For the Wounded, No Miracle Is Small

BETHESDA, Md. — The Ryan family stood vigil, gathered around a hospital bed in Building 10, Ward Five East -- a surgical ward at the National Naval Medical Center. Before them lay Marine Cpl. Eddie Ryan, silent and pale, a grievous bullet wound in his brain and a feeding tube in his belly, straight through the "N" in a blue tattoo that spelled "RYAN."

Angela Ryan stroked her son's fine hair. Christopher Ryan squeezed his boy's hand. Felicia Ryan, 19, looked into her brother's eyes, her hand on a Bible resting against his left leg.

The news was not good.

Eddie's neurosurgeon, Robert Rosenbaum, had told the family that the young Marine's frontal lobes had been terribly damaged by a bullet that tore into his skull during a firefight in western Iraq on April 13. It was quite possible that Eddie, 21, would never fully regain consciousness or recover what the doctor called "full cognitive activity."

Christopher stared at his son's smooth face and spoke: "We need a miracle. Eddie's going to be our miracle Marine. We're praying that God gives us this miracle because my son is a great American."

Across the hall the same day this month, Marine Cpl. Bryan Trusty sat up in bed, wolfing down a chicken dinner on a hospital tray. His father, Steve, sat at his bedside, amazed that his son was eating and talking, and even laughing.

On April 3, a hot shard of shrapnel ripped a hole beneath Bryan's left eye, pierced the length of his brain and lodged against his brain stem. He survived emergency surgery in Baghdad, but went into cardiac arrest on the medevac flight to the U.S. on April 7. His doctors did not expect him to live.

Now Bryan, who turned 21 in the intensive care unit four weeks earlier, was about to be discharged for outpatient therapy, with shrapnel still in his brain and his arm, and a distinct memory of all that had befallen him. He is able to walk and speak normally.

"I call him my miracle child," his father said, watching him eat.

The number of service members wounded in Iraq has surged past 12,000, half of them injured so badly that they cannot return to duty. Many of the most critical cases end up here at the National Naval Medical Center, established in the early days of World War II.

On the worst nights at the Bethesda hospital complex, ambulances and casualty buses deliver up to 100 wounded Marines and sailors from Iraq. Since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, more than 1,700 have arrived, most of them young and suffering from the devastating damage inflicted on human tissue by explosives, bullets and shrapnel.