Our Town: Healing from the war Our Town: Healing from the war (July 06, 2005)

by Don Kazak

Jason Poole is naturally upbeat, a quality that has touched and amazed others at the Palo Alto Veterans Affairs Hospital, where he has been a patient since last September.

Poole, a 22-year-old Marine corporal from Cupertino, was on patrol in Iraq last year with three other Marines, two Iraqi soldiers and an interpreter.

"I told them to spread out," he remembers -- just as the patrol was struck by a mortar round. Three died. Poole was in a coma for two months.

He is now a patient in the Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI) unit at the hospital.

"He could not walk and he could not talk," Kerri Childress, the hospital's communications officer, recalled of Poole's arrival. "He's been an inspiration to everyone because he was so determined."

Poole recently underwent his fourth surgery, to remove shrapnel from his ear. Some of the surgery has been cosmetic, to repair damage to the side of his face and eye.

Despite the severity of his wounds, he said he's never been depressed. "I was always happy, and still was," he said.

Other than the sunglasses he wears even on cloudy days to hide damage to his eye, there doesn't seem to much out of the ordinary with Poole now. He has no limp, his smile is quick and he's making the slow march back to being well again.

Adrian Barajas, 21, an Army sergeant who is also a patient on the TBI unit (following an auto accident), said he and other patients call Poole "Mr. Happy" because of his unrelenting cheerfulness. The patients pull for each other and help each other, Barajas said.

"They're outstanding, in morale," he said.

The 24-bed TBI unit, one of four such VA hospital wards in the country, has been busy, and has almost all war-wounded as patients now.

Some of brain injuries are hard to detect, and hard for the soldiers to accept.

"It's difficult for them to acknowledge they have injuries" because they are walking and talking appear normal, said Stephanie Alvarez, the TBI unit's head nurse.

The number of patients with traumatic brain injuries in the unit has increased 70 percent since the war in Iraq began in 2003, Alvarez said.

The patients sometimes have to relearn simple tasks -- "to relearn their lives," as Alvarez put it. They remember they should brush their teeth, but they may forget the toothpaste or, in one case, begin combing their hair with the toothbrush instead, she said.

"The injuries are more severe than we've had before," she said.

Some patients have shrapnel wounds to the head from the improvised explosive devices (IEDs) that have become the weapon of choice for Iraqi insurgents.

"In a blast injury, they physically look worse, but the brain itself is only suffering in isolated places," said Harriet Zeiner, a neuropsychologist who works with the patients.

Sometimes the brain injuries are subtle enough to not show up for months, or even a year or two. She said four brain-injured National Guard troops who came to the ward had been discharged to their families after their tours of duty were over only to find they were having difficulties because of their injuries.

"We're getting people one-year wounded and two-year wounded," she said. The National Guard's policy of getting them home as soon as possible worked against detection of their brain injuries, she said.

But Zeiner marvels at the upbeat morale of patients like Poole. She said all the patients at the VA hospital eat together in the dining room rather in their rooms, as part of a re-socialization process for the wounded.

And one would expect that the young Iraq veterans would eat together, but that isn't the case. The older guys, veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam, invite the younger vets to sit with them.

"They are treated with tremendous respect by the older veterans," Zeiner said. Even though the younger vets like to listen to hip-hop music and the World War II vets prefer Benny Goodman, they are still closely bonded by the experience of war.

"There is no generation gap," she said.

"They hate being injured," she said of the young vets. "They hate having lost independence, and not one of them is sorry they went. Not one."

Senior Staff Writer Don Kazak can be e-mailed at dkazak@paweekly.com.

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