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The long road to recovery

By BRADY DENNIS
Published February 12, 2006

	[Times photo: Chris Zuppa]
	Maria Jones and her daughter Angel wait in their hotel to be picked up for church. Maria doesn't know how long she'll be in Tampa to be with her husband. "Sometimes I think I'm going to go crazy," she said. Below: Lee, Maria and Angel at a hospital in Texas.

TAMPA - Outside her small hotel room, the lights of Fowler Avenue shine in the darkness, a neon ribbon of chain restaurants, gas stations and dime-a-dozen strip malls.

Inside, Maria Jones has assembled a makeshift home for herself and her 9-month-old daughter: Family pictures on the mirror. A Portuguese Bible on the desk. Angel's crib by the bed. Her husband's Purple Heart beside the lamp.

Lee Jones, a once-handsome Army staff sergeant with the 82nd Airborne, lies burned and broken a mile away in his room at the James A. Haley VA Medical Center. In early October, he survived a bomb that exploded near his Humvee during combat in Haqlaniyah, northwest of Baghdad. Three soldiers died in the blast, including one from Tampa.

In the months since, Maria and Angel have become a hidden consequence of the war in Iraq. Like thousands of other young wives, children, parents and siblings, they left behind a life they knew to travel to the bedside of a severely injured soldier.

Lee's long, painful journey of recovery took them to an Army hospital in Texas for several months of intensive care. In January, it brought them to Haley - 600 miles from their North Carolina home - so he could undergo months, maybe even a year, of rehabilitation.

For the second time, they have found themselves alone in a strange and unfamiliar city.

They have relied on the kindness of strangers. They have, as best they can, learned to weather each day's quiet struggles.

"I have times when I despair, and I cry," Maria says in her native Portuguese. "There are moments when I want to give up. But my husband needs me. So I get up for one more day."

On this cool February evening, the hotel room television flickers with the faces of two more soldiers killed in Iraq. Maria doesn't notice.

She's busy feeding Angel a bottle, rocking the tiny girl in her arms until she drifts quietly to sleep.

* * *

As isolated as Maria sometimes feels, her situation has played out in hospitals across the United States.

As of Friday, more than 17,300 members of the military have been wounded in action during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, according to the Department of Defense Web site.

In 2005, Congress created four "polytrauma" rehabilitation units around the country - in California, Minnesota, Virginia and Tampa - designed specifically to handle the war's most seriously injured soldiers. The units so far have treated more than 200 patients, including Lee Jones.

Most of them are victims of insurgents' explosives, and they suffer a dizzying array of injuries : brain damage, nerve damage, multiple bone fractures, hearing and vision loss, infections, severe burns and behavioral or emotional problems. Some have lost limbs. Others have severed spinal cords.

With almost every shattered soldier comes a shattered family.

"The families, they have grief and loss. They have been wounded, too," said Dr. Steven Scott, director of Tampa's Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center. "We don't want them to become another casualty of the war. We want to rehabilitate them, too."

Families need to be present, he said, both for themselves and for the patients. They can read to their soldier, watch movies and play cards, provide connections to home that doctors and nurses cannot.

"A good family support many times makes all the difference," Scott said.

But for many families, coming to a loved one's bedside means giving up all that is familiar.

"You leave behind family. You leave behind cars. You leave behind your animals, your plants, other children, jobs," said Mary Ellen Harlan, chairwoman of the nonprofit Haley House Fund, which assists families of patients at Tampa's VA hospital.

"Everything changes in a minute. This is not a vacation. This is a way of life."

A way of life that Tonia Sargent knows well.

Her husband, a Marine gunnery sergeant, was hit by shrapnel from a bullet on Aug.5, 2004, outside Najaf. He lived, barely, to fight an endless string of personal battles: brain damage, a fractured skull, a shattered jaw, partial paralysis, impaired vision and speech, amnesia and spinal meningitis.

A week after the attack, Tonia left her job and two teenage daughters in Southern California and stayed with her husband for two months, first in Maryland and later in Palo Alto, Calif., 450 miles from home.

"I didn't have the money to travel, didn't know if I was going to have to quit my job, didn't know what I was going to do with my children. I didn't know if I was supposed to pack for a funeral," she said.

"I'd lived with a Marine for 18 years. Our days were very structured. Suddenly there was no structure. It was very terrifying."

Early on, she had wavered.

Do I stay and be a mother, or do I go and be a wife?

"There was no choice," Tonia said. "I had to be by his side. He needed me."

* * *

With no transportation of her own, an infant who requires constant attention, a limited command of English and long hours spent by Lee's side, Maria has little time for making friends or having fun.

