Buoyed by Army iron will, Stryker soldiers and their loved ones struggle to make their families whole
when some of the pieces never come home
MICHAEL GILBERT; The News Tribune
Sunday, October 17th, 2004 12:01 AM (PDT)
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 Dean J. Koepfler | The News Tribune Sgt. Scott Throson's wife, Tiffany, and daughter, Alyson, visit him in a Washington, D.C., military hospital. b
 dean j. koepfler/The News Tribune michael gilbert/The News Tribune
Tacoma native and Stryker Lt. Damon Armeni, second from left, lost his spleen and parts of his colon and intestine when a grenade exploded Aug. 4 in Mosul, Iraq. His family – from left, brother, Bryce; mother, Sharon; son, Dalen; wife, Kim; and father, Dan – considers him a hero. Sgt. Scott Thorne’s wife, Tiffany, and daughter, Alyson, visit him in a Washington, D.C., military hospital.
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Families from all over the country will be coming to Fort Lewis in the next few weeks to welcome home their Stryker brigade soldiers who spent a year in Iraq.
The first troops to return, the advance party, were greeted by cheering loved ones and an Army band on Oct 5.
But others have come back under much less joyful circumstances, one and two at a time. The most critically wounded soldiers and their loved ones have had to make reunions at military hospitals in Germany and Washington, D.C.
That’s how it was for the Armeni family of Tacoma when Lt. Damon Armeni was torn apart by a rocket-propelled grenade Aug. 4 in Mosul.
In the 10 months since Damon left, his mother was absorbed with every bit of information she could glean about the war zone.
“I had just gotten to the point where I didn’t stress out about it, and focus my whole life on it,” Sharon Armeni said, “when this happened.”
At least 252 of the 4,000 soldiers in the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, have been wounded in Iraq. That’s how many have been awarded the Purple Heart, the medal to recognize soldiers wounded in action, said executive officer Lt. Col. Barry Huggins.
Of those, he said, 28 were hurt seriously enough to be evacuated to hospitals in Germany and the United States.
Huggins said his figures were preliminary, and that the brigade wouldn’t release a full report until it returns.
The number of wounded is probably much higher.
About 15 soldiers had been flown out of Iraq for combat injuries by the end of February, well before the 3rd Brigade saw its heaviest action in April and again in August and September.
Officials at Madigan Army Medical Center said 67 Stryker soldiers have come there for treatment since the brigade deployed in November. That number includes those hurt in accidents and in combat.
As of Friday, more than 7,862 U.S. service members had been wounded in action in Iraq – 4,240 seriously enough that they did not return to duty within three days, according to the Pentagon.
Behind each wounded soldier are family members suddenly facing circumstances they’d hoped and prayed would never come.
Without warning, they have to push through the shock to arrange for child care and time off work, travel arrangements and, in some cases, passports and other complexities, all while worrying they might not get there in time.
“It is my worst fear become all too real,” said Steve Thorne.
His son, Sgt. Scott Thorne, was shot in the head Sept. 14 while leading a patrol in the streets of Mosul. It was the same drive-by ambush that killed Sgt. Jacob Demand of Palouse, Whitman County.
Steve and other family members from Southern California took up residence near Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
Doctors decided to leave the bullet in his brain rather than risk further damage removing it.
William and Mary Cecil Parker of South Carolina spent a week in Germany to be with their son, Sgt. Billy Parker, after he was wounded April 26 at Tal Afar.
Shrapnel struck him in the head, neck, shoulder, arm and hand when a grenade detonated on top of his Stryker vehicle. Spc. Jacob Herring of Kirkland was killed in the same attack.
“We went over there with tunnel vision, thinking about nothing but him – until we got there,” William Parker said. “The people we met up with were the wives, the children, the families of people all shot to pieces – the guys shot through the head, the multiple amputees, the burns.
“There was an 18-year-old pregnant wife standing there and waiting to see if her husband was going to sit up tomorrow. He was not going to sit up tomorrow. He wasn’t going to sit up ever. It was horrific.
“It was cold and rainy and we cried literally every day,” Parker said. “You come back and you’ve got a new view on things.” The Armenis were vacationing on a houseboat in northern British Columbia when Damon’s wife, Kim, got a message on her cell phone to call Fort Lewis.
It was a long, tense and quiet drive home, punctuated every so often by a call from the rear detachment of Damon’s unit, the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment, with an update on his condition. The battalion chaplain also called, from Mosul.
