War without end / Damaged soldiers start their agonizing recoveries
by Joan Ryan, SF Chronicle

The steady banter is punctured only by the occasional grunts and yelps of pain from behind the curtains along the right wall, where physical therapists — physical terrorists, the soldiers call them — push patients to the breaking point, stretching muscles that haven't moved in months, manipulating limbs still gouged and raw. But soldiers who end up here consider themselves the lucky ones. Others are still in comas or so severely brain damaged they will never recognize their own children. Plenty never made it home at all. If you were missing a leg, there was someone nearby missing both. If you were missing two legs, there was someone missing an arm, too. The injuries at Walter Reed were so profound that a single amputation below the knee was often dismissed as an inconvenience.

"There's always someone worse," the soldiers say.


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