I’ve been out of pocket for a while, so never got a chance to write about our visit to Walter Reed hospital. I don’t have much to add to the excellent things Kathryn and John Hillen wrote about it. But, for the record, I just want to say how awe-inspiring these guys are, and how wrenching it is to see the sacrifices that they have made. I talked for a while to a guy who had gotten hit twice. The first time was a minor shrapnel wound from a mortar attack. He had been buried deep in a bunker, but still had gotten hit, prompting jokes from his buddies, “Next time, duck.” His response was, “Hey, all I was doing was ducking.” His second injury was much, much more serious. He was manning the 50-caliber gun on an armored vehicle–sorry, I had never heard of it and now don’t quite remember what it was–when a roadside bomb exploded. He was hit in the head. He was temporarily blinded and went deaf. A comrade pulled him to safety inside a Stryker, which then barreled down the road at high speed to get him to medical help. His sight began to come back and he remembers being loaded onto a helicopter and looking at the sky. Then he fell into a coma for 9 days. His brain swelled to–I believe he told us–twice its size. Part of his skull was removed to relieve the pressure. That fragment of his skull is still stitched into his stomach, for preservation. He has had countless surgeries and faces more. He recently had to decide whether or not to get a certain nerve cut: If he did, he would lose forever the sense of taste on the left side of his mouth. If he didn’t, the left side of his mouth would always taste like metal. But his spirits seemed good. He loves talking to the guys in his unit back in Iraq whenever he gets a chance. He has a strong religious faith. At the open house, he was looking for a girl he had talked to there before. He wasn’t the least bit hesitant talking about his experience. He said he doesn’t have many dreams anymore, but that when he does it’s about his injury. He said at one point, “The one thing I’ve learned is that you don’t want to be in a coma very long.” He says he gets flashbacks from his coma, weird distorted memories that must have some connection to reality. The hospital rooms will come back to him. Or he’ll remember being caught in a nightmare, trying to run from a doctor in a surgical mask–probably a vague recollection of being strapped down and thrashing around as often happens to patients with brain injuries. He said, of his coma, or his memories of it, “I’ve never been so terrified in my life.” I talked to a friend afterward and we both agreed that these were the most chilling things he told us. He will live with his injuries and these memories the rest of his life. And he is just one guy–multiply the sacrifice he has made, and the burden he has taken on, by several thousand and you get some sense of the price we have paid in Iraq. We should always, always be mindful of that.