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“I got blown up. That’s it in a nutshell.”

That’s Maj. Chuck Ziegenfuss’ summary of June 21, 2005—the day when a mortar buried neatly, seamlessly under the asphalt of a road north of Baquba, Iraq went off under his feet, ripping new, unnatural seams in both of his arms and legs, bruising his corneas, and sending him into a long, rough recovery.

Four days after his second-in-command pulled him bleeding from an Iraqi canal, Ziegenfuss woke up at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Before getting injured, Ziegenfuss had been working with Soldiers’ Angels—a charity organization that runs the Adopt-a-Soldier program, which strives to ensure that every man and woman overseas gets care packages from stateside. Now that he was back in the states and stuck in a hospital bed, Soldiers’ Angels came to his aid, and a new project was born.

VALOUR-IT—Voice-Activated Laptops for OUR Injured Troops—has since delivered more than 1,600 laptops fitted with software that allows healing troops, sometimes without the use of their hands and eyes, to use them.

When Soldiers’ Angels founder Patti Patton-Bader called to ask what he might need, Chuck told Patti he’d like to start blogging again. Ziegenfuss had blogged regularly at From My Position…On the Way! (http://tcoverride.blogspot.com/ ) while in Iraq and his audience was anxious to know about his injury and recovery after his wife announced it on the blog. Problem was, the only computer for patient use in his section of Walter Reed was many painful steps down a hallway. Ziegenfuss couldn’t yet move from his bed.

He and Patti soon found a laptop for the wounded soldier, but Chuck ran up against another obstacle:

“Not only could I not get out of my bed to walk down there, but my hands were all blown up, he said. “I only had really one finger on each hand that I could use, and one of those was in a cast…I was really incapable of communicating.”

Chuck hunted-and-pecked his way through an online search for helpful software and asked for donations on his blog. The next day, an anonymous e-mail advised him to check his Amazon account. It had been filled with the cost of the software, in full.

“I still have no idea who he was,” he said.

Within 15 minutes of installing the software, he said, he was up and on the ‘Net. And, here’s the good part.

“The more I used the software, the more I wanted to be awake and not be all drugged up,” he said.

Chuck explains the paradox of the healing soldier. “Here’s the thing. They give you enough [pain meds],”—strong, expensive, good meds—“to knock out a horse, and it honestly sometimes doesn’t begin to touch the pain. You really don’t have anything else to think about.”

While on the meds, the pain is better, but all the body’s processes slow down, which means you may be in less pain, but you also may be in a hospital bed quite a bit longer. And, the longer you’re on the meds, the harder it is to get off them.

For accomplished soldiers who have just had their independence ripped away, anything that can shorten that process is welcome. For Chuck, it was a computer.“When you’re using something that takes your mind off the pain…you get the benefit of your body being able to recover without being heavily drugged,” he said.

Something as simple as a wireless connection to the world beyond an IV drip and stainless steel bedrails, something as small as the ability to move freely around the Internet when moving freely beyond his room had become an impossibility, was enough to change Ziegenfuss’ outlook during a very bleak time. Continued...