Brian Kolfage....The heros we never know.........
Awhile ago,
I shared a story of an engine change in Balad where i was there overnight. We were attacked by mortars and rockets. i will never forget the overwhelming numbness i felt, afterword when i heard of the fate of the security forces squadron airman who gave both his legs and an arm to the fight that day. Until a few days ago i wondered often how he was doing and if he made it. I had heard he lost alot of blood and was medevaced to germany, where he was in critical condition and they did not know if he would survive. I didn't know him......but he crossed my mind often and i said many prayers for him.
a few days ago i saw this in the march 28th edition of the airforce times :
and after having been , frankly.....reading it brought tears to my eyes.
it is copied and pasted from their website
March 28, 2005
The long road back
He survived a mortar attack and a triple amputation, but he’ll work for the Air Force again.
By Laura M. Colarusso
Times staff writer
As Brian Kolfage waits for his physical therapist, he gets a phone call. He holds the phone with his left hand and flips it open with his mouth.
Kolfage, 23, a senior airman previously stationed at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas, has had to find a new way to perform even this simple task. He lost part of his right arm and both of his legs in a mortar blast at Balad Air Base in Iraq last September.
“It’s hard relearning how to do everything,” said Kolfage, who was assigned to the 887th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron in Iraq. “When you’re little, you learn to do things like zipping zippers one way. Now, I have to do that with one hand.”
Kolfage has survived massive blood loss, a triple amputation and a collapsed lung.
He has been through more than a dozen surgeries, daily physical rehab and occupational therapy. He’s had tubes stuck down his throat, through his rib cage into his lungs and where his legs were cut off. He was on a respirator because he had fluid in his lungs.
Yet despite loosing his entire left leg, all but 6 inches of his right and his dominant hand, Kolfage expects to be able to work for the Air Force again.
This time around, he’ll be a civilian, probably working with security forces at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz.
Kolfage is one of 300 airmen injured in the war on terrorism. Of those, 285 have returned to duty, according to statistics provided by the Air Force.
These servicemen and women are returning to active-duty or civilian jobs within the military in greater numbers than a few years ago. Officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the hospital where Kolfage is recuperating, attribute this to technological improvements in prosthetic limbs and more aggressive physical therapy.
Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on March 3, Air Force Lt. Gen. Roger Brady, deputy chief of staff for personnel, said the Air Force has a policy to keep those injured in the service.
“We work to retain [wounded airmen] on active duty if it is at all possible,” he said. “If we are unable to return an [airman] to active duty, we work to get them civilian employment within the Air Force if they so desire. We owe that to these great young men and women who defend this country.”
Kolfage’s injuries were too severe for him to return to active duty. He will be medically retired from the Air Force on April 13.
But Kolfage has a team of three civilians helping him put together his resume, find job openings and talk to prospective employers.
‘I tried standing up and I couldn’t’
As he works on a painting project at Walter Reed to help him get used to using his left hand, Kolfage talks about the attack that changed his life.
It was about 2 in the afternoon. Kolfage left his tent at Balad Air Base to get a bottle of water. About 20 feet from the tent, a 107mm mortar round fell on him and, as he describes it, “ripped my body apart.”
The date was Sept. 11, 2004.
“I tried standing up and I couldn’t,” Kolfage recalls as he paints brown highlights on a plaster-cast family of wolves. “My right hand looked like a dog had chewed at it.”
He wasn’t wearing body armor or a helmet when he was hit. Instead, he wore beach shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops.
The blast from the mortar pushed him back six feet from where he was standing. Within moments, what seemed like dozens of people began scurrying around him, administering first aid.
He just lay back and watched.
As he tells the story, Caren Garner, a craft-care specialist helping the airman with his project, interrupts.
“How about some beige for the top?” she asks.
Kolfage looks at the statue for a moment and agrees it needs a lighter color. After switching brushes, he goes back to the story.
His clothes had turned red, and blood was everywhere, he said. One of his friends from Goodfellow, Senior Airman Valentine Cortez, “plugged up a lot of the holes where blood was gushing,” Kolfage said.
He had volunteered for duty in Iraq. He and about a dozen others from Goodfellow were working for the Department of Agriculture inspecting luggage and packages going back to the United States.
The group had been deployed to the base for two weeks when the attack occurred.
“I didn’t think I was going to die,” Kolfage said. “But I didn’t think it was as bad as it was.”
He was scooped up in a stretcher and put on an ambulance where people were holding his legs on.
