Sargent Brigg's War, pic and link.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

http://citypages.com/databank/26/1304/article13914.asp
Sgt. Briggs's War

Bob Briggs got a head full of shrapnel in Iraq. Then he came home to more wars: to regain the use of his half-paralyzed body, and to get the U.S. government to pay for his medical care.

by Molly Priesmeyer, City Pages, Wednesday, November 30, 2005

FROM THE TIME Bob Briggs was a kid, what always thrilled him most was the romance of operating heavy equipment—the big machines that made roads and dug holes and moved steel beams, that got jobs done and kept the world moving. The fascination never left him. It was part of the reason that the then-23-year-old Briggs enlisted in the National Guard in 1992, after the first Gulf War, as a combat engineer and equipment operator. And it was certainly the reason he chased after, and eventually won, what he calls his "dream job," as a road maintenance worker with the Iowa Department of Transportation.

These days, the heavy machine Briggs is learning to operate is his own body. Last April 16, at an encampment 70 miles west of Baghdad, an Iraqi insurgent's rocket-propelled grenade exploded about 10 feet from Briggs. The blast shredded the right side of Briggs's skull with shrapnel. His right eye was destroyed, along with most of the vision in his left eye. The resulting massive brain trauma effectively wiped out a lifetime's worth of vital neural connections that encompassed tasks as varied as walking, feeding himself, and making and storing memories. The left side of his body was almost completely paralyzed. Shrapnel littered his brain and right hip. After being evacuated from the field, he spent nearly a week on life support. "I got so much metal in me I probably won't be able to go through airport security ever again," he jokes now.

[CatWoman]

1. Wow

Briggs is my surname.

Really weird seeing it in print.