Author Topic: Rebuilding Honor: How Kyle Carpenter Came Back From The Brink Of Death  (Read 379 times)

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Rebuilding Honor: How Kyle Carpenter Came Back From The Brink Of Death
NOVEMBER 11, 2016| THOMAS J. BRENNAN
 
Seven years ago this month Lance Corporal Kyle Carpenter suffered grievous wounds after shielding another Marine from a grenade blast in Afghanistan. Somehow, he survived. This is the story of his remarkable recovery.

The thick steel body of the grenade flexed and swelled before exploding and tearing flesh and bone from Lance Corporal Kyle Carpenter’s face. The date was November 21, 2010. The place was Marjah, Afghanistan. For seven days, the extent of Carpenter’s wounds remained a mystery to his family. Despite e-mails, voicemails, and calls with Marine Corps representatives, his mother and father knew only that their son was being evacuated from Afghanistan in critical condition. The military told them that Kyle had been badly wounded and that his chances of survival were unknown. On November 25, Thanksgiving Day, Robin and Jim Carpenter drove 12 hours, slowed by the holiday traffic, from Gilbert, South Carolina, to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Maryland, to await their son’s arrival. His flight was delayed because of blood clots in his legs. A flight at high altitude could have killed him.

Carpenter arrived at Walter Reed on Sunday, November 28. Robin held his hand all the way from the ambulance to the elevator taking him to the intensive-care unit. Carpenter’s head appeared roughly double its normal size—it was wrapped in gauze and pressure dressings to deal with the effects of the explosion and the aftermath of emergency brain surgery. The doctors in Afghanistan had to remove shrapnel before Carpenter could be flown to Landstuhl, in Germany, and then to Walter Reed. Tubes protruded from his neck, head, chest, abdomen, and each of his limbs. The Carpenters had not seen their son in four months. His mother remembers thinking that Kyle looked worse than anything she had seen while working as a radiology technician in a trauma hospital. She knew it was Kyle only because the hospital staff told her it was.

https://thewarhorse.org/rebuilding-honor-how-kyle-carpenter-came-back-from-the-brink-of-death/

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