Page 34 - Total War on PTSD

After the presentation of the award, the contingent moved on to present the Purple Heart to another wounded soldier in a nearby ward. The nurse came up to me at that point and asked if she could talk with me a minute. I said, “Sure."
"Would you mind visiting with an 'expectant' soldier in the Special Care Unit a couple of sections over," she asked. "Maybe you could talk to him like you usually do with the other troops when you visit one of your injured soldiers. I think it would mean a lot to him.” "I don't mind at all," I said. "I'll be glad to."
As we walked, she added that he was a triple-amputee and that nobody, not even anyone from his own unit, had been to see him and that no one probably would.
“The patient is heavily sedated and might not be able to talk with you," she confessed. "But I'm sure that he will hear you and will know that you're there.”
She then led me down the center of an adjacent ward with soldiers lying in elevated beds along both sides of the aisle. Some were asleep. Most were in some form of traction. Nurses in blue scrubs were attending to others. There was a heavy curtain at the far end of the corridor separating us from the section on the other side — the Special Care Unit.
As we walked toward the curtain, I began to remember the words of that same nurse on my first visit to the Role III six-months earlier as she was explaining the level of injuries that came into the hospital. "Single limb amputations are common," she had said. "There are a lot of double amputees. Some Soldiers don't make it. Triple amputees rarely survive.”
It was then that I realized what the term 'expectant' meant — it was a triage term for a patient who wasn't expected to live.
As we neared the wall of fabric, tears started running down my cheeks. About fifteen feet from the curtain, my legs stopped moving, and I just stood there staring ahead into space — the
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