Full of Heart: My Story of Survival, Strength, and Spirit Read online

  The heat from the explosion roared into a fire that sounded oddly like falling rain. Within seconds, my vehicle was almost completely consumed by fire. Rounds from the stored ammo in the vehicle were going off. I watched as the flames licked up from the floor and my hands started to burn, the skin melting away. The blaze reached my face, and with great effort I pulled up my seared hands—like paws now—to try to shield myself. I got a taste of sweetness on my tongue—perhaps a physiological reaction to the blast. The oxygen burned up in the fire, and I struggled to breathe. I was frantic with pain and terror.

  I’m going to die, I thought.

  Somewhere outside I heard our .50-cal rounds cooking off. It made me think of Fourth of July fireworks.

  In all the war movies I’d seen since I was a kid, whenever soldiers were blown up, it seemed to happen lightning fast. But in real life the clock eased almost to a halt, and I was able to process everything that was happening to me.

  I watched my dreams fade away as my nineteen-year-old life rewound. I saw myself as a little boy with my mom. I saw my mom at my grave. Her head bowed, covered with a mantilla; she was crying. A soldier passed her the triangle of American flag. I knew that my mother would be ruined. And then I reflected on a couple of pretty trivial truths: All the girls I wanted to date would move on. The NFL would find talent in some other kid. I wouldn’t get the chance to have all the adventures guaranteed a young man.

  As if in answer, a young girl appeared. It was the same child my mom had once shown me in a black-and-white photo, but this girl before me now was a teenager. She was wearing a pink dress with long sleeves and ruffles. I’d never met my late sister, Anabel, but I knew this was her. When she appeared, the chaos and noise around me faded.

  “You’re going to be okay,” she told me. “Mom needs you.”

  I don’t remember what her voice sounded like or even whether she spoke in English or Spanish, but I heard her. Then, as quickly as she had entered my life, she disappeared.

  Valdez and O’Shea ran to my burning Humvee. One of our antitank missiles exploded from the rack, kicking the sergeants back against a nearby wall. I had been ejected from the vehicle and was sitting about two feet from the Humvee. Once they recovered, Valdez and O’Shea grabbed my forearms, but some of my uniform and skin came off in their hands, so they reached behind my back to drag me away by my body armor.

  The two men, assisted by Clayton, hauled me to the rear of O’Shea’s Humvee, which was a troop carrier. They dumped me into the back. As O’ Shea took stock of the casualties, he told Valdez to help me find my “happy place,” so I could win the psychological battle of staying alive. Valdez got into the Humvee with me. He drew my head into his lap. I was in shock, so he began to rock me, calling me “baby boy,” repeating that he wasn’t going to leave me. “You’re going to be okay,” he said.

  I sensed it wasn’t true. I struggled to get air.

  “Try to breathe through your nose,” he said.

  Up front, O’Shea attempted to call for a medevac as we sped toward the emergency casualty evacuation site.

  I reached up to touch my face, but Valdez knocked my hands down. My uniform had melted into my skin. I clawed at his neck. When we reached the casevac, two frontline ambulances were waiting. Valdez helped the medical team hoist me onto a litter and watched anxiously while they tried to clear my airway.

  Parts of my swollen face were scorched black. My hands were burned and my head was bleeding. Blood was leaking from my ears. The medics attempted to remove my clothing so they could put the burn blankets on me to try to cool the skin and stop the burn progression.

  “I want to go home!” I screamed. “I want to go home! I want to go home!”

  The medics tried to insert a breathing tube down my throat, but I was out of my mind with fear and pain, and I fought them like they were the enemy.

  I reached toward Valdez. “Please don’t leave me!”

  I wondered how much the human body is able to withstand before it shuts off. I had such plans—to play football, to go to college. Now I wondered, Would I make it? Would my mother be okay? Would I be remembered? How the hell did I get here?

