I wanted to post this story, because it was truly inspiring. Most of the time you hear of Military guys going back to the war zone after injuries, and those are totally motivating. To see a guy operating over there, while wearing a prosthetic is something else to see. It takes a certain kind of resolve to get yourself back in the game like that, and I have tons of respect for our injured troops. And what mostly drives them, is the desire to get back with their comrades.
But this story is a little different. When a contractor gets injured and expresses a desire to go back to that war zone, then that is really unique. It further emphasizes the kind of dedication that is out there, both on the Military side and Contractor side and really is motivating to read about. And for Mr. Shah, thanks for everything you have done and sacrificed for this country and the war effort. I also know that Mr. Shah is not alone, and that I know of other contractors that have returned back to the war zones they were injured at. –Head Jundi
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The New York Times
September 1, 2008
A Kind of Courage That’s Hard to Translate
By CARA BUCKLEY
The military translator from Queens sat beside his mother in a wheelchair in a hospital room on Manhattan’s Upper East Side on Thursday. His right leg was encased in a black boot, affixed with Velcro straps from his swollen toes to his knee. What was left of his left leg, which had been amputated at the knee, was wrapped in a snug elastic rubber stocking on which the word “stump” had been scrawled.
The man’s name is Syed Shah and he was grievously wounded in July in a bomb attack on a military convoy in Afghanistan, where he had been working as a translator for soldiers battling the Taliban. Mr. Shah is learning to walk with a prosthetic leg, though his progress is severely hindered because he cannot put any weight on his partly shattered right leg.
Yet to his family’s shock and anguish, and to his doctors’ awe, Mr. Shah is aiming to be back in Afghanistan by year’s end.
“I don’t want him to go,” said Mr. Shah’s mother, Rashida Shah. “I thought it was a safe job, but then, after one and a half months, this happened.” She paused. Her eyes welled with tears. “I was very upset,” she said.
It is unclear how many military translators have been injured or killed working in Iraq and Afghanistan, though estimates put the figure at hundreds. Local militants fighting American forces vilify translators and make them targets, seeing their work as acts of betrayal.
Yet Mr. Shah said his reason for wanting to return was simple: Working in Afghanistan instilled in him a sense of purpose that he had not quite felt before.
“I developed a bond over there with people, buddy relationships,” Mr. Shah said. “I understand the dialogues, I can decode messages. It gives me a special feeling, like I’m doing something important. Like I’m saving lives.”
Mr. Shah is 37 years old and a newlywed, an American citizen who was born in Pakistan and moved to Queens with his parents and two sisters eight years ago. Until this year, he was living a comfortable if unremarkable life. He had taken college courses in human resources and was working with a leather importer in New Jersey. He and his future wife, a Canadian who was born in Pakistan and is becoming an American citizen, shared a two-bedroom apartment with his parents in Jamaica.
Then, sometime last year, an ad in a Pakistani community newspaper caught Mr. Shah’s eye. A language company was looking for English speakers fluent in Pashto and Farsi to translate for the military and coalition forces in Afghanistan. Mr. Shah was intrigued.
He had long been troubled by terrorist acts carried out in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and was especially haunted by an Internet video that showed a young boy, who was perhaps 10, being outfitted with a suicide vest, and later blowing up. “It was something,” he said, “that any human would find unacceptable.”
So Mr. Shah applied to the company, a private contracting agency, and they ran a series of background and security checks. The pay was enticing, too: base salaries, Mr. Shah said, started at several thousand dollars a month. In April, he attended a month of preparatory classes with the company, and returned to Queens early in May.
The company asked that it not be identified for the safety of its other military translators and their families.
On May 12, he was married in a traditional Pakistani wedding ceremony, and he and his wife, who also asked not to be identified, honeymooned in Niagara Falls. Two weeks later, Mr. Shah began a long journey from New York to his final destination, a sprawling coalition army base in southeastern Afghanistan.
