One family's tragedy

Photo courtesy Michelle Sandoval

They aren't just cannon fodder.

This is a story about one soldier, but it is not at all unusual. Frank is an example of what Bush's illegal invasions of Afganistan and Iraq have wrought.

Who had Frank Sandoval become?

Where was the tough soldier who wouldn't quit?

Michelle Sandoval broke down in tears, her brave front shattered as she tried to describe the man her husband had been before that awful day.

Frankie was someone who never gave up. He wouldn't make excuses and he didn't accept them. He always encouraged their young daughter by saying: I don't want to hear you say, ``I can't.'' Just do it.

Now, she was watching him cry and plead those haunting words: I can't.

Frankie never would have done that before.

It was late January, and they had just arrived at the Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto. Frank could sit up in his wheelchair for only a few minutes. He couldn't feel or control much of his left side. His speech was nearly unintelligible.

And there was the more obvious evidence of his terrible wound: The right side of his head was sunken like a deflated basketball.

Frank now was a face of the modern war casualty. He had suffered a traumatic brain injury -- the emblematic wound of the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. These devastating injuries have forever altered the lives of hundreds of U.S. soldiers and Marines, leaving their futures uncertain.

Like Frank's.

It wasn't his physical impairments that upset her most, a tearful Michelle told Harriet Zeiner, a VA neuropsychologist. It was that Frankie seemed not to remember who he really was.

That, Zeiner believed, could be the cruelest part of a brain injury. Losing a sense of who you are.

No one knows how the journey of Frank Sandoval will end. But this is how it began.

(read more)

Cross posted at Brilliant at Breakfast