Wounded In Baghdad:
Queens Sailor Trying To Recover

By Shams Tarek

When Navy corpsman Ted Bittle joined the Army right after graduating high school in 1989, he didn’t realize that he’d end up with a purple heart as a Navy serviceman 14 years later.

The 31-year-old was wounded by a suicide bomber in Iraq and left with permanent injuries, including the loss of most of his vision and feeling in the right side of his face. This week, he was back at home in Queens.

There was no big hero’s welcome for Bittle, who removed his purple heart before landing at JFK Airport on April 25.  Right now he’s just trying to quietly recover and get some rest with his eight-month old baby Ari and his wife Denise.  They celebrated their first anniversary on April 27, and will celebrate Bittle’s birthday on May 12.

By the end of the month Bittle will report back to his base, Camp Pendleton in San Diego, for a medical evaluation, to process his departure from the Navy and to prepare for the rest of his life.

Bittle remembers the day he was wounded with precise detail.

His mission on April 11 was to help take a Baghdad stadium.  As a Navy corpsman, Bittle’s job was basically to be a kind of armed medic, trained to treat allies, civilians and POWs wounded in combat but also engage in firefights if needed.

Deployed with a unit of special operations-capable Marines, Bittle drove into Baghdad that morning right alongside rush-hour civilian traffic, an experience he called “bizarre.”  People waved and cheered along the way.

When it got late, Bittle and his crew stopped near a bunker and started to secure it by putting sandbags in the street.

Then, as the corpsmen were moving the sandbags, Bittle’s life — and that of three other corpsmen injured in the blast — was changed.

“The next thing you know there was a huge explosion that blew me back to the ground,” Bittle said from his cozy Francis Lewis Boulevard apartment.  He fell face down and saw blood and thought the bags were booby trapped.

But the explosion was from a suicide bomber wearing a vest full of ball bearings. He had been standing about two feet away from Brittle. The Corpsman was later told that  civilians tried to warn the Americans about the attack.

“We didn’t catch on about that,” Bittle said.  “It happened so quickly.  I didn’t even see the guy until after it happened.  The guy who blew himself up was everywhere.  He blew himself up in half.”

Bittle and his peers were rushed by helicopter to a Navy shock trauma platoon 45 miles south of Baghdad, where he found himself bleeding back into his throat.

He was operated on the next day at an Army hospital at Kuwait City International Airport, where he stayed a few days before being transferred to two hospitals in Germany.  He was flown back to Camp Pendleton last week.

Bittle’s injuries are painful and permanent. The Tae Kwon Do black belt champion and avid runner has shrapnel embedded in the right side of his body from his fingertips to his shoulders to his face. A particularly bad wound in his hand is still open and draining.  There’s no feeling in the right side of his face and he has almost no vision in his right eye, under which a titanium plate is embedded to make up for shattered bone.

Even though he was technically a non-combatant, Bittle was constantly on the leading edge of the American offensive and “had contact” with enemy forces every day since entering Iraq on March 20, just hours after the war started.  He carried an M-16 rifle and nine-millimeter pistol all the time, and had to fire them frequently.

“The day I got injured was not the day I thought I was  going to die,” Bittle said.  “The thought of death crowded my mind many times.”

No time was safe. When Bittle wasn’t taking enemy fire, there was the threat of it.

When Bittle and his unit entered Iraq, their mission was to secure gas-oil separation tanks before the Iraqis could torch them.  They were lightly armed, but backed by the British Royal Horse Brigade, which carried 105-millimeter cannons.

Just like news viewers watching live “embedded” news reports back home, it was hard to know how reliable a lot of information was.  He was covered head to toe in full-body “MOP-4” chemical suits, but didn’t know if they were necessary.

“We were told we were gonna get hit by chemical weapons. . . . We were told to grow mustaches for security purposes; apparently Saddam bought uniforms that looked like ours.  We were told all kinds of stories — who knows what was and wasn’t necessarily true,” he said.

Supply was another problem. 

Bittle and his unit raced across the desert so fast that they had access to and time for only one freeze-dried MRE, or “Meal, Ready to Eat,” every day, and moved in armored personnel carriers “without most of the armor.”

One bullet pierced the armor of a carrier near Bittle, hitting a gas can and seriously burning a fellow corpsman in the face.

When he wasn’t flying over the sand or in a firefight with the enemy, Bittle’s day-to-day duties were mundane.  He took care of ground troops’ feet, made sure they were on top of their personal hygiene, administered medication and made sure that everyone was “psychologically” okay. His bachelor’s degree is in psychology and he was a substance abuse counselor at Manhattan’s Covenant House before joining the Navy.

The days were long, with never more than about four hours of sleep and hardly any time for rest or recreation.  Bittle would wake up at 4:45 every morning, stand watch for an hour and wait for word to either stay in position or continue across the desert towards Baghdad.

The troops would “set in” at 11 p.m., at which point the unit’s vehicles would circle around a makeshift camp and the men would dig holes in the ground, sometimes neck-high, in which they would either sleep or assume combat positions.  They slept —little — in sleeping bags or poncho liners under the open sky.

“It was hard,” Bittle said. Some soldiers lost 20 pounds and looked emaciated.  “Everyone was miserable.  You’re hungry and you’re tired, you’re hot, you’re cold.  It was like an emotional rollercoaster.”

Bittle’s unit took over a Sudanese terror camp in the middle of the desert, where four members of the camp wouldn’t put their weapons down.  Marines shot the enemies, all of whom Bittle treated, including one man who was shot twice near the heart, once in the arm and once in the thigh.  Bittle saved his life.

“That’s my job,” Bittle said. “We don’t differentiate.”

Bittle said he and most of his peers are “apolitical” about the war and the policies behind it, that they’re just regular men and women with families who have normal everyday things to worry about.

“If they had political opinions, they kind of kept it to themselves. It wasn’t as much about whether this is ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ or whether Bush is making the right decision.  It was about what’ll they do when they get back home?”

Bittle, who said “I wanted to be a part of something if we were gonna do something,” added that the anti-war protests around the world didn’t phase his fellow troops.  He was actually happy about them, he said.

“It’s a beautiful thing that this guy can get up there and state his opinion without fear of retribution while the country we were fighting in doesn’t allow it,” Bittle said.

He said the protestors made him proud to be American. “It’s our country,” Bittle said.  “It’s the best in the world.  There’s no other place where you can say whatever you believe in.  And that’s what we were there fighting for.”

Another thing that boosted Bittle’s morale was the support he got from Iraqis on the ground.

“The people were saying what we did made a difference, that they did want us there and they were happy to get rid of this guy. . . . It was nice to see that the Iraqis didn’t hate us.”

Right now, Bittle doesn’t watch the news, and he tries not to think about the war.  He’s more worried about terrorist attacks at home and about “what kind of government will form” in Iraq.

He doesn’t know what his status will be in terms of benefits as a veteran.  The Department of Vetarans Affiars requires troops to be in combat for 180 days to be eligible for the full range of health benefits, and the discharge process normally takes up to eight months.  He was told that cases for recent Iraq veterans are being expedited and considered for exceptions, but “I don’t know what’s gonna happen.”

He’d like to take a boat ride around Manhattan and have a nice meal, he said, and is focusing most on being with his family and how to provide for it.  His wife, a United Airlines flight attendant who was furlowed — or laid off with the option to possibly return one day — soon after Sept. 11, 2001 and again recently while on maternity leave to take care of baby Ari, doesn’t have a full-time job.

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