I had my 2nd surgery when I arrived in Germany and waking up after surgery sure was something. It was a good thing that I woke up but the down side was I felt horrible pain! When I was hit with the shrapnel earlier it had really hurt but at that time I had adrenaline pumping so the pain wasn’t so bad. However when I woke up after surgery I was in so much pain I screamed for an hour because the medicine they gave me wasn’t working. Apparently when they gave me the drugs to wake up from the anesthetic they gave me way to much so it not only woke me up, it took all the working pain meds out. I was mad and they could tell. I was yelling and screaming bloody murder. They gave me morphine but instead of injecting it in the IV they put it in my arm muscle and it only works right in that area. It felt like it was forever before the pain got a little better.

It’s a long, difficult and stressful time going through the process of changing hospitals, rooms, dressings, and other things. They had to change my IV everyday because there was such a risk of I don’t know what so I was constantly getting stuck with needles in my arms and hands. Also they stabbed me in the stomach every morning with a syringe they said was a stool softener, yeah right they just love to torture innocent wounded soldiers by stabbing them with whatever they can get their hands on. Oh they also love to wake you up just when you get to sleep so they can take you vitals. Aren’t you supposed to rest and heal in a hospital? I mean I got less sleep after I got hurt than I did in Iraq and they mortared us EVERY night. They’re at least somewhat decent in all the abuse they dished out. I mean they took a break now and then during the day so we could sleep. Not the nurses though; they are slow to get your pain medicine, won’t leave you alone to rest and yell at you when you say “You are nothing but blood sucking leaches that drain every ounce of life from me so I can’t do anything to you, just because you were dropped when you were a baby don’t mean you can take it out on me”. That really pissed them off but I was in a lot of pain and after everything I had been through they could have at least shown some courtesy.

While I was there a wounded soldier was brought into my room. His team was ambushed and they were hit by a RPG. There Hummer was armored but the rocket went through the door and exploded killing 4 and taking a huge chunk of his leg along with it. When he got there the doctors just had had it wrapped with a little gauze it wasn’t bleeding much because there wasn’t much there. The part of leg that was still attached was only hanging on by a tendon or two. He was in a lot of pain and there was nothing I could do. I tried to talk to him but the only thing that came out of my mouth was “I’m so sorry” why did this have to happen? Don’t get me wrong I agree that we should have taken Saddam out of power. But did we really need to send this many troops? All this could’ve easily been solved with a couple of high powered nuclear bombs. Iraq would’ve made a very nice glass farm or maybe a parking lot for a huge Wal-Mart. I don’t disagree with the war it just could have been handled a lot less painfully (for us).

I finally got to call home late that evening after I had some food and kind of woke up. So I called my Dad. Since I had been over there he always had his phone on so if I got a chance to call he would be available. When he answered I told him what happened and then he 3-wayed my mom. He thought it would be better for her to hear it from me instead of a doctor calling that wouldn’t give her any information. When I talked to her she was very upset. I tried to assure her that I was fine and going to be coming home soon because of the injuries. I really didn’t explain them at the time because I didn’t want her to worry anymore than she already was. As you can probably imagine everyone was both happy that I was alive and sad that I had been hurt. No one wants anything to happen to you but in war there are always casualties. This was something I knew long before going over there.
Early the next morning I was put on a C-130 and flown to Kuwait City, Kuwait. When I arrived the Air Force Pilot said they were switching me to a C-5 and then flying me to Germany. The whole switching process took about 10 hours all together. Now this normally wouldn’t be that big of deal because the military is all about waiting so I was definitely used to that. But if you remember, they stripped me of all my clothes, gave me a wool blanket as cover, it was hot and it wasn’t comfortable. I am a dreamer, and out of all the places I dreamed of going none of them included me being butt naked under an itchy blanket and being carried around like some king on a throne. Just in case you were wandering you don’t get this added bonus from Expedia.
The flights were horrible and if you have never ridden in these planes you will now know why people want to jump out of them. First of all when you are Medi-Vac’d (Medically Evacuated) you are put on a special stretcher that (is very uncomfortable) can be hung in the center of the plane. They are stacked side by side, four rows up and depending on the plane about eight rows long. In order to do this you are literally inches from the person above you so it is almost impossible to get out. So you can imagine how hard it is if you need to go to the bathroom. What’s that you said you can’t imagine? Ok I’ll explain it to you. The Nurses have these special boxes (that oddly resemble Chinese take-out boxes) they unfold and become a (very hard to use lying down) bed pan box. Now since the time I got hurt to the time on the plane I had been given an IV and a lot of fluids. If you don’t know in Iraq it is about 130°F and it is a very dry heat so you sweat 95% of all the water you take in and rarely have to visit the bathroom. In the plane however you retain all water because of the cold and as a natural occurrence you have to GO. The second thing is the planes don’t have insulation so you hear everything and it is freezing. If that doesn’t sound bad you just wait.

