Life and limb: a journalist's account of surviving the signature injury of the Iraq war.

• Author: Glasser, Ronald
• Position: Blood Brothers: Among the Soldiers of Ward 57 - Book review

Blood Brothers: Among the Soldiers of Ward 57 By Michael Weisskopf Henry Holt and Company, 320 pp.

Michael Weisskopf never intended to become part of his own story. The fifty-seven-year-old senior correspondent for Time magazine was in Iraq in December 2003 on a coveted assignment--to profile the American soldier chosen as Time's Person of the Year. For three weeks, Weisskopf was embedded with a platoon of the legendary 1st Armored Division, which was based in Sunni-dominated northwest Baghdad. On the night of December 10, Weisskopf was along on the platoon's routine night patrol when he heard a clatter inside the Humvee. As Weisskopf writes in his new book, Blood Brothers: Among the Soldiers of Ward 57,

At first I thought it was a rock, the specialty of the street urchins--a harmless shot against an armored Humvee. But the clanking sound that interrupted my thoughts couldn't be ignored ... [I]t bounced off the steel blast wall behind me. I gazed down, then to the right, and spotted an object on the wooden bench two feet away. The dark oval was as shiny and smooth as a tortoiseshell, roughly six inches long and four inches wide ... [S]omething told me there was no time to consult the other soldiers ... I rose half-way, leaned to the right, and cupped the object. I might as well have plucked volcanic lava from a crater. I could feel the flesh of my palm liquefying ... [I] raised my right arm and started to throw the mass over the side of the vehicle, a short backhand toss. Then everything went dark. The grenade never made it out of the Humvee. Weisskopf took the brunt of the blast, saving the lives of everyone in the vehicle but losing his right hand in the explosion. "I shook my right arm, trying to wake it up," he remembers. "Still no response, I elevated it to see why ... My wrist looked like the neck of a decapitated chicken. The wound was jagged, blood glistening in the light."

The week that followed was hellish: multiple surgeries were needed to clean Weisskopf's wound and relieve the pressure on his injured arm. A spray of shrapnel remained buried in his right upper thigh. An Army transport plane carried Weisskopf to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, where, during a routine procedure to clean the wound, Weisskopf ended up with heart arrhythmia, which landed him in the ICU. Finally, well after midnight on December 17, a week after his hand had been blown off, Weisskopf arrived at "Amputee Alley," Walter Reed Army Medical...