‘Not better or worse … just different’
WASHINGTON – Her body had been maimed by war. Dawn Halfaker lay unconscious at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, her parents at her bedside and her future suddenly unsure. A rocket-propelled grenade had exploded in her Humvee, ravaging her arm and shoulder.
In June 2004, she became the newest soldier to start down a path almost unknown in the United States: woman as combat amputee.
It was a distinction she did not dwell on during days of intense pain and repeated surgeries, or even as she struggled to eat on her own, write left-handed and use an artificial limb. But scattered among her experiences were moments when she was aware that few women before her had rethought their lives, their bodies, their choices, in this particular way.
She was part of a new generation of women who have lost pieces of themselves in war, experiencing the same physical trauma and psychological anguish as their male counterparts. But for female combat amputees has come something else: a quiet sense of wonder about how the public views them and how they will reconcile themselves.
Their numbers are small, 11 in three years of war, compared with more than 350 men. They are not quite a band of sisters, but more a chain of women linked by history and experience and fate – one extending herself to another who then might offer something for the next.
They have discovered, at various points of their recovery, that gender has made a difference – “not better or worse,” as Halfaker put it, “just different.”
For Halfaker, an athlete with a strong sense of her physical self, the world was transformed June 19, 2004, on a night patrol through Baqubah, Iraq. Out of nowhere had come the rocket-propelled grenade, exploding behind her head.
Another soldier’s arm was sheared off. Blood was everywhere.
“Get us out of the kill zone!” she yelled to the Humvee driver. She was a 24-year-old first lieutenant, a platoon leader who two months earlier had led her unit in repulsing a six-hour attack on a police station in Diyala province. As medics worked to stabilize her, she warned: “You bastards better not cut my arm off.”
In the hospital, there was no other way to save her life.
At first, in the early days, she tried to ignore the burns on her face, her wounded right shoulder, the fact of her missing arm. She had been a basketball standout at West Point, a starting guard through four years of college. She was fit, young, energetic.
Suddenly, she was a disabled veteran of war.
“I didn’t want to know what I looked like,” she recalled recently. She asked her mother to get a towel and cover the mirror in her hospital room.
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The war has created what experts believe is the nation’s first group of female combat amputees. “We’re unaware of any female amputees from previous wars,” said historian Judy Bellafaire of the Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation, which researches such issues.
Surprising many political observers, the fact of female casualties has produced little public reaction. Before Iraq, many assumed that the sight of women in body bags or with missing limbs would provoke a wave of public revulsion.
“On the whole, the country has not been concerned about female casualties,” said Charles Moskos of Northwestern University, a leading military sociologist. Politically, Moskos said, it is a no-win issue. Conservatives fear they will undermine support for the war if they speak out about wounded women, and liberals worry they will jeopardize support for women serving in combat roles by raising the subject, he said.
In the hospital, female combat amputees face all the challenges men do – with a few possible differences. Women, for example, seem to care more about appearance and be more expressive about their experiences, hospital staff members said. Among the women, there also was “a unique understanding or bond,” said Capt. Katie Yancosek, an occupational therapist at Walter Reed.
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Two months after Dawn Halfaker was wounded, Juanita Wilson arrived on a stretcher at Walter Reed, her left arm in bandages, her hand gone. It was August 25, 2004, just days after a roadside bomb went off under Wilson’s Humvee. She came to the hospital as the Iraq war’s fourth female combat amputee – the first who was a mother.
From the beginning, Wilson decided she did not want her only child to see her so wounded. She talked to the 6-year-old by phone. “Mommy’s OK,” she assured the girl. “What are you doing at school now?”
It was only after four weeks that Wilson allowed her husband and child to travel from Hawaii, where the family had been stationed, for a visit. By then, Wilson was more mobile. She asked a nurse to put makeup on her face, stowed her IV medications into a backpack she could wear and planned an outing to Chuck E. Cheese’s.
“Mommy, I’m sorry you got hurt,” her daughter, Kenyah, said when she arrived, hugging her. And then: “Mommy, I thought you died.”