Mr. Shah was filled more with curiosity than with fear. He had vacationed in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital, as a child and wondered what Afghanistan was like after two wars. He found himself enthralled by the adventure of his job, journeying with soldiers, ignoring the taunts of prisoners — “traitor,” they would hiss — and translating for commanders on the ground.
On the morning of July 8, a blistering day, Mr. Shah was riding with a platoon commander as their 15-vehicle convoy rumbled through a clay-colored rocky moonscape. Ominous messages began crackling over the radio, and Mr. Shah nervously told the commander that their convoy was being watched. His alarm mounted as one of the voices said something was planned for the seventh vehicle, the very vehicle Mr. Shah was riding in.
And then, the earth erupted. Mr. Shah cannot remember the explosion, which flung him, he later learned, some 30 feet into the air. He came to moments later, through a thick fog of pain. His left shin was a mess of flesh and bone fragments, his right leg throbbed unbearably, and the rocks beneath him were wet with his blood. Mr. Shah turned his head. The gunner he had been riding behind, a man he had come to befriend, had been sheared in two.
Once aboard a rescue helicopter, Mr. Shah blacked out, weak from blood loss and nearly delirious from pain. He woke up at an Army hospital, and a doctor told him that his lower left leg would have to be amputated. Mr. Shah protested, and pleaded, and passed out again. When he regained consciousness, the leg below his left knee was gone.
Through tears, Mr. Shah telephoned his wife, who wept at the news. He was transported to a hospital at a larger Army base, and then to the military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center near Ramstein Air Base in Germany, where doctors detected more injuries, including a smashed right heel bone and a broken shin bone.
On July 18, Mr. Shah was flown back to New York, where he was admitted to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center in Manhattan. Dr. Dean G. Lorich, the hospital’s associate director of orthopedic trauma surgery, was expecting him; Dr. Lorich spent time last year working at Landstuhl, and associates there had recommended Mr. Shah to Dr. Lorich’s care.
“Residents here were in awe of his injuries, just the extent of them,” Dr. Lorich said. “But they were typical of what I had been seeing in Landstuhl.” More injuries were found; Mr. Shah’s pelvis was broken, and several of his back vertebrae were cracked. Over the course of the next few weeks, Dr. Lorich and other medical workers began putting Mr. Shah back together, resetting his broken bones with plates and screws, and amputating more of his left leg to prepare a stump for the prosthesis. Early on, there were fears that he might lose his part of his right leg, too, but Dr. Lorich said the chances of that are now slim.
Mr. Shah guesses that since the explosion he has had 15 operations in all, with more to come. And yet, his doctors say, he has never once expressed self-pity. Instead, they say, he tackles each rehabilitation session with a singular focus, placing his right knee on a wheeled dolly so he can move forward, inch by painstaking inch, with the artificial leg on his left side.
“He’s always here on time, sweating like he ran a marathon,” said Dr. Michael W. O’Dell, the hospital’s chief of rehabilitation medicine. “This guy is so incredibly motivated, his fortitude.”
Mr. Shah’s wife has spent every night at the hospital by his side, sleeping on blankets on the floor beside his bed. And every day, his mother rides the subway from Queens to bring him his favorite Pakistani foods — curries, omelets and roti and other breads. His hospital stay and recovery are covered by workers’ compensation, he said, and the language company’s representatives visit him every week.
For Mr. Shah’s wife, the prospect of his returning is almost unfathomable. “It’s a war zone. I wouldn’t want him to go back there and go through this again,” his wife said. “All this trauma that he had to suffer, that we had to suffer, it was really hard for us.”
Mr. Shah’s doctors hope to get him bearing weight on his right side in the coming weeks. And Mr. Shah is already researching devices that can protect the machinery of prosthetic legs from sand, which blankets much of the terrain in Afghanistan and which prostheses have trouble gripping. The company, he said, has told him that he can return, once he is fit again.
“In December, that’s when I want to go back,” Mr. Shah said. “This is the motivation.”