The Wounds of War

Alan Babin reacts to Al Sr.'s touch as neighbor and friend Andrea Lovelidge looks on. (Andrea Bruce Woodall)

Alan's neck, supported by another therapist's hand, went slack and his head drooped toward his lap.

"Hey, that's cheating," Landry-Parten said. "You're supposed to move your arm." "That's my son!" Rosie said, winking at Alan.

Later that day, taking a break for lunch, Rosie said those kinds of responses had completely convinced her that Alan's injuries weren't neurological, despite the lingering medical questions and the doctors' concerns that his seizures might be brain-related. She never allowed Alan to see her worried. She didn't want him to be satisfied with surviving; she wanted him to expect a full recovery.

"It's very important that Alan think -- that he realize he really is making progress," she said, her tone sinking from its normal upbeat registers to more solemn depths. "Otherwise people just give up. They just die."

BREAK Rosie stood in the front yard, and a neighbor pressed $150 into her hand. She couldn't talk him out of giving it to her.

To help pay for gas, he insisted.

People all over central Texas had heard about Alan through periodic local news reports and word of mouth, which spread mostly through the civic organizations such as the Lions Club, which Rosie had been deeply involved in before Alan's injury. In March, Rosie found herself on the phone with a familiar male voice: high-pitched, with a Texas twang that seemed to come straight from the nose.

"This is Ross Perot . . ." He had gotten the Babins' number through someone in the Texas governor's office who'd heard about Alan, and within days had arranged for Alan to see his doctors for a new CAT scan and MRIs. He then surprised the Babins with a customized van: a 2004 Ford Econoline with 57-inch raised side doors and a wheelchair lift. Soon, they negotiated a deal with the rehab center that let them take Alan home on weekends to try out the new bedroom that had been added onto the side of the house. Al Sr. would sleep outside the bedroom door on an inflatable mattress, so he'd be close in case anything went wrong. He and Rosie sometimes likened their lives to those of the parents of a newborn.

"It's not that bad," Al Sr. said after he had rolled off the mattress one morning.

He put a pot of coffee on in the kitchen before getting Alan ready for the day -- a body wash, a clean shave, a change of clothes. Things had settled into a routine. The scans performed by the doctors provided by Perot reconfirmed that the ventricles that carry cerebrospinal fluid in the brain were swollen, but the swelling didn't appear as significant as had been feared, and its effect on Alan's brain was unclear. The scans didn't rule out brain damage, but by the summer Alan was dispelling the worst of the family's fears on his own.

By early September, Alan was responding in his physical therapy sessions more quickly and was able to lift his fingers more easily on command, even though the effort still wiped him out. His lips, if he concentrated, began to form words, and he was almost to the point where he could push enough air through his throat to vocalize -- but not quite. Very slowly, he was becoming himself again.

"Hey, buddy," Al Sr. said as he leaned over Alan to shave a clean swath through the foamy cream on his face. "Who's your daddy?" It was a running joke. For a month or so, both Al and Rosie had been posing the question to Alan whenever they did him a favor. It was sort of like asking, "Who's got your back?" But Alan threw his father a changeup. His lips puckered, and he silently mouthed the word: Mom.

It was that kind of humor that helped his old friends feel comfortable spending time with him in his room.

"All right," said Tim Felty, a friend of Alan's from Round Rock who stopped by one afternoon to watch an NFL game on the flat-screen TV. Felty was noting approvingly that Alan's black canvas high-top Converse All-Stars, which his mom had bought him a few months ago, were gone, replaced by some new leather sandals. "Getting the style back!"

For many who knew Alan before he was shot, the figure in the bed took a little time to get used to. He had been a guy who was comfortable in his body, and his was usually a body in motion. He never hesitated to jump out onto the floor of a dance club, and if there was a bridge spanning a river and it was a hot day, he'd probably jump off it, his friends said. Everyone recognized him as the guy in the bent-billed baseball cap who could be found driving around town in his GMC Sonoma pickup, fishtailing around curves if he was feeling a little adventurous, maybe hurtling off the road if he was feeling a little too adventurous. Because so many of Alan's passions -- tae kwon do, Honda motorcycles, crawling through caves -- were driven by motion, his friends' emotions were all mixed up when they first laid eyes on him.

"First off, I want to thump him on the head and tell him what a numskull he is for not keeping his head down like I told him," said a teary-eyed Ryan Richardson, Alan's best friend from high school, who had joined the Marines at age 20 and had urged Alan to do the same. "But really I just want to give him a big hug and let him know how much I love him. I don't know. I can't -- I can't believe the things that have happened, and how fortunate we've been that he's still with us. I'm just afraid to hug him though, like I might give him too big of a hug." Richardson had worked with Alan at Jason's Deli near the Wal-Mart in Round Rock before he joined the Marines.