  Through my own screams I heard the familiar low thump and felt the merciful cold wind of a Black Hawk helicopter.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Twilight

  Back in Georgia, my mom stifled a yawn. It was six thirty in the morning, promising to be a bright spring day, and her twelve-hour shift at the Shaw carpet plant would be over in a few hours. Her job—replacing bobbins of yarn in the carpet-binding machine—was repetitive, calming, meditative. At a neighboring machine, her coworkers Nora and Jesus bantered and laughed. Mom laughed, too, but inside she was thinking about me, her only son, wondering how I was, on the other side of the world in a war zone.

  Whenever the phone rang in the office, it reverberated through the entire plant. This time when it rang, my mother didn’t hear it. She happened to raise her head and spotted her boss, Raul, heading toward her. He was smiling, but she thought his smile didn’t look right. Please don’t let him be coming to me, she prayed. But he was.

  “Hey, Maria, let’s go to my office,” he said. She felt her heart jump in her chest.

  “What did I do?” she joked weakly.

  In the office, she saw the phone was off the hook, lying on the desk. Raul stepped back. “You have a call,” he said, and she knew. With a shaking hand, she picked up the receiver.

  “Hello?”

  “Is this Maria Zavala?” a voice asked. Before she could answer, the caller introduced himself and said, “Are you Private Martinez’s mother?”

  She tried to answer but at first nothing came out. Then she said, “What happened to my son?”

  There had been an accident the day before, the caller told her. A land mine.

  “Tell me what happened to my son!” she repeated. “Is he alive?”

  “Your son is not dead,” the caller answered. “We got him breathing. Let me give you a phone number so you can get more information.”

  Her eyes met Raul’s, and she handed the receiver to him. He took down a name and a number with a Washington, D.C., area code. My mom’s quiet tears dissolved into muffled sobs. My son isn’t going to make it, she thought. And if he doesn’t, I won’t. Everyone at work knew it—if my mom lost me, they’d lose her. If anyone took me away from her, she had no reason to continue.

  She always told people that I was her doctor, her pastor, her therapist, and her entertainer. “Mama, everything’s going to be okay,” I’d tell her when I was little and she was sad. “Someday I’m going to grow up and take care of you and there will be no more tears.”

  She had driven my car to work that day and she wanted to drive herself home in it, wrapped in something of mine as though it were my arms holding her in an embrace. But her coworkers insisted on giving her a ride.

  In her apartment, Mom headed to the small shrine where she regularly prayed. She grasped an eight-by-ten rendering of the Niño de Atocha and put its face to her stomach.

  “Why aren’t you taking care of J.R.?” she asked it.

  She promised the Niño she wouldn’t let go of the image until I was okay. Then she sank onto the couch and wept, as her friends from the plant began to arrive to offer their support. As their shifts ended, more people came by to sit with her.

  The Pentagon didn’t have many answers. It was too soon to know much. They told her that I had been treated at the 212th MASH and transferred to the 47th Combat Support Hospital. From there I’d been evacuated to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, which was not only the largest military hospital but also the only top-level military trauma center outside the United States. Nearly all military personnel wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq were sent there. They assured my mom I’d receive the finest care.

  The next morning my mom began to call again, dialing that number in D.C. and new numbers she’d been given for Fort Campbell. She spoke to a surgeon who told her to write down her questi
ons for my doctor in Germany so she’d remember what to ask when she was connected.

  Finally, she was patched over to Germany. My doctor at Landstuhl told her they were preparing to transfer me back to the United States. I would end up at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Named after Brigadier General Roger Brooke, who commanded the center from 1929 to 1933 and introduced the use of routine diagnostic chest X-rays, the sprawling, 425-bed state-of-the-art facility also houses the Department of Defense’s trailblazing burn injury facility.

  “So you’re saying my son is going to live?”

  Yes, the doctor told her. “But his prognosis depends on the severity of the damage to his lungs.” I’d sustained a severe inhalation injury from the heat and smoke of the fire that consumed the Humvee I’d been driving. The doctors planned to conduct exploratory abdominal surgery to check the scope of the internal damage.

