Among the Soldiers of
Ward 57
Michael Weisskopf
(Henry Holt)
A hand grenade was thrown into the Humvee in which he was riding. He reached down and tried to throw it out. The grenade shredded his right hand. Weisskopf looked down and saw his arm with "protruding white wristbones in a bed of severed tendons and blood vessels."
Blood Brothers could have been written as one reporter's journey from injury to rehabilitation, learning prosthesis, living out what would be a very different life. But Weisskopf chose to include stories of three other amputees from Ward 57: Luis Rodriguez (right leg), Pete Damon (both hands), and most touching of all, Bobby Isaacs (both legs).
After forty-seven operations, Weisskopf tells us, Isaacs returned to his small-town church in North Carolina to be presented to the congregation. The minister, Pastor Cox, "had no difficulty matching that emotional pitch in his Sunday service ... a Walter Reed amputee who told ABC news Nightline in March, 'I believe that God's still got some use for me.'"
- As the clip ended, Bobby rolled himself onto the pulpit in a wheelchair. The overflow audience of eight hundred burst into applause."
Later, Isaac's pastor addressed the congregation. "I'm going to tell you something quickly," he said. "Bob is going to be walking again. Aren't you buddy?"
- My fellow amputees didn't need a rationale [writes Weisskopf]. They believed in the nobility of sacrifice, a traumatic loss for a just cause. Bobby Isaacs felt only pride when he displayed his stumps at church. It was his patriotic tribute, even more symbolic than a Purple Heart. He gave up his legs for love of country in a time of need.
"Just another amputee on the long road to recovery," the author concludes.
Weisskopf has spent most of his life as a professional reporter, first for the Washington Post, then for Time, among others. (He was over fifty-five at the time of his injury). Journalism is a tricky business and a reporter, even one who is trying hard to be dispassionate, will choose words, move them about so that you and I will end up seeing the world through his eyes.
Weisskopf's fate --- the one that suddenly overtook him and his three friends --- cannot be viewed, nor reported, with dispassion. He may try to present the truth years after the fact with what he believes to be a distancing, but the gestalt now and forever will be skewed by his own loss. How it is skewed is a different matter .
In writing about his friends from Ward 57, his vocabulary reveals his set. He comes up with words and phrases like "just cause," "determination," "nobility of sacrifice," and, as an apparent throw-away, "just another amputee on the long road to recovery." These words tell how Weisskopf sees his buddies and --- indirectly --- sees himself. Bobby Isaacs felt only pride when he displayed his stumps at church, he writes. But, there, in the church, looking on (as friend; as reporter), Weisskopf, too, was displaying what is left of his own body for all to see.
There are sound reasons that such writing brings us old-timers in the disability business to the brink of despair. In psychology, it is called "a double-bind." In family therapy, it is known as "emotional blackmail." In what we members of the ancien régime refer to as CripLit, it is a scandal.
A double-amputee being wheeled on the stage so 800 people can "applaud his stumps" is, at best, an inelegant take on man's suffering; at worst, it is a parody of the woe that has befallen Isaacs and the rest of those on Ward 57. I know few of my disabled friends who would condone (for themselves, for others) such a public bleeding. I know of even fewer who would haul out words like "sacrifice" or "noble" to describe as deep a personal pain as the loss of one or more limbs.
These words I write are not meant to mock an honest search for hope. You and I cannot survive without that. Rather, I am suggesting that writers, the media, the public in general, stay away from a particularly poisonous view of disability. Getting rid of this "heroism" business is the first step; It can start one on the necessary second stage of recovery, the one in the head. Mark O'Brien, the well-known disabled poet, once said that describing us as "brave" is like saying that a Black man has natural rhythm. Heroism is not all that heroic if there are no choices.
We may have been, like the men in Ward 57, in the killing fields ... but after, one does not do battle with the body. Rather, we learn to come to peace with it so we can muster what is necessary for recovery, for survival. The "nobility of sacrifice" that Weisskopf offers can only further cripple us. Hope does not.
It is important to understand that Weisskopf may well be writing in these terms through sheer innocence. It is an innocence that, as I write these words, is being slowly leached from him and the other graduates of "Amputee Alley." It comes from the most powerful of teachers: the new body. It's an introduction to what, in 1976, the paraplegic writer Richard Brickner called My Second Life.
