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The Space Between Battlefield and Home
Trying to Forget
Marine Lance Cpl. Ryan Autery is preparing to return to Tennessee after an eight-month stay at Mologne House, much of it with his mother, Trish Autery.
(By Michael Robinson-chavez -- The Washington Post)
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Ryan Autery's calamity was scarcely noted when it happened last August.
The headline was: "Marine injured in bomb explosion that claimed life of another."
The 236-word, nine-paragraph Associated Press report out of Murfreesboro, Tenn., announced that the then-19-year-old from LaVergne, near Nashville, "lost a limb" when his Humvee hit a land mine in Najaf, Iraq. Another Tennessee Marine, Cpl. Brad P. McCormick, 23, had been killed, the report said.
Autery doesn't like to talk about that day. Asked what he remembers, he replies: "Everything." But it's depressing, he said. "A very touchy subject." He's been trying to forget it, though he has McCormick's surname tattooed above the cross on his right arm.
"Some people have the ability to block out traumatic events," he said. "I, apparently, do not have that ability."
The attack happened Aug. 19 in Anbar province, "out in the middle of . . . nowhere." He had just checked his watch. It was 11:15 a.m.
A Marine rifleman right out of high school, Autery was in the back of an open Humvee when it was rocked by an explosion. The blast shredded his left arm, which was amputated just below the elbow at a combat support hospital nearby. He had been in Iraq five months.
He was taken to a hospital in Baghdad, then to one in Germany, then to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, then to Walter Reed for its amputee rehabilitation program. He was at Walter Reed until October, when he was released to Room 454.
The wounded are sent to Mologne House when they are well enough to leave the hospital, said general manager Peter A. Anderson, but still need help and treatment for their injuries.
Except for a few more hospital stays and a couple of excursions, Ryan Autery has been there the whole time.
Autery's mother and father, Rick, who served in the Marines in the 1970s, arrived the day their son was flown to Bethesda, and his mother has been with him almost nonstop since. In the hotel room, she slept across the night table from him, in the bed nearest the door, while he bunked nearer the TV set.
Autery's recovery did not go smoothly. The amputation was complicated to treat. One operation took 10 hours. At another point, a skin graft failed, and he had to have his stump sutured to his side to promote a new graft. He also suffered a bacterial infection and then a reaction to antibiotics, his mother said.
