What Do You Pray For?

Saturday night my daughter Z and her husband L came to dinner. It was a normal, lovely winter night, colder than most this year, with a high wind and blowing snow kept at bay by the fire in the woodstove. There was candle light, a Mozart violin sonata, and baked fish with red peppers and leeks, pasta with white clam sauce and a salad of avocado, yellow beet and radish. The food was good, the music and lighting conducive to conversation. Z and L are 25. He’s an electrician and she’s a nurse. They both grew up in Ithaca, and he comes from a large extended local family. Our younger kids were at the table too. We were having an amusing conversation about Z’s cousin, J, who is 18 and pregnant. She just married the father in a rushed ceremony because the father is a marine. We were laughing about the circumstances and the family’s nervousness about becoming grandparents, and the pregnancy when the subject came up of where they would live. Can new recruits live off base with their families? L started to explain and I commented that as a marine he was basically cannon fodder. Z then said, “They don’t know about your cousin yet.”

“What about your cousin?” I asked.

L said, “My cousin was severely injured in Afghanistan when a man riding a motorbike blew himself up beside him. He’s lost both legs, one arm and one eye. He has third degree burns over 85% of his body.”

Silence. Around the table a rush of tears and sadness.

L went on. “He had one week to go before coming home. It was his second deployment.”

Then the questions. How on earth did he survive those wounds? What happened?

“They flew in a medical team from Texas, who took him to Germany. He had a fungal infection, so they had to remove the muscles from his face and jaw. The burns were so bad they couldn’t find one of his eyes. The legs were blown off instantly, but he lost the arm later, also to the fungal infection. He’s in Texas now. If he lives he’ll be in the hospital for at least 3 years.”

It was the first time any of us knew someone injured in the war, after 10 years of fighting. Even Z and L, who have many friends in the military, had not been affected by the war. We wondered, in the glow of the candle light, our food growing cold on the plate, how he could live. In any other war he would have died. And who decided, with those injuries, to keep him alive? It was his father and his 20 year-old wife who could not face him dying. What if he wakes up?

“He will be so pissed off,” L said.

Z said, “Me too. If that ever happens to me, pull the plug.”

“85% of his body?”

“Does he know?”

L said, “No, he has no idea. He’s in a coma.”

“But he’s chewing on the ventilator. That means he knows it’s in there,” Z said.

“All for nothing,” I said.

Then L said “You don’t know what to pray for. Do you pray for him to live, or pray for him to die?”

I ask myself that question same question, about America.