2005-08-16 - 1:59 p.m.

Wounded Soldier Sends Visiting Bush on His Way
excerpted from August 15th, 2005 8:04 pm Soldier wounded in Iraq feels cynical By Peter Carlson / Kennebec Journal

"He kept yelling at me to get the people behind him," his mother, Ann Rodgers, recalls. "He said, 'Get them away from me!' I said, 'There's nobody behind you.' He asked me if I could see the back of his eye because his face was gone. I said, 'Your face isn't gone.' He said, 'Liar!'"

His real injuries were almost as bad as the ones he hallucinated. He had a broken femur, a broken jaw, a broken cheekbone. His right calf was blown away. His right ear couldn't hear and his right eye couldn't see.

He spent a month and a half at Walter Reed. The doctors wired his jaw shut, put a metal rod in his leg, did nine hours of surgery on his eye, reconstructed his calf and did skin grafts.

"I've had way too many surgeries to count," he says.

He was never alone. Every night somebody stayed with him -- his mother or father or sister Marie, or his girlfriend, Jane Libert, 19, a student at McDaniel College in Maryland.

"I always had somebody to talk to," he says.

He got visits from celebrities, too. Generals came by to shake his hand and ask how he was doing. The Dave Matthews Band visited, as did players from the Washington Nationals and the Colorado Rockies.

"I didn't catch their names," he says. "I was kind of high on morphine at the time. And you can't read their autographs."

One day a nurse came in to ask Rodgers if he wanted to meet President Bush, who was visiting the hospital. Rodgers declined.

"I don't want anything to do with him," he explains. "My belief is that his ego is getting people killed and mutilated for no reason -- just his ego and his reputation. If we really wanted to, we could pull out of Iraq. Maybe not completely, but enough that we wouldn't be losing people -- at least not at this rate. So I think he himself is responsible for quite a few American deaths."

Rodgers says he also declined to meet Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. This wounded soldier has lost faith in his leaders, and he no longer believes their repeated assurances of victory.

"It's gonna go on as long as we're there," he says. "There's always gonna be insurgents trying to blow us up. There's just too many of 'em that are willing to do it. You're never gonna catch all of 'em. And it seems like they have unlimited amounts of ammunition. So I don't think it's ever gonna end."

previous - next