And yet, she has tried to shed the isolation that fills her days in Tampa.

She discovered a small grocery store that stocks food from her native Brazil, which she stacks atop the air-conditioning unit in her hotel room. A friend in Texas put her in touch with a local Brazilian church, which she attends twice a week.

"It gives me strength," she says.

On a recent Wednesday night, a woman from the congregation picks up Maria and Angel and drives them 10 miles to the Assembleia De Deus World Revival Church in Tampa.

They worship in Portuguese in a blue-walled sanctuary inside a shopping center off Waters Avenue. A Brazilian flag joins the American one behind the pulpit. A full band plays the hymns.

The weariness that Maria wears most days melts away the minute she sits down in the front row. The pastor's wife takes Angel and rocks her to sleep.

During the next hour, Maria laughs, cries, hugs, dances, sings and prays. She knows most of the songs by heart. She soaks in the Bible passages, including one about Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.

She feels embraced here, free to let the burdens of her new life slide away, if only briefly. At one point during the service, Pastor Denilson Diniz brings Maria and Angel to the front of the sanctuary.

He dives into a long prayer, asking God to look after Maria's husband, to heal him, to give him strength. Maria puts her hand to her forehead, closes her eyes, loses herself in his words.

The 40 people in the congregation reach toward her with outstretched arms, as if to bless her. They shout "Amen!" and "Hallelujah!" and " "Gloria a Deus !"

When the pastor finishes, Maria takes the microphone and thanks the congregation. Thousands of miles away, she has five sisters and four brothers. But on this night, she looks out over the crowd and says, "This here, this is all my family."

The service ends just after 10 p.m. Maria and Angel catch a ride home, past the dollar stores and late-night diners, to the empty hotel room off Fowler Avenue.

* * *

She never envisioned this life. No one does.

Only three years have passed, but it seems an eternity since she was an independent, carefree 21-year-old Brazilian girl, living with relatives in Italy. Lee was the strapping, 20-year-old American soldier stationed nearby.

They met at a bar in Vicenza in early 2003.

"He called me over to dance," Maria recalls. "I didn't at first. But he kept insisting. He asked me my name. I didn't speak any English. Not a word."

He spoke no Portuguese. But she liked his pale blue eyes, loved his smile. They went dancing; they went for drinks. Life with Lee was "always a party," she says.

He proposed 10 days after they met. They married six months later in October 2003. By then, he had been to Iraq once and would leave again the next August. He returned nine months later, in time to see Angel born. But he went back to Iraq a third time.

And then, the bomb.

Maria and Angel were living with Lee's parents in eastern North Carolina, near Ft. Bragg, when the call came.

Lee suffered severe burns over nearly half his body. He had a stroke that left him weak on one side. Even now, he has open wounds and constant pain. He has trouble talking and swallowing. He must learn to stand and walk again.

And yet, the doctors, like Maria, remain hopeful.

"I have a good feeling about him," said Scott, one of a team of specialists aiding in his treatment. "We're anticipating that he'll be able to eventually go home, to walk ... to be a good father, a good husband."

Maria knows her old life won't return. On the bad days, she worries she'll never share a normal day with Lee again.

"Sometimes, I think I'm going to go crazy," she says. "I try not to think about it. It's depressing."

Lee has bad days, too. He worries, as injured soldiers often do, whether his wife will have the patience to stay by his side. Just last week, he asked her, "You promise you will stay here?"

Maria answered in her best English:

"I married forever."

* * *

Maria wishes she could feel his arms around her again, if only for a moment. She longs to give him a real kiss.

Instead, she settles for cradling his head and giving him pecks on his raw cheeks.

She wishes she could place her daughter on Lee's lap. Angel barely knows her father's hands. But because of the risk of infection, the baby is kept from his room. So Maria improvises.

Most days, the drill goes like this:

Just before 4 p.m., the soldier in room E053-58 turns slowly toward his first-floor window, which looks out on an empty courtyard and several palm trees swaying in the afternoon breeze.

He waits until he sees a young woman with blond hair wade through the bushes and stand in the patch of dirt outside. She carries a little girl who wears black buckle shoes and red stockings, a white dress with red lace roses, and a ribbon in her hair.

The soldier watches his daughter, studying her face as if seeing it for the first time.

His pale blue eyes fill with tears.

He stretches his lips into a faint smile.

He mouths the words "I love you" through the glass, toward the daughter he cannot touch and the wife who married forever.

--Times staff writer Shannon Colavecchio-Van Sickler contributed to this report. Brady Dennis can be reached at dennis@sptimes.com or 813 226-3386.

[Last modified February 12, 2006, 06:13:52]