Back home, wounded grappling with the price

CAMP PENDLETON, Calif. -- Marine Sergeant Jason Wittling remembers lying flat on his back, strapped to a stretcher in a C-130 cargo plane ferrying him from a military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, to the United States. A Humvee rollover in Iraq had left him paralyzed from the neck down, and now mucous fluids were collecting in his mouth and throat, which had been punctured to hold a tube.

Wittling, 30, stared at the stark ceiling of the droning plane, concentrating with a desperate intensity on the simple act of breathing. The nurse who had been by his side had rushed away, airsick and unable to assist Wittling in this most basic task.

Helpless and feeling hopeless, this gung-ho Marine, a squad leader who had rushed into Iraq at the spearhead of the invasion, suddenly envisioned a torturous life that seemed much worse than dying.

"I was hoping that the plane would crash and just end it," Wittling said this week at his home here. "If I couldn't do anything for the rest of my life, I didn't know if it'd be worth it."

Wittling is one of about 4,600 Army soldiers and Marines who have been wounded or injured in Operation Iraqi Freedom as of the end of February, a number that grows almost every day as winning the peace proves much more daunting than winning the war. Long after the last US soldier has left Iraq, long after the heroes have been lionized and the dead have been counted, Wittling and his severely wounded comrades will be reminded every day of the sacrifices they made.

To veterans such as Wittling, whose accident took place eight days after President Bush declared mission accomplished, the life-altering price he paid with his body is an acceptable and honorable sacrifice for what they consider a transparently just cause. But for wounded soldiers such as Army Sergeant David Pettigrew, whose right leg has been amputated from the hip, the rationale for war remains murky.

"Looking back at how everything got kicked off and got started up, I don't know," said Pettigrew, 26, of Colorado Springs, Colo. "I don't know if the reasons we went were valid."

For both Wittling and Pettigrew, however, this much is certain: They knew the dangers of military service, and they will not make their injuries a cause for wallowing in regret or self-pity.

"I ultimately lost my leg not for a cause, but for my buddies, for my unit," said Pettigrew, whose leg was shredded by a rocket-propelled grenade that tore through the turret of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle last July. "We knew what the potential cost was."

Whenever Pettigrew tries to cross his legs, the native Texan is reminded that he will travel through the rest of his life with only one of them.

Wittling, however, has a flicker of hope, and that long-shot chance motivates and sustains this father of two young children. Though he says doctors have given him only a 1 or 2 percent chance of walking again, he is adamant that he will do so.

Already, Wittling has regained some movement in his upper arms. Despite the paralysis that grips most of his body, Wittling is jut-jawed insistent that he would return to the battlefield if possible.

"I'm paying the price of freedom right now, and I have no regrets about doing it," said Wittling, a 10-year veteran of the Marine Corps. "I'd rather end up like this or worse, so my two kids don't have to live like kids I've seen in other countries."

As Wittling speaks about family and patriotism, words that are more than rhetoric to him, two of his brothers watch with open admiration. They seem less sure, however, whether his sacrifice was justified.

Time will tell, they say. But seeds of doubt, created by the violent instability in Iraq, have been planted in the minds of Michael and James Wittling, both military veterans, as they prepare to bring their brother home to Ashland, Wis.

"The people who make the decisions to go to war, I think they throw it out there, and they don't realize the consequences," said James Wittling, 39, a Marine veteran. "I wasn't really convinced this was the next move we should do."

Michael Wittling, 42, who served in the Army, supports the cause of regime change in Iraq, but said the future of that distant country will determine if his brother's sacrifice was worthwhile.

"It's too early to tell if his injury is justified," Michael said. "If the government over there works, then yes. But if it's going to turn out like Vietnam, where the Communists took over anyway, then that ain't worth crap."

This ambivalence, even among veterans of the Armed Forces, is expected to be visible this weekend in venues from Bush's hometown of Crawford, Texas, and the gates of Fort Bragg, N.C., to New York City, where members of Military Families Speak Out will demonstrate against the war.

But in the Wittlings' home, a subsidized stucco duplex in new Marine Corps housing, the ambiguities of war are invisible.

