FORWARD OPERATING BASE SHANK: Seven years ago, Jose Navarro’s platoon was ambushed and nearly overrun by Taliban fighters in Afghanistan.
The troops found themselves pinned down, desperately calling for air strikes. Bullets ripped through Navarro’s stomach, and medics at one point thought he was dead. But this week, after dozens of surgeries, Navarro returned to Afghanistan in an army uniform, flying in a military helicopter with another soldier wounded in the same attack.
“I wanted to walk out of here on my two feet. Last time I was here I got shot in my stomach and got an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) through my leg,” he said.
Washington is winding down its 32,000 troop deployment in Afghanistan after nearly 13 years of war, with US President Barack Obama announcing this week that all US forces will leave by the end of 2016. While an end is now in sight for America’s longest war, many of the more than 19,000 Americans wounded in Afghanistan will be coping with injuries for years to come.
And, at home, the wounded vets are now facing another fight, struggling to secure medical treatment in the face of incessant bureaucratic delays blamed on the Obama administration’s Veterans Affairs department.
Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki resigned on Friday, paying the price for an expanding scandal over failures in health care for America’s retired warriors.
Although elderly veterans often revisit battlefields decades after they fought, Navarro and some other former soldiers are returning to a country still at war, to try to conquer painful memories.
The return trip was organised by the Troops First charity under its “Operation Proper Exit” programme, which is designed to give wounded US soldiers a chance to write a new epilogue to their tour of duty.
On his trip back to Afghanistan, the former staff sergeant was accompanied by a “mentor”, Joshua Ben, who was in the same 82nd Airborne Division platoon encircled that day in Wardak province. Ben, Navarro and four other veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan began a tour this week that will take them to US bases across Afghanistan.
AFP
