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Hero Amputee Soldiers Run on Heart July 30, 2004 DANIELLE GREEN, while playing basketball for Notre Dame, scored 1,100 points with a withering left-handed jump shot. “I think I'm ready for a change of sport,” Danielle, 27, who is more recently with the 571st Military Police, said with a little chuckle. On May 25, a rocket-propelled grenade tore off her left hand and shattered her left thigh while on a rooftop in Baghdad. “I really at first thought I was dead,” she told me. “Thinking all my dreams were over at the age of 27. I thought I would never be found.” Within minutes, she was being rushed by medics to an operation. “When I regained consciousness, there was my platoon sergeant. A little grim, I know, but he had recovered my left hand under seven inches of sand and retrieved my wedding ring, which was in perfectly good shape.” Regrets? “No, sir. I can look back years from now and say I was a proud part of the military.” Sgt. Mike McNaughton, 30, who joined the Army when he was 18, remembers every second of that day on Jan. 9, 2003, on the perimeter of Bagram Air Base, Afghanistan. “I never passed out,” said Mike who as a minesweeper knew immediately he had stepped on an antipersonnel mine. “My main concern was that others in my company would come into the area,” said Mike, who lost his right leg and two right fingers in the blast. Early this year, after 11 surgeries, Mike started jogging after being fitted with a state-of-the-art prosthesis at Walter Reed Hospital in Washington. On Sunday, Danielle and Mike will be part of a 5-mile run in Central Park, beginning at East 99th Street, joining 33 other servicemen and women who lost limbs and are partially paralyzed. It has been sponsored by the Achilles Track Club, the private firm of Cushman & Wakefield, and Walter Reed Hospital. “We are going to see some real heart on that day,” said Mary Bryant, spokesperson for Achilles. The toughest will be feted by the Finest and the Bravest, who will run beside the contestants. No question about it: Guts can't be properly defined in any ordinary old dictionary. © Copyright New York Post 2004. |
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