When Wounded Vets Come Home

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As more troops than ever are surviving the fearsome injuries of war, parents are increasingly being thrust into the role of long-term caregivers

Cynthia Lefever didn't get a chance to see her son Army Specialist Rory Dunn before he shipped out to Iraq on 24 hours’ notice in March 2004. The strapping, gregarious athlete—six feet three and broad shouldered, with mischievous brown eyes—had enlisted two years earlier, when construction jobs started drying up in the Seattle area. “I was really upset,” says Cynthia, 57. She knew the war in Afghanistan was escalating and an invasion of Iraq seemed imminent. “Naturally, as a mother, I was afraid for his safety and welfare,” she says. “But he was making an adult decision. I supported it.”

Three months after Rory’s deployment, on his 22nd birthday, Cynthia was sitting in her family room in Renton, Washington, composing an e-mail to him that included birthday greetings from his friends and relatives, when the phone rang. It was Rory’s captain, calling from Fort Drum, New York. The officer delivered his news with a shaky voice: a pair of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) had blown up Rory’s Humvee while he and his unit were on escort duty near the city of Fallujah. Shrapnel from the simultaneous blasts had pierced the unarmored vehicle. The captain offered few details about the incident, which killed Rory’s best friend and another soldier with them in the Humvee. But he did explain that Rory had suffered an open-head injury and was “critically wounded.”

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At that moment, Cynthia became one of a growing number of parents who are, by necessity, stepping back into the role of caregiver for their children who are returning from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with debilitating and often long-term injuries. According to officials from three national organizations—the Wounded Warrior Project, The Military Family Network,, and the Coalition to Salute America’s Heroes— an estimated 10,000 recent veterans of these conflicts now depend on their parents for their care. Working unheralded, these parents have quit jobs, shelved retirement plans, and relocated so they can be with their injured sons and daughters. Many have become warriors themselves, fighting to make sure this new wave of injured veterans gets the medical care and rehabilitation it needs.

These parent caregivers, many of them boomers and some older, face a 21st-century challenge: their children are coming home in unprecedented numbers with injuries that would have been fatal during earlier conflicts. “This is a war of disability, not a war of deaths,” says former Army physician Ronald Glasser, M.D., author of Wounded: Vietnam to Iraq (George Braziller, 2006). “Its legacy is the orthopedics and neurology wards, not the cemetery.” Not only have better helmets and body armor saved lives, but battlefield medicine now borders on miraculous. Someone arriving at the Air Force Theater Hospital in Balad, Iraq, has a 96 percent chance of survival. He or she can sometimes be stateside within 36 hours of the injury. As a result, there are just 6 deaths for every 100 injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan, compared with 28 deaths per 100 in Vietnam, and 38 in World War II, according to Linda Bilmes, a researcher at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

AARP

[midnight]

1. I wonder how our country expects aging parents to provide

this exhausting care? The planning of these sevice men/women's lifes seem to never have entered into the equation. I find this war of disabilities to be very telling of a country that barely makes allowances for those of aged disabilities, or those with birth disabilities. I attended a conference in Chicago about two years ago for universal designing. There is some amazing technology to measure the gate of a person and determine what diseases are in the process. Meausuing urine from the toilte to tell what meds are being taken, or forgotten. Lots of cameras for monitoring. Basically designing a world in which monitoring is happening at a distance.

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2. At one time, I felt remote (video) specialist office visits was OK for rural areas

and parts of U.S. that could not entice physicians. Mainly because it created an opportunity for the patient to receive help from the professional who could best meet their needs.

Now, I believe it will be used as an extension of "looks good from the door" mentality.

America may have the "best medical science", but its absolutely worthless when its unavailable to the average American.