Army of Iraq war veterans 'suffering brain damage'
From Jonathan Rugman in Palo Alto, California
THE hardest part of Jason Poole’s day is his early morning confrontation with the face staring back at him from his bathroom mirror. In the past 18 months, plastic surgeons have rebuilt it five times.
“I used to be handsome, you know,” says the 23-year-old US Marine, who was on foot patrol in western Iraq in June 2004 when he suffered terrible injuries in a roadside bomb blast. He adds: “But hey, c’est la vie.”
He has earned a Purple Heart medal for valour, but the twist to this Marine’s story is that when he fought in Iraq he wasn’t American at all, but British. Born in Bristol, he moved to California with his parents at the age of 12, and signed on the dotted line aged 17 in exchange for help from the Marines with college tuition fees and his application for US citizenship.
Corporal Poole cannot remember the explosion itself. He was in a coma for two months and is permanently brain-damaged. Two Iraqi soldiers and an interpreter were killed, but the Marine’s body armour saved him. He is now deaf in one ear and blind in one eye, and his face is a maze of skin and bone grafts held together with metal plates. Shrapnel was embedded in his skull and his brain injuries were so severe that he has had to learn to walk and talk again.
“We are talking about a brain-injury epidemic,” says Nurse Jill Gandolfi, who cares for Corporal Poole in a rehabilitation unit run by the US Department of Veterans Affairs in Palo Alto. The official number of brain- injured Iraq veterans is more than 1,700, but Harriet Zeiner, Palo Alto’s leading neuropsychologist, believes that well over 6,000 such injuries is a far more realistic estimate.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,11069-2037633,00.htmlDamn