Woodworkers Lend Skills to Injured Soldiers

Program Brings Personalized Canes to Wounded

C.A. Savoy has gotten too good at making canes.

"There's a need. If there wasn't, we wouldn't be turning them," said Savoy, a master woodworker from Fairfax County. "When the kids stop coming home wounded, we're out of business. And that can't come soon enough."

Army Maj. Joe Claburn, 32, stopped outside a dining room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center yesterday to pick up his cane. Burned along the side is his nickname, "Crazy Joe." That's what Pakistani soldiers dubbed him in 2001. They taught him a few phrases in Urdu before the invasion of Afghanistan, and one that he used for a while before he knew just what he was saying: "I'm a crazy man."

It stuck.

Woodworkers from across the country carve and personalize canes with soldiers' names, descriptions of combat tours, dates of wounds and, sometimes, the names of fellow soldiers who died, burned into the wood. Carved eagles top them off.

Late last year, Claburn's parachute got twisted after he leapt from a plane over Germany. He and German commandos were preparing for a low-altitude jump into Afghanistan. Instead, the elite parachuting instructor was falling toward the earth. Half a page of bones were broken when he hit, starting with his right foot and moving through his pelvis. He said he thinks the tree he fell through, while he wore his heavy gear, saved his life by slightly breaking his fall. Although he said his doctors gave him 30 percent odds of walking again, he gave up his wheelchair on his birthday this month.

"The fact that I can use this cane is really important to me. It kind of shows my progression," Claburn said. But what he wants is no cane at all. The carved wood "is really a symbol of the next thing that I have to overcome," he said.

Hank Cloutier, a retired Air Force flight engineer who spent decades managing operations at Dulles International Airport, gathers requests for canes from the injured, then helps get them to volunteers nationwide. He also handles deliveries and teaches carving to soldiers to help lighten the monotony of recovery.

Many want to start big.

"A lot of the guys say, 'Maybe I can get around to carving an eagle,' " Cloutier said.

Sgt. 1st Class Milton Siave, 53, an Army combat engineer whose job included dismantling improvised bombs in Afghanistan, has started with a boot. It's for his son, who went to the Citadel military college in South Carolina, and it's almost finished.

"It's a good therapy," Siave said. "Nothing bothers you."