The Army helped Sharon and Kim get passports in just a day. They were on their way to SeaTac Airport for a flight to Germany when they got word that Damon might soon be headed to Walter Reed.
So they turned around and flew to Washington, D.C, the next morning.
The Army pays to fly immediate family members to be with critically wounded soldiers. If the soldier’s condition is less serious, the family has to pay its own way.
“I kept thinking, ‘Oh good, maybe we’ll have to buy our own tickets,’” Sharon recalled.
But at that point, her son’s condition was not improving.
Damon, 26 – a graduate of Wilson High School in Tacoma and Pacific Lutheran University – had lost his spleen and parts of his colon and intestine.
Today a 19-inch L-shaped scar runs from below his navel up to his ribs. When he arrived at Walter Reed he was swollen and bloated.
“I barely recognized him,” Kim said. “I knew him by his hairline. He was asleep for about two days before he woke up.”
His mother, a cardiac care nurse practitioner with MultiCare Health System in Tacoma, said she couldn’t understand how her son was still alive.
“It was amazing to me that he had made it that far, and the fact that all his surgery was done in a combat hospital,” she said. “I fully believe it’s prayer that pulled this kid through.”
Sharon and Kim stayed at his side the first week at Walter Reed.
Sharon said when it got too tough to play the role of mom, she switched into nurse-practitioner mode and thought of him as a patient.
After several days, Damon’s brother Bryce, 22, a Marine, came and stayed with his brother for three days. And then finally his father, Dan – who had to take time off without pay from his job at the Boeing Co. – arrived with Dalen, 2, Damon and Kim’s son.
Damon eventually recovered enough to be moved home to Fort Lewis, where he spent another two weeks at Madigan Army Medical Center.
Today he credits the other soldiers for literally holding him together as they raced in their damaged Stryker across Mosul to the Army field hospital.
He said he remembers feeling like he wanted to go to sleep.
It would have been so easy to bleed to death.
But the soldiers held his guts in and talked to him, told him he was going to be OK. When he started to drift off, one smacked him hard in the face.
At the field hospital, “I remember them bringing me in and hearing a voice say, ‘Holy shit! Get him into the ER, now!’ And then the chaplain leaned over me and said, ‘Son, do you need to get right with God?’
“I think I told him I am right with God, but I wanted to hear him praying as they took me into surgery.”
He’d like to know the name of that Army surgeon who ordered him straight into surgery. The physician’s assistant at Walter Reed said he’d try to track the guy down so Damon can thank him.
“I told the PA, ‘I guess I owe that guy a bottle of scotch.’ He said, ‘I’ve seen your surgical report. You owe that guy a case of scotch.’”
Damon said he also owes a lifetime of thanks to another soldier wounded with him, Sgt. Paul Schmitz of Missouri, who insisted at each stop from Mosul to Walter Reed that he remain within arm’s reach of his unconscious young lieutenant.
Schmitz suffered spinal injuries and is likely to be medically retired, Damon said.
“I was sedated, on a ventilator, and very sick the whole time, but he ensured that there was someone I knew around me until I was brought back to my wife,” Damon said.
These days, he’s padding around his house at Fort Lewis on sore feet.
He suffered nerve damage when he fell on his back after being hit. The condition will get better, though, and he’s preparing to go to work at battalion headquarters, if for just a few hours at first.
By February, he hopes to get medical clearance not just to stay in the Army – but to stay in a combat-arms branch.
“I love being a soldier,” he said. “It’s all I ever wanted to do. This is just a part of being in the Army to me.” Sharon remembers the year her boys – Damon and his younger brother, Bryce – asked for green dental floss for Christmas.
The boys hadn’t become obsessed with oral hygiene.
“They used it for rappelling with their GI Joes,” she said. “I had strands of green dental floss hanging all over the house.”
It makes sense that Damon and Bryce would be so inclined.
Their father, Dan, was a Reconnaissance Marine in Vietnam and then switched to the Army. He retired in 1993 after a career as an armor officer.
With an Army father, Sharon knew what her sons would be in for.
“I fought and resisted it and he kind of joined the ROTC on the sly,” Sharon said of Damon.
“I always wanted to raise the family and the grandkids and have them all together in one place, and I knew that if he was in the military that wasn’t going to happen.”
But she accepted her son’s career choice because she knew it’s what he wanted.
Her husband is proud that his boys followed him into the family business – proud, but also pained. He’d seen men wounded as badly as Damon, and worse.
“I knew what he was going to have to go through when he got into combat,” Dan said. “I knew the changes that would happen to him, what he was going to have to do to survive.