The sort of mother who mailed her daughter penmanship exercises and math problems from the war zone, Wilson wanted Kenyah to stay focused on school and the ordinary concerns of being 6. “I wanted it to be like I was going to be OK when she saw me,” said Wilson, 32.
Changes revealed themselves one at a time.
Wilson remembered that her daughter eyed a plate of croissants in the hotel-like room where the family stayed at Walter Reed that first time they were together again. The child asked her mother for a sandwich.
“I realized, ‘Oh, I can’t even make a sandwich,’ ” she said. “It was a hurting feeling, your kid asking you to make her a sandwich and you’re saying, ‘You’ll have to make your own sandwich’ to a 6-year-old.”
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By mid-2005, Juanita Wilson was back to the rhythms of daily life with her husband and daughter. The couple bought a house in the suburbs of Baltimore. She took a new job with the Army, is a staff sergeant and up for a promotion.
At 6:30 one winter morning, Wilson was cooking Cream of Wheat on her stovetop – taking great care to pour with her prosthetic and stir with her other arm. In her life as a woman, a mother and a wife, there are limits she once didn’t face and could not even imagine.
“Kenyah,” Wilson called.
When the child came down the stairs in bright pink pajamas, she saw her mother’s trouble: Wilson was in uniform, almost ready for work, but she needed help with her hair.
Wilson sat on a chair as Kenyah brushed gently and then brought her mother’s hair up in a bun. She is “a happy helper,” Wilson said.
The girl, now 7, tells all her friends about “handie,” as she has nicknamed Wilson’s artificial limb. “My daughter is definitely not bashful about telling anybody,” Wilson said. “She tells other kids at school. Kids don’t judge you. They think it’s the coolest thing that I have a robotic arm.”
But Wilson continues to shield her daughter from the discomfort and anguish of her injury. “I didn’t want to take her childhood away. That’s my focus – that she is happy and enjoying life and not thinking about me. She’ll ask me questions, and I’ll say, ‘Oh that’s not for children to worry about.’ “
How the world sees war-wounded women like her, she said, is a little hard to pinpoint.
“When you’re in Walter Reed, you’re in a bubble. I could walk around with my arm off. It’s acceptable. Everyone there knows. … But when you walk out that gate, it’s a whole different world. No one knows what I’ve been through, no one probably cares, and to avoid all of that, I never come outside without my (prosthetic) arm. Never.”
Wilson added, “I have noticed that when you’re a female walking around as an amputee, everybody’s mouth drops.”
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Long out of Walter Reed, Dawn Halfaker is also deeply into a life remade. It has been 17 months since she was wounded. She retired from the Army as a captain. Lately, she works at an office in Arlington, Va., mostly as a consultant to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. She has applied to graduate school in security studies, bought a condo in Washington, D.C., and co-written a book proposal about postwar recovery.
To get to this new place, Halfaker has made all sorts of adjustments. She types on a computer one-handed. Drives a car with a push-button ignition. Uses her knees to hold steady a peanut butter jar she wants to open. To write a note or a letter, she learned to use her left hand.
“I never really wanted to hide the fact that I was an amputee,” she said, “but I never wanted it to be the central focus of my life.” For some men, she said, it seems a badge of honor that they do not mind showing. “For a woman, at least for me, it’s not at all. … The fact that I only have one arm, I’m OK with that, but I want to be able to walk around and look like everyone else and not attract attention to myself.”
Last year, a guy she met on the Metro asked her out, saying that he thought she was pretty. She agreed to meet him for lunch but felt nervous about mentioning her missing limb. It turned out that he was no less interested, she said. In the fall, she started dating an Army anesthesiologist, to whom she has become close. He is deployed in Iraq.
As a woman in her twenties, “I want to look as good as I can look,” she acknowledged. “I think that’s very much a female perspective.”
Even more, she said, “I don’t want to be known for being one-armed. I want to be known for whatever it is I do in my life.”