The Cupertino Courier

Cover Story

Photograph by Jacqueline Ramseyer

Love Birds: Jason Poole gets a smooch from his girlfriend, Angela Eastman. Poole and Eastman met through a friend of PooleÕs, who died July 2 from wounds he sustained in Iraq.

Clear Objective

Wounded veteran soldiers on

By Cody Kraatz

'This is speech, one of the most difficult things for me. Talking, writing, doing anything is speech," says Jason Poole, 24. An improvised explosive blew apart the left side of his head in Iraq in 2004 and this is one of his weekly speech therapy sessions to recover his language abilities.

"Back, back, back in the day, like two years ago when I was trying to speak and trying to read, it was so hard. It was chopped up. Now it's a little bit better, but it's still so frustrating."

Poole has been living in a Cupertino apartment since January 2006 and takes a bus three days a week to the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System. He loves going to the Palo Alto hospital to see the doctors, nurses and veterans who have become his friends. He is also strengthening his reading and writing skills at De Anza College and working out in a gym there afterwards.

Poole's much-publicized injuries, signature wounds of the Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts, will continue to vex his efforts to communicate and manage his life.

His physical injuries are permanent for the most part. But his determination and positive attitude, coupled with the support of VA staff, his girlfriend and family, have brought him a long way.

Poole was walking through an alley on patrol with two other Marines in a town near the Syrian border when a 155-millimeter artillery shell set up in a tree was detonated, killing two Iraqis and an interpreter who were behind him.

"I was out for the count," says Poole, who remembers nothing until he woke up from a two-month coma at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

Poole, born in England, moved to Cupertino when he was 12 with his father. He enlisted in the Marines after graduating from Fremont High School in 2000. Recruiters approached him when he was a freshman, and he started playing football on Saturday mornings with a group they organized. His love of the Marines was born.

He served on three tours, first sailing to Hawaii, Thailand, Australia and Africa for seven months. When the Iraq conflict started he was part of the first invading wave of American troops from Kuwait pushing into Baghdad.

"We killed a lot of people, but they were bad," says Poole. "There was lots of killing."

His third and final tour took him to the Syrian border. He was wounded 10 days before he was set to go home and retire.

"For three months we were truly scared. All the people, they wouldn't talk to us," he says. But photos show that Poole's jovial nature and the unit's friendship allowed them to have a good time. Poole was sworn in as an American citizen in a ceremony at the VA. He has two tattoos of stars on his left arm.

Legendary recovery

Poole was transferred from Bethesda to the Palo Alto VA in September 2004 and has become something of a legend there.

"He couldn't sit up and he had a tracheotomy, which meant he couldn't speak," says Dr. Harriet Zeiner, Ph.D., a clinical neuropsychologist who first met with Poole six weeks after his arrival. She says he has come farther than anyone expected, partially because he harbors no regrets and devotes all his energy to recovery.

"I was scared," says Poole, who is not the sort who dwells on stumbling blocks. He is contagiously positive, one of the reasons people at the VA like to have him around so much.

"He's kind of a person who contributes a mature attitude in the group, kind of a positive attitude," says Paul Johnson, co-director of the VA brain injury recovery unit and leader of a class-style group that Poole regularly attends. Poole is happy to provide some leadership.

"I'm very seasoned. I'm like the oldest guy," says Poole. Many patients are 21 or younger.

At a recent session, Johnson lectures and the veterans ask questions about healthy eating. They seem low-energy, some of them with canes and others with intricate splints on their arms. Poole's upbeat attitude stands out.

Johnson says that the veterans who come to the recovery program are often sick of being in the hospital and would rather go home and not think about the things the staff wants them to work on. Sixty to 70 percent of the veterans in the group suffer from depression, and about half have post-traumatic stress disorder, Johnson says. They grieve as they recognize what they have lost.

When Poole arrived at the VA he started various forms of therapy geared towards basic self-care. Since then, he continues to increase his ability to manage transportation and a routine and to communicate effectively.

"One of the first things we worked on was for him to be able to say 'yes' and 'no' with thumbs up and thumbs down," says Zeiner, recalling her first meetings with Poole. "He had difficulty understanding what was said to him. And when he did understand and was capable of speaking, he had difficulty understanding what he was saying."

One of her goals with Poole is helping him adapt to his weakened memory--rather than faking it--by using a $700 PDA that the VA provides to brain trauma patients.

"He's very good at learning that he's seeing me on Wednesday because that's a repeating routine. But he doesn't remember single events very well," says Zeiner. Poole was a bit resistant to the PDA because he doesn't want to look like a geek, says Zeiner. But once he learned that the $700 PDA is essentially a souped-up cell phone, he started using it more regularly.

Poole is not thrilled with the psychological therapy. His gestures and tone suggest that he would rather keep things simple and upbeat than dig into war memories and painful emotions.

Basic training

Poole also meets with Cari Nicholson, a speech pathologist, on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, a schedule of therapy that forms the backbone of his week.

