Free, at Sea, to Air Their Wounds
While fishing off Montauk, three vets recount the broken harvest of war, 9/11
(09/10/2009) The three men boarded the boat with limbs intact and no visible scars, but they had come to help put themselves, and one another, back together again nonetheless. There was a gentle furtiveness about
 Russell Drumm |
Chris Sullivan and Cesar Quiroz, as if they were on guard to see if was safe to come out from a storm.
Greg Amira was different. Pure Brooklyn Italian, wiry, with harder eyes, constantly talking, full of stories that rose and fell in scary waves from comic to tragic.
Funny: His boss, Sam Epstein, thought he was wearing a Hawaiian shirt in the picture he discovered in a post-Sept. 11, 2001, photo display. “A Hawaiian shirt? A Hawaiian shirt? I was working for Morgan Stanley!”
Not funny: “The photographer, Bill Biggart, was crushed two frames after the picture was taken. They found the camera beside his body. It was not a Hawaiian shirt, Mr. Amira said. The photojournalist had shot him being pulled from the rubble of the World Trade Center’s south tower as it collapsed around him. The design on his white shirt was blood and ash.
Later, in Iraq, his mother had sent caviar and cans of stewed tomatoes and paste which he’d rendered into pasta sauce on hot plates for his men. The scene made the others on the boat laugh.
Not funny: holding his dead commander, whose body a roadside bomb had blown into a sewage ditch. Mr. Amira continues to fight an infection caused by swallowing the water trying to save the major.
Talking, talking. Free at sea, and at other Wounded Warrior events, to speak with vets about things kept pent up when he was with his fiancée, or his daughter. His speech filled with the acronyms and abbreviations of war and its broken harvest. Talking, talking as though afraid to stop.
The three combat veterans went fishing from the Gone Fishing Marina in Montauk last Thursday as part of the Wounded Warrior Project’s continuing effort to quiet the storm that began with their service in Iraq, Afghanistan, and, in Mr. Amira’s case, on Sept. 11.
The musician Jimmy Buffett had invited them aboard his Margaritavitch in the care of Capt. Vinnie Lasorsa, who headed the boat offshore in September’s silver light past Montauk Point and toward Block Island upon an unusually calm sea.
Chris (Sully) Sullivan is still active-duty Army, assigned to Long Island’s Fighting 69th air infantry. He helps run the R.O.T.C. program at Rutgers University. “I was blown up twice,” he said with a wan smile as the boat got under way.
 Russell Drumm |
“Once in a Humvee in Baghdad. An ambush with I.E.D. [an improvised explosive device]. I was blown out the back. Landed on my shoulder, back, and head. When I came to, they were still shooting. I was deaf. I killed two people. There were 14 dead. We lost one soldier.”
Mr. Sullivan said the explosion had caused permanent hearing loss in one ear. A second roadside bomb turned his heavier M.R.A.P. (mine-resistant, ambush-protected) vehicle upside down. “I was hanging from the seat belt but okay.”
His memories jarred the beautiful day: a row of present-day prairie schooners lined up along Gin Beach in preparation for the big weekend, the gentle swells lifting the boat. He said his first wound was suffered when he and his team entered a Coca-Cola bottling plant in Baghdad that was being used to bag cocaine en route to Turkey and beyond for distribution.
“There were these young kids working there. Their eyes were red. Noses were running. They were stoned from the cocaine dust in the air. I went in first. A guy had a big knife just inside the door, like a kitchen knife.”
“I put down my weapon and asked him what he was doing. There was a whole battalion outside. He must have been high. He swung the knife and got me in between my armpit and the Kevlar. It hit a rib.”
Mr. Sullivan had been in the initial invasion with the 101st Airborne, Bravo Company, “the third of the 327th Infantry,” and was at Camp New York in the Kuwaiti desert when a deranged soldier threw a grenade into an officer’s tent, killing two and wounding five.
When Mr. Sullivan returned from his first tour after a year, his wife was gone. The Army paid for the divorce.
He re-enlisted and joined a Special Forces team with missions along the Turkish and Iranian borders. Then on to Afghanistan. He was sent back to the States and assigned to the Army’s honor guard in Washington, D.C., where he served at the White House and Pentagon, and at Arlington National Cemetery. “I wanted to see all sides of the war,” he said, referring to the burials at Arlington.