When I arrived at the Field hospital I finally was given a pain killer that took away some of the pain. I was the first casualty they had for the day so they got to me right away. First thing they did was take me to get x-rays to see where the shrapnel was in my foot. Also they wanted to see what the damaged looked like on the inside. It wasn’t good even I could tell that! I could tell it was bad when I saw that all the bones had a dark jagged line through them.
Now all this time they had a bandage on my foot but they didn’t have one on my thigh because it wasn’t bleeding much while I was lying down. However to get from the stretcher they brought me in on to the x-ray table I had to stand like a flamingo. When I did that it started flowing again and it was getting everywhere all over the floor and the x-ray table. Now I wasn’t worried about my belongings (or lack there of) but their multi-million dollar machine didn’t seem like it was bought to be a gauze pad. After I received a look like I just busted their laptop I apologized (a lot). Come on guys it wasn’t my fault, blame the dang terrorist.
Surgery took them a while and the one thing I remembered before the surgery was when they gave me the anesthetic; you know when they ask you to count backwards from 100 to 0. I don’t know about you but I try to compete and have fun with everything I do, and that my friend was a challenge. So before they gave me the anesthetic I asked them “how far do people usually get before they black out” and the Doc said “about 96-94 somewhere around there” so I replied “when I wake up tell me how far I got.” I finally awoke from the procedure at about 10pm and I was hungry because I couldn’t eat anything before the surgery and hadn’t eaten since breakfast. When I asked for the food they sent the Doc in to make sure I was doing OK. The first thing he said was “you are definitely a fighter, you made it all the way to 87 I was shocked. I almost gave you another dose ‘cause I thought it didn’t work.”

Now I have to tell you even though I was hurt and hurt bad I still had my awesome sense of humor. My team Sgt. who I called “Big Guns” was there with me from the moment I got hit to the aid station before they sent me south to the combat hospital. He was trying to keep me from going into shock by telling me jokes and keeping me laughing. After he bandaged me up he said “Pete” (that is what my team called me) “guess what… now you get a Purple Heart!” By the way that was the only medal I didn’t want because it requires something like this to happen.
All this time he had to keep pressure on my foot to slow the bleeding down which is very painful. I kept telling him “Stop pushin’ on it that really isn’t helping the pain” he would just grin and say “it’s to stop the bleeding Pete I can’t” I said “fine let me bleed then it hurts.” By the time we got to the aid station the bed of the Hummer was filled with blood. When they pulled me out they had to open the tailgate and when they did it just poured out. I thought for sure I was done for, I had never seen so much blood in my life.
This is the part that I don’t understand the nurses cut all of my clothes off and put a blanket over me. They said it was to make sure that I wasn’t hurt anywhere else and so they could easily get to the wounds. Yeah right I thought as I lay there in front everybody butt naked with a scratchy wool military blanket over me. Anyway after they stopped the bleeding they sent a Chaplin in to see me. He said “is there anything you would like?” after a second I said “yeah. Where is my CD player?” he looked at me kind of weird and I’m sure he thought I was nuts! But I was concerned because I had my Captain’s brand new Good Charlotte CD in it that I was listening to and it was in my cargo pocket of my uniform. Now you are probably wandering what that has to do with anything. My leg was hit right above the cargo pocket and I thought that it went through the CD player. I wasn’t really worried about the massive holes in me at this time because I was at the aid station but if that CD was broken I was toast. Everything was ok with it and with me for the time being.
Now they had to send me to the field hospital so they could get the shrapnel out of me. They couldn’t wait that long because their biggest concern was that Depleted Uranium was used in almost every bomb over there and if that was in me I had a bigger problem than bleeding to death. The hospital was about 35km away and it took about 45-50 minutes to drive there. So I got to fly in a Black Hawk! The coolest part about this was my whole 5 man team got to load me into the helicopter. It may sound dumb but this was a very sad time for me because this was like I was being forced away from my family. This was the first time we were separated in six months. It was already tough for me leaving home to go to basic training, AIT, and then war. Now I was doing that all over again. None of this hit me at the time…

For starters I will tell you a little about what happened to me and then we will go from there. I was wounded during combat in Iraq on July 14 2003. We were ambushed from the side of the road by Insurgents. They had set up an I.E.D. (Improvised Explosive Device) near a truck that looked like it had broken down. Like most vehicles there this was not uncommon however when our vehicle approached they attacked, detonating the I.E.D., shrapnel tore through the HUMVEE like rocks falling through a wet paper towel. I was hit by the burning hot metal in two locations the first my right thigh and second my left foot. It didn’t do much but a small flesh wound through the muscle tissue in my thigh. This was obsolete when looking at blood pouring from my boot. It was a massive hole the size of a quarter and it went through my foot like a drill. Starting at the middle of the arch going all the way across. The nerve was destroyed, the artery was severed and I was loosing a lot of blood. I started my timer on my watch after I realized what happened. I wanted to make sure that if I passed out the doctors would know when it happened and how long I had been bleeding. Forty four minutes to be exact. Now I have to say that I am not a doctor in any way, but when any one bleeds from an artery for that long you shouldn’t still be breathing. In my case however I was! Now I am not saying it wasn’t tough being hurt, but the things that followed were VERY trying on anyone…