“That’s when the pain kicked in,” Kolfage said.
That’s also when his anger arose. Kolfage questioned why it was him that got hit.
“In the ambulance, I was really pissed off it was me,” he said.
He remembers yelling for pain medication, and then waking up 36 hours later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center without his right hand and legs.
In addition to the amputations, Kolfage had been through a procedure to determine whether there was any internal bleeding. He has a foot-long scar from the bottom of his breastbone to his pelvis where surgeons cut him open to prod around.
“A lot of the doctors said I should have died,” Kolfage said.
Recovery
Physical therapy began almost as soon as Kolfage arrived at Walter Reed on Sept. 13.
“He had to start from ground zero,” said Laura Friedman, Kolfage’s physical therapist. “Just sitting up was a challenge.”
The first exercises worked on getting Kolfage to contract his muscles as he lay in the hospital bed, still heavily medicated.
He has steadily progressed to more difficult exercises, all designed to increase his core stability and upper body strength.
On this day, Kolfage, who uses a wheelchair while waiting for new sockets on his prosthetic legs, wheels over to a cushioned table and pulls himself onto it. He climbs on top of a blue disk designed to keep shifting his balance as he does his therapy routine.
He decides he doesn’t want to wear his prosthetic arm.
“I think I’m going to take off my arm,” he said. “I was doing … [exercises] yesterday, and my arm flew off.”
For the first exercise, Kolfage picks up what is called a “body blade.” It is a thin bar that is held in the middle and swings back and forth on both ends.
“It’s gotten easier over time,” Kolfage said, shaking the blade with his left hand. “Now I can pretty much get myself on the disk. When I first started, I couldn’t hold myself up on this.”
If the experience has demoralized him, Kolfage isn’t telling. He says matter-of-factly that keeping a positive outlook has helped him recover.
But there are small signs of the frustration he faces.
Before he begins the second set of exercises, Kolfage pushes up his right sleeve, but it slips back down because there is no wrist to catch it.
He tries two more times and finally lets it fall back over what’s left of his arm. He takes a deep breath and carries on with the exercise.
Kolfage’s hips are in constant motion, jerking back and forth, trying to hold his balance. Friedman sits behind him to make sure he doesn’t fall.
Friedman described Kolfage as “one of the most challenging cases I have ever seen.”
The next exercise doesn’t involve any weights or other equipment. It’s simply Kolfage trying to maintain his balance on the disk.
“Without legs, you’re basically balancing on your torso,” he said.
He uses a resistance band to work out his shoulder and back muscles.
Thirty-five minutes and several sets later, Kolfage moves back to his wheelchair. Friedman hands him a 25-pound weight and he begins doing bicep curls.
For the first time, his face gets flushed.
“I’m done,” he said.
‘I feel real short’
After he finishes with physical therapy for the day, Kolfage decides to put on his prosthetic legs.
It’s a highly coordinated event. He pushes the wheelchair up to his walker and then back a bit so he’s not too close.
With Friedman at his side, Kolfage puts his right arm in a holster and grabs the walker with his left hand, pulling himself out of the chair. He wobbles, but finds his balance within a few seconds.
With the legs locked in place, Kolfage stands at about 5 feet 7 inches. He said he started with a pair of legs that were only 6 inches tall and has slowly worked his way up.
“I feel real short,” said Kolfage, who was 6 feet 2 inches tall before the injury.
Without his prostheses, he’s only a few inches taller than 3 feet.
Kolfage stands for less than five minutes, but his hips are constantly moving, much like when he was on the blue balance disk.
He focuses on the floor. He appears out of breath.
“You have to learn how to put pressure on them,” Kolfage says of his legs. “I don’t have one [leg] to trust.”
A tour group has entered the physical therapy room and gives Kolfage a round of applause.
“Way to go,” cheered one woman.
He doesn’t move from the spot. When he sits back down, he raises the bottom of his prosthetic foot so it is parallel with his head. He jokes that the next time he goes to a bar, he’s going to ask the bartender to put his beer on his foot.
Once Kolfage gets his final set of legs, he’ll be back to his normal height and back to a relatively normal life, he says. He won’t be able to take long walks with his wife, who he married two months after the attack in a ceremony at the hospital. But he’s looking forward to being as independent as possible.
“I’ve got a deal with the prosthetic guy,” Kolfage said with a smile, referring to one of the rehabilitation specialists he works with. “If I run, he’ll lose 100 pounds.”
