Combat injuries can't crush chief's spirit

  • Published
  • By Susan Griggs
  • Keesler News editor
KEESLER AIR FORCE BASE, Miss. --  When Chief Master Sgt. Damian Orslene retired from the Air Force Monday, he received traditional keepsakes, love and respect bestowed on an Airman who's devoted 28 years of service to his country.

He'll also carry with him combat injuries from a five-month deployment that forced his departure from the service much earlier than he'd hoped. He's had three surgeries and three years of nonstop physical therapy to rebuild his right shoulder and replace his right hip. He developed a blood clot in his lung after surgery and nearly died. He walks with a cane, takes 18 pills a day and wears hearing aids to lessen the constant buzzing that steals his sleep.

But his worst wounds are ones people can't see and often don't understand -- the traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder resulting from an explosion at Kirkuk Air Base, Iraq.

"A song, a movie, a book, a feel-good article in Reader's Digest will make me bawl--I feel like the biggest wimp sometimes because my emotions are so raw," the chief remarked. "That other Damian Orslene no longer exists. You come home a new person and you have to figure out who you are--and you expect the person who loved that person who left to love this new you."

Chief Orslene volunteered for his third deployment over the objections of his wife, Lori, a retired senior master sergeant, and some of his Keesler colleagues.

"I had a little trouble with hip degeneration, but I was still running half-marathons, 10-Ks and 5-Ks and I passed all my PT tests with flying colors," he noted.

At Kirkuk, the chief headed a six-member personnel support for contingency operations team--PERSCO, for short. About once a week, he'd get a call to assist with other duties.

Chief Orslene injured his right shoulder while securing concertina wire to the base's chain link fence with a wooden crimping tool. After four hours, he heard a loud pop and his right arm stopped working and started tingling. He hurt his right hip when he slipped as he and his teammates ran to a bunker when they were attacked during a mail run.

"Both times the medics said they needed to medevac me to Landstuhl (Regional Medical Center, Germany), but I insisted on staying with my team," he recalled.

April 2, 2007, changed the chief's life forever. A cement truck full of explosives drove into a police station just as U.S. security forces arrived. The base commander called him to the command post to use the personnel database to find A-positive blood donors. Then the command chief called and said, "I need you at the hospital."

When Chief Orslene arrived, he found the command chief standing outside who said, "They need help in there. I thought I could do it, but I can't."

The emergency room "reminded me of a chainsaw massacre -- blood on the ceiling, running down the walls, bloody footprints down the hall. An Airman I knew yelled, 'Down here, Chief! Here's your gloves. They need you in the operating room.' I told her, 'I'm a personnel chief.' She repeated, 'They need you in the OR.'"

"I go in and there's the medical chief--he's a 4A, a medical admin guy--and he's gowned, masked, actively involved in the operation," Chief Orslene remembered. "I asked, 'Tom, what in the hell am I doing here?' He said, 'We need anyone with any medical training. Come over here and hold this guy's eye in.' He slid this thing like a Dixie cup across the guy's face and sewed it in place over the eye. Then he handed me this guy's arm and told me to put it in a bag and put his name on it and put it under the bed so that when they shipped him out, all of his body parts would go with him.

"The blood was flowing out as fast as they could put it in. They were taking blood right out of people's arms and brought it straight into the OR. The tile floor was so covered in blood that you couldn't stand up, so I took these blue spongy pads and tried to squeegee the blood into the corner."

Finally the surgeon said, "If we're going to ship him to Balad (Air Base, Iraq), there's no better time than this. I put as much anesthesia in him as he can take. He's going to wake up and you're going to have to talk to him."

"I started whispering in his ear as he started to rouse and shake," the chief said. "I held his hand and kept saying, 'Brian, you're going to be OK. Buddy, you're going to be OK,' over and over again. We went out through the ER to go to the helicopter, but I didn't remember any of that. Finally, they had to pry my fingers loose from his hand -- and he died 23 minutes after they took off."

When Chief Orslene returned home from Iraq, he had to learn to navigate the medical care maze to get the treatment he needed for his physical injuries.

"We didn't have a wounded warrior program here yet," he pointed out. "That's been fixed -- now when you get home, you see a doctor, whether you need to or not. Dr. James Gasque, a retired colonel who continues to work with wounded warriors, and Dr. Yekaterina Karpitskaya, my orthopedic surgeon, are the very best."

It didn't take long for the chief's wife to become aware of the emotional toll of her husband's deployment.

"We were at the base gas station during his R&R week on a Wednesday at noon when they test the base sirens," Mrs. Orslene said. "As the alarm started blaring, he literally dove under the truck. He was visibly startled and asked what the siren was for. Even after I explained it to him, he was uncomfortable hearing it and only visibly relaxed when it stopped."

She noticed her husband's frequent "whiteouts" when he stared ahead without blinking for long periods.

The chief's PTSD became more obvious to his wife on the 4th of July, about six weeks after his return. When a neighbor started firing a small cannon to celebrate the holiday, her husband flipped over the dining room table, tried to find his weapon and freaked out their guests.

"When I couldn't get Damian to understand he was safe, I went outside and demanded that my neighbor, a retired Navy officer, stop firing his cannon," Mrs. Orslene said. "I told him, 'From one military person to another, I'm sure you understand what my husband just went though and will not fire that cannon again.'

"Damian had so many things physically wrong with him that we just associatedany changes -- headaches, memory loss, irritability -- to the therapy or pain he was in at the time," she continued. "I didn't immediately associate his forgetting things to traumatic brain injury. What was different right away, though, was his emotional state. Damian had never spoken harshly to me and he came very close several times. He had highs and lows before like everyone does, but now his highs were higher and his lows lower."

