Book Review: Blood Brothers - Among the Soldiers of Ward 57 by Michael Weisskopf

When Time magazine reporter Michael Weisskopf went to Iraq to do a cover story on the U.S. soldier as Time's "Person of the Year" for 2003, he came back with the story of a lifetime. Problem is, it wasn't the cover story. It was a story that came from losing his right hand to a grenade.

As the first reporter wounded in a war ever afforded the privilege of being treated at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Weisskopf was in a unique position to view and truly understand the care and treatment provided battlefield amputees. From that position, he brings us Blood Brothers, the story of soldiers treated on Ward 57 of the hospital, the amputee ward.

Weisskopf was in a Humvee on patrol with the 1st Armored Division in a district of northwest Baghdad on December 10, 2003. He heard a clanking sound, thinking it was just one of the rocks youth tended to throw at the Humvees. He looked down, saw a small dark oval and picked it up.

I may as well have plucked volcanic lava from a crater. I could feel the flesh of my palm liquefying. In one fluid motion, I raised my right arm and started to throw the mass over the side of the vehicle, a short backchand toss. Then everything went dark.

Thus starts Weisskopf's journey into a world of pain, medicine, rehabilitation and courage. At Walter Reed, he comes to know a variety of soldiers who have lost one or both hands, arms, feet or legs or any combination of them. Weisskopf tells the stories of three of them as much as his own. He takes us through not only his own experiences, but the medical, rehabilitative and personal trials and tribulations of a variety of Ward 57's patients, focusing in particular on Pete Damon, Luis Rodriguez and Bobby Isaacs, even after their discharge from the hospital. None of them are alone or unique. By the time Weisskopf was injured, the Iraq War had produced twice the rate of amputations of every war of the 20th century, except Vietnam, for which there were no good statistics.

I soon discovered that I shared something with those soldiers [on Ward 57] larger than the differences in our biographies. We were men struggling for an identity. The psychological scars of amputation ran deeper than those from conventional wounds of war. The blasts took away something deeply personal. None of us felt like the man who had gone to Iraq. We possessed the same minds; they just resided in different bodies.

It is not difficult to see how their identities were affected. Weisskopf was a journalist who had lost his writing hand. "I never gave much thought to how a hand worked until I lost one," he says. How would he type? How would he take notes?

Article Author: Tim Gebhart

Tim Gebhart lives in Sioux Falls, SD, where he practices law in order to provide shelter for his family, his dogs, and his books. He is a member of the National Book Critics Circle and his blog de guerre is A Progressive on the Prairie.

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