"For me, it was just, 'Get me out of Round Rock, get me started,' '' said Richardson, who did not serve in Iraq and was discharged from the Marines last year. "I talked to our other friend Robbie and Alan, and tried to get them to go with me, but at the time I guess it wasn't right for them. Then Robbie went and signed up for the Marines, and when he did that I think Alan kind of went, 'Hey, everybody's moving, maybe it's time I did, too.' "

The guy Richardson had known was still there under the largely motionless body, as he and his friends discovered the more time they spent with him. The once-sharp tongue could no longer sling comebacks, but eventually the slow smiles that spread across his face as his muscles continued to wake up let them know he was following what they were telling him. Felty sat at his bedside with a can of Coors Light he'd grabbed from the Babins' refrigerator and scrolled through channels in search of the football game. He filled Alan in on what he had missed when his friends went out the night before.

"They had these drink specials, and they were unbelievable," Felty said. "A Guinness was $1.75. Man, I never heard of $1.75 Guinness."

In the next few hours, more friends would stop by, just to hang out in the room and tell stories. In the old days, Alan would more often than not have been the one helping to direct the flow of conversation, but now his eyes simply followed from one speaker to the next, with him smiling at all the right times.

His friend Brion Baird asked if he remembered when a cow walked up to them from out of nowhere while they were fishing. They all climbed a tree and left their tackle boxes on the ground, and sure enough the cow went straight for the tackle box, started nosing around, got itself hooked on a lure and ended up breaking Robbie's pole. Alan remembered, according to the silent smile that was so big it pushed his glasses down his nose. Baird tried to give him a hand, awkwardly readjusting the frames.

"I don't know what I'm doing here, bud," Baird said, getting laughter from the others and a smile from Alan. "I'll be honest."

Before the injury, Alan probably would have been the one to come up with the sarcastic stinger that would have bust them all up laughing.

But on this night, the practical joker side of him came out in more subtle ways. A few months earlier, Rosie had gotten Alan a dog -- an almost hairless, 3-pound teacup Chihuahua name Chuy who could lie with Alan without much risk of damage. A high-strung creature, the dog was all shiver and yap when not at Alan's side. The dog and Alan -- being the only two in the house who had to rely on others to interpret what was going on in their heads -- seemed to share a bond, and that bond sometimes seemed to exploit Al Sr.'s willingness to provide his son entertainment. The dog liked to mark its territory throughout the house, drawing groans from a beleaguered Al. And now, in the other room, the dog was christening the shoestrings of a visitor. Hearing what had happened, a long, lingering smile of approval broke out on Alan's face.

Alan was becoming adept at such forms of silent communication, but his friends could tell from his wiggling lips that he increasingly seemed to yearn to add his own oral commentary to conversations. And in the past month his strength had begun to improve, allowing him to occasionally form an audible vocalization.

Just a few weeks before, as Rosie and Al Sr. turned the light off in his room and bade him good night, Alan opened his mouth to speak.

"Water," he said.

At first they couldn't believe their ears. But in the following weeks, they'd hear his croaking voice more and more, erasing all doubt that the figure who had been lying motionless with his eyes open for so long was capable of expressing himself.

ALAN SAT IN HIS WHEELCHAIR IN HIS ROOM IN THE REHAB CENTER ONE FALL DAY and agreed to try an experiment with a visitor: He would listen to a list of questions; possible answers to each question would be read aloud and assigned a number. Using his fingers, he would pick the number that came closest to his answer. If none of the answers fit, more possibilities would be offered until he heard one that gave accurate expression to his thoughts.

It was a process his parents had tried with limited success, but his recent progress indicated that another try might prove more productive. It promised to be a long, slow and sometimes frustrating ordeal for him, but he conveyed with a nod that he was eager to try it.

Though he recalls his childhood up through basic training, Alan indicated that he did not specifically remember Iraq. He didn't remember being there, and didn't even remember deploying to Kuwait. The sandstorms that filled the soldiers' tents with grainy light had made no impression. He didn't remember the abandoned military camps the soldiers in the 82nd Airborne had occupied as they moved toward Samawah. Rosie, however, a few weeks earlier had noticed an unusual reaction -- a wide-eyed look of attention from him -- as images of burned-out trucks appeared on TV. She had asked if he had seen images like those and he had nodded yes. Now, when asked again if images of burned-out trucks smoldering on a roadway sometimes flashed through his head, he raised one finger: Yes.

Did he sometimes feel angry about what happened to him?

Never.

Did he ever get depressed?

Again, never. But he did suggest that he was sometimes frustrated because he believes people underestimate him.

Which do they underestimate -- his physical or mental capacity?