  “Also, he has severe burns over one-third of his body.”

  My mom wanted to go to Germany to be with me. If I were that close to death, she reasoned, it would help me to see her—even just hear her voice. But the doctor said no, and that “no” actually gave her hope. It meant I wasn’t going to die.

  “Don’t worry,” the doc said. “He’s in my hands, and he’s going to make it.”

  A thousand miles west of Dalton, Sergeant First Class Robert Mazak’s government-issued cell phone buzzed in his pocket. The forty-year-old physical therapy technician, a soldier himself and a father of three, was part of a critical-care air transport team out of the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center. As the operations noncommissioned officer for the team, Mazak took care of everything but the patients on flights out of Landstuhl to BAMC. Since the war had begun a month earlier, Mazak found himself on an airplane several times a week.

  As usual, Colonel Dave Barillo, one of the unit’s surgeons, was on the other end of the phone. “Spin up the team,” he told Mazak. “We’ve got another soldier to bring home.”

  Mazak got to work. He reached out to the burn flight team (BFT) on call, which included a burn surgeon, a respiratory therapist, a burn intensive-care nurse, other RNs and LVNs, and a burn flight physician’s assistant. Then he called the operations center to process the commercial flight arrangements to carry them to Germany.

  When the team had assembled, they checked the prestaged equipment and supplies they would bring on their flight to Germany—the pumps, monitors, respirators, ventilators—everything you’d see in a burn intensive-care unit. Within about three hours from Barillo’s call, the BFT members were settled in their seats for the twelve-hour flight to Frankfurt.

  Back at Landstuhl, the medical team was getting me ready. They’d charted my injuries, which were varied and many. I had 34 percent total body surface-area burns—with 10 percent second-degree and 24 percent third-degree. I had bilateral corneal abrasions and ulcerations. Nasal, head, rib, and shoulder fractures. Grade III liver laceration. A ruptured eardrum.

  I was losing a lot of my vital body fluids through my large, open burn areas, so the medical team rehydrated me with additional fluids. They injected sedatives and narcotics to keep me calm and pain-free. They conducted numerous blood tests to determine how my body was reacting to my injuries, and they infused lifesaving medicines into me. The respiratory therapists were busy checking and maintaining proper oxygen and breathing parameters.

  Mazak spent his time on the flight going over every detail in his flight log—the timeline for the patient, orders given, decisions made—and tried to doze. The BFT landed in Frankfurt the following morning. They loaded all their gear—fifteen large cases—into Army vehicles sent by Landstuhl and began the two-hour ride to the base.

  Their focus would be to stabilize me for transport back to the United States. If a patient’s condition is too precarious, the team won’t take him or her but instead will stay in Germany to provide care until the patient is stable enough to be transferred. Medical personnel would make every effort to get every service member back to the United States. As the war progressed, it became obvious that some of the injured troops weren’t going to survive. The transport teams honored a second unspoken mission: If they couldn’t get someone home with the expectation of survival and recovery, then it was equally important to get that patient home so that he or she would die in the United States instead of a foreign country, and to provide the family the opportunity to say goodbye.

  Once at the hospital, the BAMC team began to work on me. They removed all the dressings and assessed me. They cleaned my wounds and reapplied bandages, then placed me on a padded stretcher. All my medical equipment—ventilators, pumps, monitors, IV bags, and oxygen tanks—was attached to the stretcher, which was transformed into a mini-ICU.

  The team loaded me and a couple of other patients onto a bus and we rolled to Ramstein Air Base, where we boarded a military transport plane headed for the other side of the world. The patients didn’t so much board as we were stacked like trays of pies in a bakery, so that we could be more easily monitored.

