they would get back to me when they had it."
Three and a half weeks later, Mills grabbed his cane and walked across the Walter Reed campus to the doctor's office. There, he was told "the doctor left July 1. He transferred to Arizona . . . so I have to call this lady on the phone and tell her, 'That doctor you're waiting for has left! That's why you're not getting a response!' "
Finally, there's his primary care physician. Mills visited her recently to tell her he's been having nightmares in which he can't breathe - only to wake up gasping for air.
"She told me she was afraid to give me referrals to see any other doctors because she could get her hand slapped by someone above her because I should have been med boarded by now," Mills said. "So to see these specialists, I don't even go through her. I just go directly to their offices now and, you know, try to get my way in."
Throughout last week's interview, a member of Walter Reed's public affairs staff listened closely to Mills and took frequent notes. He said he couldn't comment on Mills' case immediately, but would pass the soldier's complaints on to the appropriate hospital officials for their response.
Late last week, the hospital e-mailed a statement declining to comment on Mills' case because of "patient privacy laws and regulations."
"However," it continued, "we want to assure the public that every decision our staff makes is with the best interest of the patient in mind. If in the course of treating more than 700 battle casualties and 2,600 other patients from Operation Iraqi Freedom, we have failed to explain some of our actions completely enough to any of our patients, we apologize and will try to do better in the future. We are doing everything we can to help our patients complete their care at Walter Reed as quickly as medical science and their bodies will allow."
On Wednesday, as Mills went through his daily physical therapy regimen, his 166 comrades from the 94th military police finally came home to Maine and New Hampshire. Their 596-day deployment, twice extended by four months, was one of the longest served by an Army Reserve unit in Iraq.
Mills has spent many an hour during the past 10 months glued to the television set at Mologne House, watching the latest news from Iraq for any word on the 94th. The first time she saw him doing it, Penny told him, "Now you know how I felt."
He's also kept in touch with his unit via e-mails and the occasional telephone call. He calls them "my family" and wonders, now that they're home, when and how he'll see them all again.
Much as he treasures having his wife and kids with him, Mills said he'll probably send them home to Maine - with or without him - when school starts for Jessica in September. Penny can go back to her job as a nursing assistant at Maine Medical Center and maybe start catching up on the bills.
And Mills, like so many of the soldiers here, will limp through what's left of his military career alone.
"When I first got injured, one thing that used to help me get through the day was that I'd wish to God I could fast-forward six or seven months and be home," he said. "And it's 10 months later and I'm still here . . . and there's no end in sight."
The battle-scarred sergeant shifted on his cane, taking the pressure off the foot he cannot feel.
"You know, I love the military. I love my country. And I support my country, but this is not the military I know."
― george w. bush, Sunday, 8 August 2004 11:46 (twenty-one years ago)