Word: meinen
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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...
...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 up and was trying to massage it, trying to get the feeling back...
...except for the piece of my leg that had been blown off from the knee down," Wyatt says. "So I took my leg and jammed it under the stump to keep it pointing up. It was kind of messy." It may have been messy, but it worked. Meinen and Wyatt held hands, trying to reassure each other. "We're not gonna die in this track," Meinen said. "We're not gonna die over here." He was right. About an hour after being wounded--thanks to their colleagues and a Black Hawk medevac flight--the three U.S. soldiers were receiving some...
...release month-by-month injury counts. The wounded are mentioned only when some other soldier has been killed in the same attack. "When you join the Army, they send your picture to your hometown paper because they want everybody to know that you're 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...
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...