  During the flight, the team was busy checking and adjusting medications and oxygen levels and ensuring that staff documented all the proper medical information. Mazak updated his flight diary and saw that everyone had meals and drinks for the long flight back. Then he made his way forward to the cockpit, where he was patched through to the burn unit to update the waiting team. The contact on the ground in San Antonio reminded the ambulance company to be at the airport for pickup—one ambulance for each patient—and contacted the ICUs and the wards to make sure everyone would be prepared.

  The aircraft landed at the San Antonio airport on Wednesday, April 9, 2003, one month after I’d shipped out from Fort Campbell.

  I don’t remember any of this. Not a minute. I’d been intubated and sedated. I needed to be on the ventilator because my lungs weren’t working well enough to support me, and the doctors kept me infused with narcotics and sedatives to keep me comfortable. It was like being under general anesthesia.

  I wouldn’t regain consciousness for three weeks.

  It’s humbling to know now that so many dedicated people had worked in tandem to get me out of Iraq and back onto U.S. soil still alive. All those people intent on saving my life, and I wasn’t even aware of it. I was one of the very first combat patients from the Iraq War to enter the Brooke burn center. Although the Army Burn Center is one of the oldest and most experienced in the world, few of the staff at that point in time were old enough to have had firsthand experience with wartime burns and the center didn’t have nearly the resources it has today. Their plan was to offer continuity of care, in which each patient would benefit by having the same doctors, nurses, and other staff throughout his or her stay at the hospital. They’d follow each patient from admittance to discharge, giving a lot of attention to patients and family members.

  The day before I arrived, my mom took a call from the social worker on staff. “We’re going to be receiving your son here,” she said. It would be another sixteen hours before my mom got word that I was there.

  My mom had wanted to be with me when I arrived in the United States.

  “That’s not how this works,” the social worker told her. “If a transport plane is diverted or a patient becomes too ill to continue to the destination, the Army doesn’t want to have the family waiting in the wrong location. So they wait to bring the family members until the patient actually checks into the facility.”

  The social worker told my mom that they’d arrange a flight for her leaving that afternoon at four thirty from Chattanooga, Tennessee, the closest metropolitan airport to Dalton. She packed her clothes and even packed some for me, reasoning that when I gave interviews to the media I’d need to look sharp. She knew I was badly hurt, but she didn’t really accept it.

  My mom was still clutching the picture of the Niño de Atocha to her body, like it was a real little boy, when she got on the plane.

  At the airport in San Antonio, she was greeted by three hospital reps, who escorte
d her to BAMC. Her emotions were swinging wildly. While hours earlier she’d optimistically packed clothing for me to wear on television, now she visualized my funeral, imagined people holding clods of dirt to toss onto my casket, in which I was laid to rest dressed in my Class A uniform.

  He’s my pride, she thought. If he doesn’t make it, I have no more pride.

  The social worker met my mom as she stepped off the elevator in the burn unit. The two of them hurried down the corridor to my ICU room and stopped at the big picture window looking in. My body was covered with white dressings. Both of my arms were elevated in slings to minimize swelling and increase blood flow, my knees were slightly bent, and my head was raised. The staff called this position the “burn crucifix.” I had a feeding tube in my nose, and my face was dark from open wounds and burned tissue. IV poles hung on either side of the bed with pumps attached, bags of fluids dangling above.

  My mom burst into tears at the sight.

  “It’s okay,” the social worker told her. “Cry now, as much as you want, and get it out. Once you walk into the room, you need to be finished crying. Even though he can’t see you or talk, he might hear you and that could upset him.”

  That’s why the picture window was a stopping point for visitors: It wasn’t uncommon for them to dissolve into tears at the first sight of their wounded loved one. Most civilians are spared the sight of the horrific injuries that members of the military can receive in combat. The staff wanted to ensure that extreme emotional reactions occurred out of the patient’s earshot. It was also better for the visitors to be in a location where the staff could help them recover.

  After my mom pulled herself together, the nurses showed her how to put on the PPE, or personal protective equipment—shoe covers, gown, mask, and gloves. The final touch was winding her long black hair into the bonnet. They opened the door, and she went to my bed.