Injured Marine Declares a Victory of the Spirit

The day it happened, Marine Cpl. Brett Doggett was clutching his rifle and taking hushed steps past a smelly chicken coop and an old well, checking house to house for Iraqi snipers.

A charcoal sky, result of distant oil fires, covered a Kuwaiti landscape as flat as Kansas while the 26-year-old Camp Pendleton Marine trod gingerly through a spoiled garden and walked along the bottom of a berm.

Then, the explosion. “I looked down and the left front of my boot was missing completely, and the right boot was peeled back like a can,” Doggett said.

“I yelled ‘Corpsman!’ as loud as I could. The captain came over and immediately elevated my legs. Other guys, they held my head and said, ‘You’ll be all right. Just lie back and take it easy.’ The captain was, like, rubbing my stomach the whole time.”

Doggett stepped on the enemy mine a little more than a month ago. It was March 3, only four days after President Bush decreed that the allies had won the war against Iraq and that the guns would stop their killing and maiming.

Doggett’s left foot now has been amputated. One toe on his right foot is gone, and others were mauled in the explosion. Doctors are waiting for the shrapnel to work its way out of his damaged foot.

Soon, the victory parades will quickly pass, and the world will begin to forget. And just like the others, the Persian Gulf War will become an old war fought by graying veterans who shared something no one else can truly understand.

But for Doggett, every day for the rest of his days, as he mundanely pulls on his trousers, there will be remembrance of war.

Even so, Doggett has already made a pact between his spirit and his physical wound.

It is this:

The painful injury will not change the course of his life. He will not be a cripple--hardly. He will be fitted with an artificial foot, undergo therapy and be walking in 90 days. He will resume college.

He is whole and, perhaps, by the sheer exhilaration of being alive, even more.

“It’s like facing death and staring it down,” Doggett said.

He’s too busy to wait for time alone to fully mend him, so he has started the healing his own way, by feeling gratitude rather than bitterness or pity.

“You look down and your foot is missing and you know there was a lot of damage. At least I’m still living,” Doggett said. “I’m going to walk again. What more can you ask for?”

These days, as he recuperates at the Naval Hospital in Balboa Park, Doggett, who lived in Mission Viejo before he shipped out for the Gulf, has become a celebrity.

Although serious and reserved by nature, he engages in bursts of impishness. Like the times when, as if the ghost of Groucho Marx were whispering the commands, he’ll chase pretty women in his wheelchair.

Or when the young corporal--with two stripes, not exactly an exalted position--enjoys a robust camaraderie with hospital staffers of superior rank. It didn’t hurt his status when a Marine major general came by and pinned a Purple Heart on his chest two weeks ago.

“I can get away with murder,” he said gleefully, knowing this revelry can’t last forever.

Pat Kelly, the hospital spokesman, said, “There’s some kind of warmth he radiates that reflects back on him. He’s everybody’s son; he’s everybody’s brother. He’s just a sweet, sweet guy.”

Doggett said he is having no emotional problems, but he recalled a strangely poetic, vaguely disturbing little dream: “I was just walking in a field and there’s a bunch of wildflowers like daisies and there’s one dark flower and I stepped on it and jerked my foot back, but nothing happened.”

There was another eerie dream before he was hurt.

“I had a glimpse, a real sharp glimpse, of the hospital room I’d end up in,” he said. “I saw the room, the way it looked and the way the people were. They were walking around. They were waiting for me.”

His mother, Sandy Garrett of Mission Viejo, had her own premonition even before war broke out, back when Doggett, who joined the Marines in 1986 and was honorably discharged from active duty, joined the Marine Corps Reserves last November.

“I had this feeling,” she said, “I begged him not to join the reserves. I knew we were going to war.”

Doggett’s unit, Alpha Company of the 4th Light Armored Infantry Battalion, was deployed to the Gulf in December but stayed aboard ship until one day before the allied ground war was launched in February.

The unit was put ashore in Saudi Arabia with orders to move toward Kuwait and merge with other units. Doggett ended up at Kuwait’s El Wafra refinery, which is surrounded by a community of scattered homes and businesses built of simple gray blocks.

The initial nervousness had left him, and Doggett--who had served in Panama but not during the U.S. invasion of December, 1989--was hoping for combat.

The day before he was wounded, another unit had taken sniper fire, and Doggett’s unit was harassed by sporadic small-arms fire. He was the frustrated gunner on an armored vehicle.

“I heard shots but couldn’t find a target. It would have been nice,” he said with a sigh.

The next day Doggett and the other Marines awakened early and moved out by 8 a.m., with orders to head back toward the Saudi border because the cease-fire had been declared.

While they waited, the Marines patrolled the area to make sure it was secured, even though most Iraqis had pulled out.

Filtering through a nearby forest in two patrols, the Marines searched each structure for enemy snipers or ordnance. Doggett took the right and moved cautiously.

He said the type of mine he set off is nicknamed “Toe Popper,” a shallowly buried mine triggered by pressure.

He was evacuated to a battalion aid station, then rushed to a temporary hospital near Kuwait City. Over the next week, Doggett was sent on to a U.S. military hospital in Lanstahl, Germany, then was flown to Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington. He arrived in San Diego on March 15.

In the meantime, his mother and stepfather, Larry Garrett, were going through their own pain. Two Marines arrived at their front door.

“I didn’t know what to think. (One sergeant) said right away, ‘No, no, he’s not dead, he’s just injured,’ ” Garrett said. “They didn’t know very much at the time except he stepped on a land mine and had a traumatic injury to the foot.”

The Garretts are buoyed by Doggett’s determination, and they’re confident in him.

“The first thing he asked me in Germany is if he could still take golf lessons when he gets back,” Garrett said.

Doggett’s mother has her own agenda.

“I want him to get on with his life, get a girlfriend and go back to school,” she said.

Indeed, Doggett is using the days to contemplate his future once the physical therapy is finished and he is fitted with an artificial foot and a special shoe to support the other foot.

He wishes for a speedy recovery that will enable him to resume his studies this fall at Saddleback Community College in Orange County. Eventually, he wants to earn a master’s degree in international business.

Although his goals have not changed, he has a newfound sensitivity for the world of handicapped people. “Before, I used to see handicapped people and not really feel about it,” he said.

Perhaps the greatest uncertainty is whether he and the Marine Corps must part company. He is thinking about whether he wants to stay in--or whether he’ll be allowed to.

But he knows he could never have what he wants most.

“I wouldn’t be a front-line troop anymore,” he said. “I don’t think I can settle for second-best.”