Weisskopf and his friends are in a new school now, one that has no presidential speeches or awards, certainly no graduation ceremonies. They are quietly joining those of us members of the ancien régime. Journalist John Hockenberry said that it was a voyage of discovery: "My body had become a puzzle. Solving it was exhilarating beyond the simple imperatives of survival." Too, Weisskopf and friends will discover, as did Mark O'Brien, that it is the gift that keeps on giving.
Weisskopf's attempt to figure out the why of his loss makes for a compulsive listing in Blood Brothers of awards that have come to him since his accident: the Daniel Pearl Award, the Fourth Estate Award, the Brian Bennett honorable mention from the Overseas Press Club, the White House Correspondents' Dinner ... where President Bush compared Weisskopf to "NBC's David Bloom and Atlantic Monthly's Michael Kelly" who had lost their lives in Iraq.
- Other's like Michael Weisskopf, have shown incredible presence of mind and courage that won our admiration,
said Bush. Then, reports Michael Weisskopf, "The room erupted in applause."
We cannot fault the encomiums, but we must see them for what they are: important testimonies for a man who is baffled by what has come over his body (and his sense of self); a clinging to anything that can give his loss the dignity he feels it deserves; a repeating of all possible facts of the accident to give meaning to despair; and finally, the troubling (and troubled) hope that a noble sacrifice creates nobility.
Those of us who have lost parts of our bodies in far less heroic circumstances than Weisskopf know that, over time, none of these will avail. The historian Hugh Gallagher, disabled for more than five decades, said to me, not long before he died, "I'm tired of being a crip. I want to do something else."
The tributes that are flowing to Isaacs, and the final one that came to Weisskopf, may be a recognition of suffering by those with clerical or political power, but they come from those who are not amputees, who will never know the truth of it, who, indeed, may have another agenda.
Public sympathy plunges Bobby, Pete, Luis and Michael into photo-ops, but these are not necessarily to honor "sacrifice." There is a singular photograph of Bobby Isaacs shaking hands with President Bush. Both of Isaac's stumps are on view.
Isaacs is being photographed with the one man who could be said to have set the scene for the loss of his two legs. Not since Teddy Roosevelt has a president been so deeply identified with "his" war. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and even Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon were dragged into conflicts in medias res.
As the author makes very clear, Isaacs has a lifetime ahead of him filled with uncertainty. He started out poor. His government pension --- some $3000 a month --- can never begin to give him the equipment and the independence he needs.
He will find, in his life, people either turning away from him or loading him down with pity. He faces an dismal future dickering with the Veteran's Bureau, a notoriously stupid arm of the federal government, sometimes even worse --- if such is possible --- than those who run SSI's disability program.
There is, too, a chance that Isaacs will be cursed with drug addiction to curtail his "phantom pain." As the author explains, "Doctors were as hard-pressed to treat phantom pain as they were to explain it." On his nightstand he had a sampling of drugs which might (or might not) relieve it. "pills to combat seizures and depression, lozenges for bronchitis, allergy nasal spray, arthritis cream, medicated patches for shingles, and an electro-stimulation device."
- It was hard to tell if any of them works. The crushing, stabbing pain in my right hand flared and subsided --- but never went away. Doctors said it might last a month, a year, a lifetime.
A lifetime of an ineradicable pain. And for this, a handshake and a few words doled out by the producer of the movie that now runs his life.
There are books available that reveal --- far better than Blood Brothers can --- the world that these newly disabled will come to know. Three years ago, New Mobility and RALPH Magazine published a list of what I believed to be the best books on disability. Of those, we gave our highest honors to three. John Callahan's Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far on Foot, is a must; it is what he calls "the brighter side of being disabled for life." It has a wonderful strain of pissed-off hope (sometimes it is anger that keeps us up to snuff).
Tumbling After, Pedaling Like Crazy after Life Goes Downhill by Susan Parker is what we have come to see as one of the few existential books on disability. Parker tells, in agonizing, painful, merry, finely-wrought detail her new life with her husband, recently a quadriplegic. It gives the reader a chance to see the world of the disabled through the eyes of those who live it daily (I am not talking about what some people crassly refer to as the "victim;"--- I'm referring to the family who, we learn, begin to suffer unexpected trauma of their own).
Finally, since Weisskopf is obviously a political animal, he could gain great insight from Hugh Gallagher's FDR's Splendid Deception. It tells of a man who was profoundly disabled, who pretended it wasn't so, who managed to convince an entire nation of his lack of disability.
It also tells of the price we all paid for it.