Jane Cook - Stories of Faith and Courage from the War in Iraq and Afghanistan

My heart was pounding. Three days had passed since Daniel had been injured, and I was about to see him for the first time at Walter Reed. Daniel’s brother, Patton, prayed with me before we entered surgical ICU together.

Machines filled the room, with tubes going in and out of Daniel’s body. He had just been checked out by his doctors at Walter Reed, and since they had not re-bandaged him yet, I was able to get a good look at the magnitude of his injuries. They had opened up his belly; it was just wide open. I had never seen anything like it.

Okay, all right, this is where we start, I thought. This is where we are, what we’re going to move forward from.

I had a job to do: to support my husband and be the leader of the family while he recovered. I had to rise now because he needed me. I wasn’t going to look back on it with regret, I was going to do the best I could. So that’s where we started.

And it was a long road ahead. In Korea, he spent all his free time working out and trained his men to push themselves beyond their physical limits, too. Some of the guys thought he was crazy, but when Daniel was hit, everyone could see how being in good shape really helped his body. He had additional muscle and more blood.

The body ate up his muscle to get energy. He went from being really strong and muscular to being so thin he couldn’t even keep a ring on his finger. His cheeks were concave, his eyes almost looked too big for his face. We had shaved his head to be able to keep it clean easier, and the resulting appearance reminded me of pictures I had seen of prisoners in Auschwitz.

He was unbelievably thin and weak. For the first time since I had known him, he was helpless, but I knew he was going to make it. And in the meantime, I braced myself for what would be required of me calling on prayer and God’s strength to be my support.

Lord, use my weaknesses to prove your strength and receive the glory.

“But he said to me, ‘My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.’” (2 Corinthians 12:9a)

When I became conscious again, my leg was gone. But I was alive.

A week after the injury, my right leg was decomposing so quickly that my body had become septic and I was crashing. The doctor was terrified I was going to die so he made a decision: it was either my leg or my life.

As soon as they took my leg, my vitals began to improve. But I was in a precarious position for many weeks to come.

In the first two months following the injury, I had received more than one hundred and twenty units of blood (the human body has about ten to twelve units of blood), and I had undergone about thirty-five surgeries. Kidney and liver failure plagued me, too. I was so messed up that it took me a while before I was even ready to start physical therapy. My abdomen was still open for a long time the doctors at the initial trauma station had opened it to visually inspect all the organs and make sure no little piece of shrapnel had nicked anything.

So it was at least two months after I got hurt that I could even sit up. It took three people to move me to the chair with all the tubes and wires. I sat for ten minutes and was in total agony.

The recovery process seemed really drawn out, punctuated with ups and downs. At first I was just thrilled to be alive thrilled that my genitals were intact, that I could still be a dad and a husband, be functional. So I went from that elation to trying to cope with the exact level of my disability. How bad is it? How bad is it going to stay? How good is it going to get?

Throughout the recovery process, my dad’s advice came back to me. I had decided not to become bitter before I ever landed on Iraqi soil. I was determined to stay true to that resolve, to remember that my circumstance was just one brushstroke in a masterpiece God was creating.

Lord, grow my desire to glorify you so much that I will be content with both good times and bad as long as you are honored.

“When times are good, be happy; but when times are bad, consider: God has made the one as well as the other.” (Ecclesiastes 7:14)

“Let me get that for you,” my father-in-law said as he reached to adjust the hospital bed for Daniel. We all wanted him to be as comfortable as possible while he was Walter Reed.

I’ll never forget Daniel’s response.

“No,” he said, looking at each of us hovering over him. “Actually, you all need to leave. I have training to do.” He was just determined to figure out how to do these things on his own, including operating his mechanical bed.

Another time, a nurse asked him, “What would you prefer, your head to be up or down, or your feet…?”

And he said, “What is the optimal position for healing?” In other words, don’t ask me what I want, tell me what is going to get me better and out of here. He was very determined that he was not going to be enabled. He was going to be Daniel.

We laugh at these stories in our family because it was such a relief to see his trademark “can-do” attitude shining through again. The insurgents could take his leg, but not his faith, his personality, his dry wit. He was going to continue.

That’s not to say there weren’t hard days. There weren’t lots of them in terms of being totally discouraged. There were a lot of painful days. I can only think of one day where the hope was truly needing to be replenished. For him, many of the days just felt like the movie, Groundhog Day the same thing over and over again.

But, as Daniel has said: “I had a personal mission. I wanted to get on with my life, and I didn’t feel like I had time to sit around moping. I don’t ever wake up in the middle of the night and think, ‘Wow I’m really glad that happened to me,’ but I’m not feeling sorry for myself either. It’s just what God’s plan is for our family.”

Lord, whatever task is ahead of me, give me the strength and determination to do it well.

“Forgetting what is behind and straining toward what is ahead, I press on toward the goal to win the prize for which God has called me heavenward in Christ Jesus.” (Philippians 3:13b, 14)

The insurgent attack January 10, 2005, and the ensuing recovery period began a new chapter in the life of our family. All in all, I was an inpatient for four months, then spent another six months as an outpatient, learning to walk again with a prosthetic.

If you saw me today, you wouldn’t see that I had lost a leg. You wouldn’t see me running any marathons, but you’d see me cooking dinner while Wendy runs errands, or studying for my doctorate program at the University of Georgia as I prepare to return to West Point as a professor. You’d see Wendy and me juggling twins, born in June 2008 (on our ninth anniversary), or caring for Anna Grace, now six years old. This is our new normal day.

We have seen God work directly in our lives in ways that many people haven’t had the opportunity to. This whole story is for a purpose, and the lesson is that life isn’t about us, as individuals. God has a plan which will take place one way or another, and our lives are about trying to match our actions to his will. He will do whatever it takes to get us where he wants us to be. Self-pity has no part in the plan, nor does selfishness or arrogance; all those things are the result of not understanding where we fit in the plan.