Bob Deveglio, the mate, put eel-shaped trolling gear to work and within minutes, Mr. Amira and Mr. Sullivan had fish on, bluefish. Captain Lasorsa wanted striped bass and was marking them on his electronic fish finder. He circled the boat to make another pass over where he’d seen the virtual stripers.
Mr. Amira had earned his Army commission through the University of South Florida’s R.O.T.C. program back in 1994. After school he began working for Morgan Stanley in Florida, but was sent to the company headquarters on the 73rd floor of the World Trade Center.
“I was married to a Hungarian Playboy model. I had a window office and was making a lot of money. I had an expense account, and my wife was making money. I was living it up.”
Like so many others, his world came down with the towers. “I was having seizures and blackouts. I couldn’t trade and went on disability, but I couldn’t live on it. A year later I went on long-term disability,” Mr. Amira said, going on to describe a downward spiral during which he and his wife split up, his savings ran out, and then, in disbelief, he received orders from the Army to report for duty.
Mr. Amira held his fishing rod and laughed in recognition that it all sounded like a movie script: his unsuccessful attempts to win a medical discharge after Sept. 11, his assignment to an advanced special operations team in Iraq, the promise of a desk job that quickly morphed into a field assignment near Baquba, his promotion to head a provincial reconstruction team overseeing the welfare of a million Iraqis, and finally the I.E.D. ambush on 26 January, 2007.
He will tell it again on the Nov. 4 as a guest on ABC’s “Good Morning America” show. The former Army captain organized last Thursday’s trip and said he will continue to volunteer to help bring mental and physical relief to combat veterans through the Wounded Warrior Project begun in 2002 by John Melia.
Mr. Amira said the violence around Baquba had become intense by January of 2007. “It was the deadliest week ever. We were in a four-vehicle convoy on the Iranian border.” There were two explosions, he said. One turned Maj. Allen R. Johnson’s vehicle inside out. “He was the most important person to me.”
The other bomb went off beside Captain Amira’s vehicle. “The I.E.D. deafened me. I didn’t realize they were shooting. I didn’t know there was a hail of bullets. My driver’s life was saved by a [medic] from Queens. The major’s vehicle was in a ditch full of sewage. I thought he was drowning. I went in and tried to pull him out.” He soon realized that Major Johnson had died instantly of a massive head wound.
It took an Apache helicopter, a quick-response infantry team, and seven hours of off-and-on fighting to get his team to safety. Captain Amira spent 13 months in the hospital with back and neck injuries that added to a twice-fractured jaw, a bullet wound in the arm, and the ribs that were broken on Sept. 11. He will undergo another back surgery this week.
During the telling, the Brooklyn native held his fishing rod in one hand, and alternately smoked a cigarette and drank a bottle of water with the other. He dared Mr. Quiroz, whom Captain Lasorsa had dubbed Bass Master, to catch another big bass like the 24-pounder he had reeled in a few minutes earlier. The fish had brought a rare smile to the man’s face.
The native of Colombia said he joined the Army National Guard in 2000 and served his full eight-year commitment with over a year in Iraq, mostly in and around Baghdad. “You’re thinking you’re going to die every second. It changes your life 180 degrees. I have post-traumatic stress from combat, and I’m bipolar. Depression. Road rage. I get in fights. I overreact when there’s a situation.”
Mr. Quiroz said his attitude was beginning to change for the better, “but there are huge issues. There are different phases. My girlfriend helps.”
To great applause and good-natured ribbing, Mr. Quiroz caught his second big bass, a carbon copy of the first. The Margaritavitch returned again and again to the stack of big bass, the likes of which the captain said he had never seen on the fish finder. The three wounded warriors smiled at the day and vowed to turn others on to the Wounded Warrior Project and its outings.
Then, Captain Amira caught a 26-pounder Brooklyn style. Talking trash to the unseen quarry, he said: “Don’t play with me. You’re waiting for me to finish my water.” He threw the empty plastic bottle into a bucket with a defiant thud. The rod tip bent almost immediately. “What’d I tell ya,” he said to his warrior friends.