I shared a story of an engine change in Balad where i was there overnight. We were attacked by mortars and rockets. i will never forget the overwhelming numbness i felt, afterword when i heard of the fate of the security forces squadron airman who gave both his legs and an arm to the fight that day. Until a few days ago i wondered often how he was doing and if he made it. I had heard he lost alot of blood and was medevaced to germany, where he was in critical condition and they did not know if he would survive. I didn't know him......but he crossed my mind often and i said many prayers for him.
a few days ago i saw this in the march 28th edition of the airforce times :
and after having been , frankly.....reading it brought tears to my eyes.
it is copied and pasted from their website
March 28, 2005
The long road back
He survived a mortar attack and a triple amputation, but he’ll work for the Air Force again.
By Laura M. Colarusso
Times staff writer
As Brian Kolfage waits for his physical therapist, he gets a phone call. He holds the phone with his left hand and flips it open with his mouth.
Kolfage, 23, a senior airman previously stationed at Goodfellow Air Force Base, Texas, has had to find a new way to perform even this simple task. He lost part of his right arm and both of his legs in a mortar blast at Balad Air Base in Iraq last September.
“It’s hard relearning how to do everything,” said Kolfage, who was assigned to the 887th Expeditionary Security Forces Squadron in Iraq. “When you’re little, you learn to do things like zipping zippers one way. Now, I have to do that with one hand.”
Kolfage has survived massive blood loss, a triple amputation and a collapsed lung.
He has been through more than a dozen surgeries, daily physical rehab and occupational therapy. He’s had tubes stuck down his throat, through his rib cage into his lungs and where his legs were cut off. He was on a respirator because he had fluid in his lungs.
Yet despite loosing his entire left leg, all but 6 inches of his right and his dominant hand, Kolfage expects to be able to work for the Air Force again.
This time around, he’ll be a civilian, probably working with security forces at Luke Air Force Base, Ariz.
Kolfage is one of 300 airmen injured in the war on terrorism. Of those, 285 have returned to duty, according to statistics provided by the Air Force.
These servicemen and women are returning to active-duty or civilian jobs within the military in greater numbers than a few years ago. Officials at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the hospital where Kolfage is recuperating, attribute this to technological improvements in prosthetic limbs and more aggressive physical therapy.
Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on March 3, Air Force Lt. Gen. Roger Brady, deputy chief of staff for personnel, said the Air Force has a policy to keep those injured in the service.
“We work to retain [wounded airmen] on active duty if it is at all possible,” he said. “If we are unable to return an [airman] to active duty, we work to get them civilian employment within the Air Force if they so desire. We owe that to these great young men and women who defend this country.”
Kolfage’s injuries were too severe for him to return to active duty. He will be medically retired from the Air Force on April 13.
But Kolfage has a team of three civilians helping him put together his resume, find job openings and talk to prospective employers.
‘I tried standing up and I couldn’t’
As he works on a painting project at Walter Reed to help him get used to using his left hand, Kolfage talks about the attack that changed his life.
It was about 2 in the afternoon. Kolfage left his tent at Balad Air Base to get a bottle of water. About 20 feet from the tent, a 107mm mortar round fell on him and, as he describes it, “ripped my body apart.”
The date was Sept. 11, 2004.
“I tried standing up and I couldn’t,” Kolfage recalls as he paints brown highlights on a plaster-cast family of wolves. “My right hand looked like a dog had chewed at it.”
He wasn’t wearing body armor or a helmet when he was hit. Instead, he wore beach shorts, a T-shirt and flip-flops.
The blast from the mortar pushed him back six feet from where he was standing. Within moments, what seemed like dozens of people began scurrying around him, administering first aid.
He just lay back and watched.
As he tells the story, Caren Garner, a craft-care specialist helping the airman with his project, interrupts.
“How about some beige for the top?” she asks.
Kolfage looks at the statue for a moment and agrees it needs a lighter color. After switching brushes, he goes back to the story.
His clothes had turned red, and blood was everywhere, he said. One of his friends from Goodfellow, Senior Airman Valentine Cortez, “plugged up a lot of the holes where blood was gushing,” Kolfage said.
He had volunteered for duty in Iraq. He and about a dozen others from Goodfellow were working for the Department of Agriculture inspecting luggage and packages going back to the United States.
The group had been deployed to the base for two weeks when the attack occurred.
“I didn’t think I was going to die,” Kolfage said. “But I didn’t think it was as bad as it was.”
He was scooped up in a stretcher and put on an ambulance where people were holding his legs on.