American flags are on nearly every wall. Photographs show the Wittlings with Bush at the White House; the couple in beaming health before the war; and the veteran in a wheelchair with his proud but saddened wife by his side.

An autographed jersey from Green Bay Packers quarterback Brett Favre hangs behind glass, as well as a ball presented to him after a game between the Packers and the San Diego Chargers. The mood here is upbeat, hopeful, and stubbornly stoic, as evidenced by the sticker attached to Wittling's wheelchair: "Not as lean, not as mean, but still a Marine."

Wittling's wiry frame has filled out somewhat, to 147 pounds from the 117 he weighed at his post-accident nadir. But his arms are like stringy spindles, his legs are shriveled, and his fingers are clenched in unfeeling fists wrapped with black leather gloves that push the wheelchair.

Wittling had been fanatically active in sports before the rollover outside Karbala on May 9, when Wittling's Humvee crashed as he sped away from the smoking fuse that his soldiers had used to explode a weapons cache. Now, he is limited to watching his 6-year-old son's T-ball games.

The combat engineer uses his injury in a stunningly self-effacing way that brings howls of laughter from his son, Cody, and 3-year-old daughter, Emily. In his simulation of an arcade target, Wittling pushes his wheelchair back and forth like a metal duck on a carnival firing range, grinning broadly while his children launch water balloons at him.

"I get to do things with the kids every day," Wittling said. "If I hadn't been hurt, I wouldn't have seen any of her birthdays. Hell, yeah, it was worth fighting for. It's improved my kids' lives.

"We talk about God, Corps, and country over there, but what it boiled down to was my kids."

In the Wittling home, which they will leave after the Marine's medical retirement April 30, the children make sandwiches for their father. But their mother feeds her husband, bathes him, dresses him, and attends to nearly every detail of his personal hygiene.

For a 32-year-old woman who cared for both parents in their last days, the prospect of a long marriage dominated by 24-hour nursing is physically and emotionally daunting. "I've done this before, but I never thought I would have to do it again," Maureen Wittling said.

"I'm worn out all the time," she said. She is losing large patches of hair from the constant stress.

"The first night I had him home, I was scared to death," she recalled.

"He was balanced on my knees, and I started bawling my eyes out. `I have him home,' I said. `Now what do I do for him?' "

The strain surfaces in sporadic outbursts between the couple. "He was in a foul mood one day, yelling at me," Maureen said, resting at the kitchen table she bought at a thrift sale. "And I was yelling back, calling him ungrateful, and pelting him with Hershey Kisses."

She sighed, a small smile creasing her face. "Twenty minutes later, we busted up laughing," she said.

A Southern California native, Maureen is not looking forward to life in rural Wisconsin. But the help of her mother-in-law will be a blessing, she adds, and disability pay from the Department of Veterans Affairs will allow them to live comfortably, if not luxuriously.

Even if she knew one year ago what she knows today, Maureen said, "I'd do it again. No question, no doubt."

The other wives in her husband's unit have experienced that feeling first-hand. On Valentine's Day, their soldiers returned to the battlefield that continues to be Iraq.

"I'm jealous of some of the other wives," Maureen said, "because they'll have another homecoming." Pettigrew, the Army sergeant in Colorado, knows his military homecomings are over, too. On March 31, he will retire from the Army and embark on a career path that he hopes will lead to teaching high school.

Pettigrew is proud of the reconstruction work that his Fourth Infantry Division unit accomplished near Tikrit, even though the work bore little resemblance to his combat training.

"I don't know if the reasons we went were valid, but the [reconstruction] mission once we got there was very valid and very meaningful and very necessary," he said. "Sure, the war was technically over because we said it was, but where we were at, there was the day-to-day conflict, these people are shooting at us, they're throwing [explosives] in the road," he said.

"For most of the soldiers on the ground, it really wasn't over." Nor, it seems, will the war ever truly be over for the wounded such as Pettigrew and Wittling.

That likelihood is reinforced in sprawling Camp Pendleton. There, off a street named for a ferocious Korean War battle, Emily Wittling occasionally leaves her parakeet or her bubbles, kisses her father's fingers and legs, and asks in a 3-year-old's voice: "Are you still hurt, Daddy?"