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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.”