Poole and Nicholson read movie reviews and do exercises geared toward volunteer and job opportunity research. She would like Poole to be able to skim a newspaper for entertainment, not necessarily reading everything, but reading confidently.

"I hate it. I hate it so much," says Poole, leaning over a sheet of potentially challenging words Nicholson picked out from a Spiderman review. He is a big fan of the trilogy and has seen Spiderman 3 twice already, but reading about the move is stressful.

"I hate it because I can't say it. Established? Is that right?" Poole asks after hunkering over a word. "Awesome! In my mind it works..."

"But it's hard to get the words out," says Nicholson, finishing his sentence. She explains how the force of the blast in Iraq jarred his brain, banging and bruising it against his skull. The explosion hit the left side of his head, the location of the brain's language center, and a piece of shrapnel also entered his skull near his left ear and exited below his right eye.

Words with several syllables and irregular spellings are scattered like mines throughout the Spiderman review. Some take him about 30 seconds to decipher, and paragraphs take about five minutes, with words twisting his tongue. Poole reads at a fourth-grade level but needs to work up to a sixth-grade level before he can pass a driver's test, Zeiner says.

When things get tough, Poole draws on a deep well of optimism, confidence and positivity he says he's always had.

The faint British accent he's also long had returned when he started speaking again. Ironically, people in England tease him for his American accent when he visits his mother and family in Bristol.

Re-education

During the school year, Poole spent Tuesday and Thursday in a study center at De Anza, working on reading in the morning and writing in the afternoon, after a break. He is taking the summer off. The instructors there ask him to write freely on whatever comes to mind, or to craft poems, if he prefers.

"Basically it's for me to open my mind, you know," says Poole. "I do find it very challenging, but hey, that's what I'm going for."

In high school he aspired to be an elementary school teacher, but went into the Marines. Now, he says he can't be a teacher but is confident he can one day work or volunteer as an assistant aide.

Poole, who played many sports and acted in high school, volunteered last summer at a Cupertino sports camp, playing with children and helping with arts and crafts. He says that he is just trying to get back on course the best he can.

"I was living a good life, but then I got blasted in Iraq," says Poole. "I'm just trying to become like the old Jason."

Veterans like Poole and those in the recovery group are only a sliver of the veterans who need individual or group therapy, experts say. Zeiner says that many of the people returning from Iraq are never examined for depression, anxiety or PTSD, signature mental wounds resulting from the hyper-arousal of combat, gory violence and confusion of the current conflicts.

"[Poole] has war memories and things he'd rather not have seen," says Zeiner, but no PTSD. He had little mental baggage going into Iraq, and his combat experience was not as intense as it could have been. But the stress of combat comes through when he tells her about "peekers," Iraqi children who signal insurgents to help them ambush U.S. troops.

"He had mixed feelings about Iraqis," sometimes seeing them as the enemy and at other times understanding their position, says Zeiner. About 25 percent of veterans returning from Iraq have mental health problems, she says, and even mild brain injuries further complicate their treatment.

Only 20 percent of returning troops who are eligible for VA services actually sign up, and civilian doctors cannot spot the brain trauma and PTSD as well as VA doctors can, Zeiner says.

"It's an American health care problem, not a VA health care problem," says Zeiner, adding that the U.S. Department of Defense could do a better job of encouraging soldiers to seek VA services during discharge.

She says many young veterans are slipping through the cracks because the DOD does not share its contact information so the VA can reach out to them, and they do not seek out services. The U.S. National Guard, with older veterans, welcomes VA outreach more.

Love at first sight

Life and love are looking up for Poole. He has been dating Angela Eastman, 27, since November and wants to get married, have children and grow old with her. They may move to Washington state, where she lived while her father was in the Navy. They met when Poole's friend brought Eastman and some other girls over to his apartment, and it was love at first sight.

"I was shy, you know, but Angela, she really liked me," says Poole. The two take long daily walks and travel together. "Everything has been really amazing."

Poole used to be very self-conscious, even after reconstructive surgery to his face that implanted titanium plates and pins where the bone had caved in.

Zeiner is pleased that Poole has a loving, intimate relationship in his life. He also hangs out with friends from high school and keeps in touch with Marine buddies from around the country.

"My Marine friends, they are truly, truly my life. They were in it with me. We had a bond, and I will have that bond 'til I die," says Poole, who still wishes he could be with them in Iraq.

Some of his poetry touches on feelings Poole avoids, perhaps to resist thinking about the carnage of war. He doesn't watch the news because if he sees stories about Iraq, he gets so upset that he weeps.

"These people are dying or getting hurt every single day. It's upsetting to me," he says. Some of his poetry is dark and lonely, but one poem about peace is hopeful. He says writing about peace is cliché, but claims authority, given what he's been through.

"I want peace. I know that everybody says that, but after war, I've been there. I truly want peace. And that's it."

To learn more about the services offered at the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System, visit www.palo-alto.med.va.gov. Fisher House is a nonprofit that helps military families visit veterans at medical centers such as Palo Alto's. To learn more or contribute, visit www.fisherhouse.org.