To complicate the issue, there was no clear reference in Chief Orslene's medical records about the combat aspects of his injuries, so he wasn't coded as a "wounded warrior." The medical evaluation board at Keesler said he would be retired at 40 percent non-combat related. To appeal the decision, Chief Orslene met with a physical evaluation board at Lackland Air Force Base, Texas.

"Basically the board said just because I said I was hurt in a combat zone didn't make it so," he said. "We had a laptop and a cell phone and I'm reaching out to people all over, saying, 'Dude, send me a letter, e-mail, anything!'"

People all over the globe sent information to support him, with the chief working the phones and his wife downloading e-mails to print out.

After reading some of the e-mails, Lori said, "I've been hearing you tell your story for three years -- you didn't mention half of this stuff."

"When I started reading the e-mails, it was like a filing cabinet in the deep, dark recesses of my mind was unlocked," the chief said. "Horrible memories came tumbling out."

The e-mails revealed missing pieces about the day of the police station explosion.

"The blast came through our wire through the tent to the command post--the cement building was split from floor to ceiling," Chief Orslene explained. "The blast threw me 9 feet into the air and Icame down on my head. When I came to, there was so much sand in the air I couldn't hear or see. As soon as I was cognizant, they needed blood, and that's where the story I remembered picked up."

The chief had repressed the scene in the emergency room which had been converted to a makeshift surgery suite because of the number of injuries.

"There was blood everywhere -- like the worst M*A*S*H scene you could imagine, people doing the very best they could," Chief Orslene said.

"The last thing I remembered was when the helicopter took off, but it didn't end there," he continued. "The chief who was in the operating room yelled my name and said, 'There's plenty more where he came from--let's go.' And I went back in there for 18 1/2 hours. Now I remember holding people down who were screaming as we cut off their clothes because they'd been burned so bad ... sticking my fingers in guys' bodies, holding down arteries that were pumping blood. I held people's lives in my hands.

"I had so much blood on me that when I was done they wouldn't let me leave the hospital -- they cut off my clothes and put me in scrubs and sent me out to go put on a fresh uniform. I still feel blood on my hands that just won't wash off."

Back to the physical evaluation board at Lackland--Chief Orslene's injuries were determined to be combat-related.

"I'm Air Force Wounded Warrior No. 577," he declared. "People hear about wounded Soldiers and Marines, not Airmen. There are nearly 800 Air Force Wounded Warriors now, some of them right here at Keesler."

After the Orslenes returned home, they had one day to repack before leaving for the Wounded Warrior Games at the Olympics Training Center in Colorado Springs. A week of training and conditioning preceded the actual competition, with swimming from 9-11 a.m., basketball from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and volleyball from 1-3 p.m. He won a bronze medal in the wheelchair basketball event.

Being surrounded by hundreds of wounded warriors stirred up even more repressed memories for Chief Orslene, but it also awakened a new appreciation of why the United States is the greatest fighting force in the world.

"It has little to do with technology -- it's because we never quit," he insisted. "One guy was hanging on to the side of the pool and I said, 'Way to go!' and he said, 'That's what you expect from a Marine, isn't it?' They took his legs, they took his eyes, he's forever damaged and he still won't quit."

The pace of competing in three sports took its toll on Chief Orslene by the time he competed in the 100-meter swimming event. He missed the bronze medal by 1/100th of a second. He passed out after the race and awoke with his head in Lori's lap and an oxygen mask on his face.

Two weeks after the games, the chief had shoulder surgery and ended up in the ER several times for pain management. Nightmares began anew and he was only able to sleep about two hours a night.

"PTSD is a disease--it goes into remission, but it never goes away," he observed.
"You can do things to mitigate it--take some meds, read about it, have a support network, develop coping strategies. You get comfortable with the memories--the more you talk about it, the better it gets; the more you remember, the less likely you are to have nightmares. I spend two hours with a psychiatrist every Tuesday to work through this."

Chief Orslene worries about the challenges many Airmen face after they return from deployment, expected to be back on the job just a few weeks after their return.

"They're not the same people when they come back -- maybe they were gunners on convoys or guarded Iraqis in prison," he observed. "I'm afraid our country is going to have an epidemic of PTSD in 10 years.

"I'm 46 years old and realized I needed help -- I'm a chief and I wouldn't back down," he continued. "But what if I was 20 and I had my whole life ahead of me and a 19-year-old wife and a brand new baby?"

Chief Orslene praised the 81st Medical Group's wounded warrior team, referring to Donna Anderson, active-duty wounded warrior care coordinator, and Dan Ransom, recovery care coordinator, as "absolute heroes -- Dan and Donna are a tiger team. Keesler's program is in its infancy compared to larger facilities, but the Air Force and other services count on Keesler when injured service members move home to this area."

Chief Orslene's retirement plans are uncertain. An avid fisherman, he earned his boat captain's license, hoping to work on a charter boat after retirement, but isn't sure if "my mediocre body will be able to get out there every day." He's been encouraged to start a nonprofit organization to assist wounded warriors in Mississippi, but he's not sure where to start.

"I pray every night that God's going to point me in the right direction," Chief Orslene remarked. "I've had a lot of separation anxiety about leaving the Air Force. I'm in mourning for a way of life that I love and I don't know what's next -- a chief is who I am, and that part of me is dying.

"But when it's all said and done, it's been a great ride -- I've loved being an Airman," he concluded. "It's all about the people you love and the people who love you. The rest of it is details."