“That’s when the pain kicked in,” Kolfage said.
That’s also when his anger arose. Kolfage questioned why it was him that got hit.
“In the ambulance, I was really pissed off it was me,” he said.
He remembers yelling for pain medication, and then waking up 36 hours later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center without his right hand and legs.
In addition to the amputations, Kolfage had been through a procedure to determine whether there was any internal bleeding. He has a foot-long scar from the bottom of his breastbone to his pelvis where surgeons cut him open to prod around.
“A lot of the doctors said I should have died,” Kolfage said.
Recovery
Physical therapy began almost as soon as Kolfage arrived at Walter Reed on Sept. 13.
“He had to start from ground zero,” said Laura Friedman, Kolfage’s physical therapist. “Just sitting up was a challenge.”
The first exercises worked on getting Kolfage to contract his muscles as he lay in the hospital bed, still heavily medicated.
He has steadily progressed to more difficult exercises, all designed to increase his core stability and upper body strength.
On this day, Kolfage, who uses a wheelchair while waiting for new sockets on his prosthetic legs, wheels over to a cushioned table and pulls himself onto it. He climbs on top of a blue disk designed to keep shifting his balance as he does his therapy routine.
He decides he doesn’t want to wear his prosthetic arm.
“I think I’m going to take off my arm,” he said. “I was doing … [exercises] yesterday, and my arm flew off.”
For the first exercise, Kolfage picks up what is called a “body blade.” It is a thin bar that is held in the middle and swings back and forth on both ends.
“It’s gotten easier over time,” Kolfage said, shaking the blade with his left hand. “Now I can pretty much get myself on the disk. When I first started, I couldn’t hold myself up on this.”
If the experience has demoralized him, Kolfage isn’t telling. He says matter-of-factly that keeping a positive outlook has helped him recover.
But there are small signs of the frustration he faces.
Before he begins the second set of exercises, Kolfage pushes up his right sleeve, but it slips back down because there is no wrist to catch it.
He tries two more times and finally lets it fall back over what’s left of his arm. He takes a deep breath and carries on with the exercise.
Kolfage’s hips are in constant motion, jerking back and forth, trying to hold his balance. Friedman sits behind him to make sure he doesn’t fall.
Friedman described Kolfage as “one of the most challenging cases I have ever seen.”
The next exercise doesn’t involve any weights or other equipment. It’s simply Kolfage trying to maintain his balance on the disk.
“Without legs, you’re basically balancing on your torso,” he said.
He uses a resistance band to work out his shoulder and back muscles.
Thirty-five minutes and several sets later, Kolfage moves back to his wheelchair. Friedman hands him a 25-pound weight and he begins doing bicep curls.
For the first time, his face gets flushed.
“I’m done,” he said.
‘I feel real short’
After he finishes with physical therapy for the day, Kolfage decides to put on his prosthetic legs.
It’s a highly coordinated event. He pushes the wheelchair up to his walker and then back a bit so he’s not too close.
With Friedman at his side, Kolfage puts his right arm in a holster and grabs the walker with his left hand, pulling himself out of the chair. He wobbles, but finds his balance within a few seconds.
With the legs locked in place, Kolfage stands at about 5 feet 7 inches. He said he started with a pair of legs that were only 6 inches tall and has slowly worked his way up.
“I feel real short,” said Kolfage, who was 6 feet 2 inches tall before the injury.
Without his prostheses, he’s only a few inches taller than 3 feet.
Kolfage stands for less than five minutes, but his hips are constantly moving, much like when he was on the blue balance disk.
He focuses on the floor. He appears out of breath.
“You have to learn how to put pressure on them,” Kolfage says of his legs. “I don’t have one [leg] to trust.”
A tour group has entered the physical therapy room and gives Kolfage a round of applause.
“Way to go,” cheered one woman.
He doesn’t move from the spot. When he sits back down, he raises the bottom of his prosthetic foot so it is parallel with his head. He jokes that the next time he goes to a bar, he’s going to ask the bartender to put his beer on his foot.
Once Kolfage gets his final set of legs, he’ll be back to his normal height and back to a relatively normal life, he says. He won’t be able to take long walks with his wife, who he married two months after the attack in a ceremony at the hospital. But he’s looking forward to being as independent as possible.
“I’ve got a deal with the prosthetic guy,” Kolfage said with a smile, referring to one of the rehabilitation specialists he works with. “If I run, he’ll lose 100 pounds.”
posted by militarybrat at 9:10 PM
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