This Associated Press LINK will only
be in service for a short time before
it is rotated out. The article text
is posted below.

For those who insist, insist, and insist
on saying that the slightest of any
exposure at all to a combat zone
is cause of lifelong crippling disability
or the ridiculous and absurd justification
to stop living in a regular house and
take up Loafer Squad status at the
local Homeless Shelters, then I point to
these articles to show you the truth
and reality of the situation for
those who know how to get on with
it and recover. We really do have to
stop rewarding the Sissy-Crowd and
start focusing our praise and Bravado
Worship towards those who can pull it off
and move on in spite of it all.

This is the HUGE disparity that we
see across combat populations:
one crowd who does it all and recovers,
while the other crowd, is one big
Whiney-ass excuse factory after another.
So embrace this article below for
what it is. TRUE VALOR !!!




AP LINK


http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/W/WOUNDED_WARRIOR?...OME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT



Apr 27, 12:42 AM EDT


Wounded Iraq veteran plays lacrosse after losing limbs

By ADAM GOLDMAN
Associated Press Writer



NEW YORK (AP) -- John Fernandez should not have been playing lacrosse Saturday in the Army-Navy alumni game at Madison Square Garden. By all rights, the former U.S. Army first lieutenant should be dead. But luck intervened.

"It was just a matter of chance - pure luck," said Fernandez of Shoreham, Long Island, who was severely wounded in Iraq after a U.S. plane dropped a 500-pound bomb on his Humvee in a case of friendly fire on April 3, 2003. Shrapnel from the explosion shredded his legs.

"I crawled," Fernandez recalled. "I couldn't walk."

More than five years later, the soldier can do more than just walk. He can play lacrosse thanks to prosthetic limbs, as he demonstrated during the Heroes Cup, which preceded the New York Titans professional game Saturday night.

"Change of direction is a little bit more difficult just because I don't have ankles," Fernandez said. "I get around. I'm not necessarily the guy who's going to be taking the ball and driving from behind the cage. I'm out there and playing. Running around, setting picks and scoring goals."

Fernandez speaks impassively when he recounts what happened to him. But his story is extraordinary.

Somehow the bomb, which ripped through his Humvee, spared Fernandez, who was sleeping next to the vehicle on a cot south of Baghdad in Karballa. It did not spare his driver, gunner nor the platoon sergeant nearby in another Humvee.

Seven others were injured.

Afterward, Fernandez, 30, was flown to a naval base in Spain and then to Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Doctors delivered a grim prognosis when he arrived. Part of his right leg had to go. They could try to save his left foot, but it might be more trouble than it was worth.

There could be lasting complications.

Fernandez told doctors: "Just take it off. Cut it off and move on. It's literally cutting your losses."

Surgeons amputated his right leg eight inches below the knee. They also removed his left foot.

But Fernandez was undeterred. He returned home that June for many months of painful rehabilitation. The soldier in him refused to lay down - so did his wife, Kristi, who helped Fernandez recover.

"We just kept looking ahead," she said while watching Fernandez play at the Garden, cheering the Army players who eventually lost to Navy 10-6.

The first few years were a learning process, but over time he adapted to his new legs. His latest set is made mostly of carbon fiber. He's been able to play sports for about four years.

"I put on my legs in the morning like you put on your shoes," said Fernandez, now alumni director of the Wounded Warrior Project in New York, dedicated to veterans injured in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And he never limited himself.

"I wanted to be able to do everything I could do prior to the injury," said Fernandez, who has two children and a third on the way.

One of those things was lacrosse. Fernandez played at Rocky Point High School on Long Island. He was also captain of his team at West Point.

Fernandez wasn't the quickest player. He wasn't a star. But he had other skills.

"My saving grace was that I (had a) hard shot," he said.

The other players show him no quarter and certainly the ones from Navy did not at MSG. Most of the time, players aren't looking at his legs. They're looking to jar the bar loose with a good hit.

"I try my hardest," he said. "I try to put the ball in the back of the net."

Playing lacrosse at the Garden, perhaps, isn't his proudest moment on two legs since his injury.

Fernandez had intended to marry his wife in a big ceremony but had to quickly tie the knot in a civil service shortly before he shipped out to Iraq.

"The deployment got in the way," he said.

A proper wedding had to wait. Only seven months after Fernandez narrowly avoided death, the couple finally had one.

"I danced and walked down the isle," Fernandez said. "I did it all."


________________________________________
END of AP Release

REPLY:

I guess I am not getting the connection
between what you have written and the article
that you have posted it to.

I have no issue at all with the depleted uranium
veterans and I openly supported them in a floor
speech at the Veterans Disability Benefits
Commission public hearings when they all
came in person.

I don't know where you are getting your
information, but for sure, it isn't here.

thanks

For someone with no combat experience, you sure know a lot about the subject.

I suppose the hair analysis (I had to pay for out of my own pocket) showing elevated uranium levels nearly 20 years after the war, in spite of massive detoxification efforts, is a figment of my imagination?

Likewise, my prostate swelling up due to chronic dehydration, leaving me with a case of prostatitis that would do a 70 year old proud (even though I was only 23) is also a pity play?

Oh, and when my wife and I tried to have a child, the baby was so spectacularly deformed that the doctor said he had never seen anything like it in 15 years of OB/GYN. All a big joke, right? Google "depleted uranium birth defects" for more "slackers" and "whiners" to point at, if thats what gets you off.

In spite of your attack on myself and all combat veterans, I truly hope you get your pension and due recognition.

We veterans, combat or peacetime, are all brothers and sisters, fighting a corrupt political system.

We are not each others enemy. Perhaps you will learn that some day.