“When I stop to think about how close we came to losing him, I still get a little teary-eyed. And sometimes I still have a hard time talking about it. It’s scary.”
Sharon said watching Damon leave for Iraq was far harder than any time she had to say good-bye to Dan during his military career.
As for Damon’s hopes to stay in the Army, Sharon said, “I want it for him because that’s what he wants. He’s happy and that’s what he loves doing.
“As a mom, I would love to see him behind a desk someplace. But there are a lot of dangerous occupations.” William Parker was on the Internet when he got the call from the Army telling him that his son was wounded.
Sgt. Billy Parker and Spc. Jake Herring of Kirkland, were squadmates, and Parker’s dad kept in touch with Herring’s mom, Susan Sutter, over the computer.
They had previously exchanged photos of their boys.
“The next morning I had an e-mail from her saying, ‘Yeah, the Army had called. Jake died.’
“And there it was, you know?”
He would later learn that his son, riding chest-high out of a forward hatch of his Stryker, had just leaned inside and told his squad to stay focused: “‘If they’re gonna hit us, this is where.’”
When he stood back out of the hatch, they were hit. The driver turned around and raced the 35 miles or so to Mosul. The surgeons couldn’t save Herring.
“Amazingly, the next day I get a call from Billy on somebody’s satellite phone,” William said. “He said, ‘I just got blown up,’ but he was heavily sedated and not making a lot of sense.
“I did get that he was alive, and that he was going to Germany.”
The Parkers were at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center a week with their son, and then he went on to Madigan Army Medical Center, where he healed and then went back to work training replacements.
Billy, 24, got a month off to visit his folks in South Carolina.
“For the first week he was home, he was kind of in shock. The second week, he was kind of relaxing,” said William, who spent three years in the Army and was a Special Forces trooper in Vietnam.
“Then he started getting antsy, and except for old stupid dad and a couple of stupid dad’s Vietnam buddies, there’s nobody he could talk to.
“I mean, his slacker buddies were like, ‘Dude! How many of them (enemies) did you kill?’ By the end he was a nervous wreck.”
Dad knew he had to help.
“We got him good and damned drunk one night just so he could get it all out,” William said. “When you finally sit down and let it all out – which is what we hoped for and what we achieved – then you get somewhere.”
“We took him to the mountains, to the beach. We camped and body-surfed,” William said. “We tried to give him as much of the civilian good life as we could.”
Billy returned to Fort Lewis and took the first chance he got to go back to his unit, the 5th Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment. He got to Iraq Aug. 2.
In e-mails home, Billy said things were far more violent than before: He returned just in time for the big insurgent attack in Mosul in early August, then the heavy fighting last month in Tal Afar.
These days, Billy is thinking about re-enlisting, but his parents say that after six years, they hope he’s ready to move on – maybe catch up with his brother Dylan, a sophomore at Clemson University in Clemson, S.C. Steve Thorne was home sick in Escondido, Calif., when his daughter-in-law, Tiffany, called.
It was 2:51 p.m. Her voice was shaking. She’d just heard from the Army.
Scott had suffered some kind of head trauma.
It wasn’t long before the whole family headed to the Washington, D.C., area to be with Scott at Walter Reed and briefly at the U.S. Navy hospital.
Scott, 23, was shot in the head in a Sept. 14 ambush that wounded four other soldiers from his squad in the 1st Squadron, 14th Cavalry Regiment.
“Bringing all his men home was something he viewed as the highest goal of a combat leader and he worked very hard at it,” Steve said of his son. “As it turned out, there were just too many raindrops to run between.”
Scott lost part of his skull, but he made it through the time when he was most vulnerable to infection.
He can talk and stand with help and is making good progress, his father said. He’s being fitted with a helmet and will soon be transferred to a Veterans Administration hospital that specializes in brain-injury patients.
Along the way, Steve has been filing Internet updates on his son’s progress and his family’s experiences with the military medical system.
They’re posted on the unofficial online community of Stryker families and friends, www.strykernews.com.
In part, he’s doing it because he believes the brigade’s soldiers, especially its wounded, have been ignored. He spent 19 years as a soldier, and these days he works as a family court mediator in San Diego County.
Writing also helps him “focus on the positives that happen every day” and takes his mind off his family’s struggle.
And so he files daily updates.
“I don’t want Scott’s sacrifice – if that’s what the end result will be – to be forgotten by the society he made it for,” Steve said via e-mail.
“We want the nation to have the opportunity to be as proud of him as we are.”
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