Giving to those who have given

Families of injured military personnel find support from those who truly understand.

By REBECCA CATALANELLO
Published July 20, 2007

TAMPA - It looks like nothing more than a plate of baked chicken, yellow rice, green beans and a roll served in a noisy hospital dining hall on a Thursday.

But when it lands on the red table cloth before Priscilla Bowen, 57, she smiles and her eyes crinkle and get wet the way they've been doing a lot since she got here four months ago.

It's not the chicken. It's Kamal, her 22-year-old son. He walked. Just hours earlier, for the first time since U.S. Marine Corps Cpl. Kamal Bowen of Piscataway, N.J., was injured in a car accident on a Japanese highway Jan. 20, he stood up and walked with a walker - 50 or 75 feet - no harness, no railing, on his own.

"It was a good day," Bowen says, as she picks up a fork and looks over at her second-born child seated in a wheelchair next to her.

Across the table, Marine Staff Sgt. Fernando Martinez, 37, stares at his wife of 11 years and smirks as she talks to him. He doesn't have a voice now since suffering traumatic brain injury three years ago, but no one can say they aren't talking.

Suzanne Martinez, 43, of Clermont, is simply glad he's here with her. Since his accident, she's attended these dinners alone and with their 7-year-old daughter, Carina.

Fernando was usually sleeping in the nearby nursing home building of the James A. Haley VA Medical Center. But now he's more active, more alert. He's been moved to the fifth floor Spinal Cord Injury Center, not far from Kamal.

Every third Thursday for the past three years, volunteers and veterans from the Tampa chapter of Military Officers Association of America have been doing this. They call it Operation Helping Hand.

They come to the Spinal Cord Injury Center with homemade desserts, catered dinners, bouquets of flowers and little gifts, to serve a simple meal to people like Priscilla Bowen and Suzanne Martinez - families of military personnel whose lives have been transformed and uprooted by a loved one's traumatic injury.

"Sometimes you feel so helpless," says Jeanne Cohen, a 68-year-old veteran of the Army Nurse Corps, who's been volunteering at the support group about every month for the past year. Baking a bunch of cupcakes or cleaning a pan seems like a small thing. But it's something, she said, some way to give to people who have given.

There are about a dozen patients or patient families around the room. They are outnumbered about three to one by those who want to give to them.

The injured dine in wheelchairs. One wears a medically prescribed helmet. Those who can, talk and laugh. Fernando raises his cast-bound arm in a joking gesture. "Hoorah," Kamal says quietly when an emcee announces dinner.

The disabled veterans sit beside people in uniform, healthy men and women who are active-duty - whose brains are whole, who haven't suffered a debilitating injury. They are men and women who want to mingle with the injured, who want to thank their families, who just want to be there.

Army Maj. Yessic Spencer, a communications officer at Central Command who has had two tours in Iraq, has been attending these dinners every month for a year.

"By the grace of God," he says when asked why he comes. "It could have been me."

Rebecca Catalanello can be reached at rcatalanello@sptimes.com or 813 226-3383.

[Last modified July 20, 2007, 12:01:09]