Word: castros
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There is horror and there is luck, and in war they sometimes come together. The RPG that severed three legs in a fire fight late last August near Fallujah didn't explode, which probably saved the lives of Wyatt, Castro and Meinen. But even a dud traveling at nearly 1,000 ft. per sec. can slice through limbs like a meat cleaver. The three men were alive, but there was a real danger that they would bleed to death in minutes amid the smoke, dust and confusion. As troops on the two other APCs continued firing, the lone medic among...
...medic, the wounded soldiers and their comrades began a frantic race against the clock. Buddies pressed their hands into Castro's hip wound to keep him from bleeding to death. The wound was so massive that his tourniquet was useless. He handed it to Wyatt, who needed two to stanch the blood flowing from his femoral artery. Amid the mayhem, Meinen, who had been manning a 50-cal. machine gun, noticed that he didn't have any feeling in his right foot. "It felt like it had gone to sleep on me, so I picked my foot...
...Black Hawk medevac flight--the three U.S. soldiers were receiving some of the world's best medical care at the 28th Combat Support Hospital, south of Baghdad. Wyatt and Meinen were back in the U.S. about three days later. It was a week before the more seriously wounded Castro landed on U.S. soil...
...leaving for the military," says Meinen, a dark-haired practical joker from Grangeville, Idaho. "But if you're wounded, the military doesn't tell them, because they might be worried about the public getting negative about what's going on over there." Says the serious, quiet-spoken Castro, from Santa Ana, Calif.: "Nobody knows what happened to us, even though it was one of the biggest ambushes in Iraq. People are only finding out about soldiers who are dying, but American soldiers are getting injured...
Wyatt and more than 300 of the most seriously injured have come to the bucolic Walter Reed, which has been treating wounded U.S. soldiers since World War I. The men--and a few women--coming off the Iraqi battlefields in stretchers tend to be young: Castro is 23, Meinen 24, and Wyatt, from Franktown, Colo., turned 21 two weeks before losing his leg. Many enlisted as a way to earn money for college and get in shape, but now they're wheelchair bound. Contrary to the old Army recruiting motto, they're not fighting to be all they...