Photo By Staff Sgt. Michael Pryor | Pfc. Anthony Graves, Paso Robles, Calif., native, a medic with the Fort Stewart, Ga.,...... read more read more
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By Sgt. Mike Pryor
2nd Brigade Combat Team, 82nd Airborne Division Public Affairs
BAGHDAD – Baghdad is a city full of sad stories. Soldiers on patrol hear so many of them, a kind of numbness tends to set in. But when a platoon of Soldiers heard the sad tale of a little Iraqi girl named Rusil recently, they knew they had to act.
Rusil, a 5-year-old living in Baghdad's Adhamiyah District, was hit in the leg by a stray bullet in July. Local doctors treated the wound, but without proper follow-up care, the leg wasn't healing, and Rusil had been shut up in her house, unable to walk, for almost a month.
Since learning of the situation, Soldiers from Troop A, 3rd Squadron, 7th Cavalry Regiment have taken it upon themselves to make sure Rusil gets the medical attention she needs.
Soldiers from Troop A's 2nd Platoon first heard about Rusil during an Aug. 8 patrol in Adhamiyah's Suleikh area. The platoon had stopped to talk with some of the locals when one of them mentioned a sick little girl in the neighborhood. Information often gets passed to the Soldiers that way, said Paso Robles, Calif., native Pfc. Anthony Graves, the platoon's medic.
"We'll be standing there talking to a group of people and someone will come up and tell us about someone who is hurt or needs help," Graves said. "Usually, even if there's nothing we can do, we still go take a look, just to show our good faith."
When the man told the Soldiers about Rusil's situation, they immediately decided to investigate.
The platoon paid a visit to the tiny apartment where Rusil lives with her aunt and grandmother. The women were, at first, very nervous to have the Americans in their home, but they took the Soldiers to the next room to see Rusil. She was on the bed, wearing a white dress, her curly brown hair pulled back from her face, and she had a gruesome steel brace screwed into her tiny leg. The Soldiers' appearance in body armor, helmets, and sunglasses seemed to frighten her. Graves went over and knelt down next to the girl and smiled.
"I took off some of my gear to look a little bit more normal and talked to her real softly and she started to calm down," Graves said.
The grandmother told the Soldiers that Rusil had been playing in the yard July 17 when a bullet from a firefight between U.S. forces and insurgents struck her in the leg. The 3-7th Cav. has not been able to corroborate that there was an incident that day, but to the Soldiers who were there in the room with Rusil, it didn't matter who was responsible.
"Whether or not she was hurt by American forces isn't really important," Graves said. "She's just a little girl who needs help."
The bullet had shattered Rusil's right femur. Her aunt and grandmother took her for treatment at a local hospital, but the treatment there wasn't adequate for the severity of the injury.
To hold the bone in place, the doctors had given Rusil an external fixator, a brace that screws through the skin and into the leg. According to Oklahoma City native Lt. Col. Marvin Williams, the 3-7 Cav's squadron surgeon, the device is only meant to stay on for a few days. By the time the Soldiers found her, Rusil had it on for almost a month.
It appeared to Graves that the wound was infected. The Soldiers urged the family to take Rusil back to the hospital for antibiotics. When they left, Rusil was over her initial fright. She waved happily.
The next day, they came back to the little apartment to check up on her. This time they brought coloring books and toys for Rusil, as well as food and water for the family, who were destitute and living off the kindness of neighbors. Rusil was glad to see the Soldiers this time, smiling and waving when they came in, and eventually trying to talk with them.
"Even though we didn't understand each other, we talked a little bit," Graves said. "She showed me how to write her name in Arabic and I showed her how to write my name in English."
But when the aunt showed them the x-rays taken at the hospital, the news was worse than they had feared.
"As it is now, if she doesn't get proper surgery, the best that will happen is that the leg won't heal right and she'll be crippled for life," Graves said. "The worst that will happen is, she could lose the leg or even die."
When the Soldiers left the house this time, they were committed to getting Rusil the best possible care. Their best hope was to get her to the Army's Combat Support Hospital in the International Zone. When the story reached Anchorage, Alaska, native Capt. Jesse Reynolds, the squadron's physician's assistant, he got to work making the arrangements to have Rusil admitted to the CSH.
On Aug. 11, Rusil and her grandmother were taken to the 3-7's base in Adhamiyah. Because of the nature of her injury and the limited space on helicopter flights, they couldn't fly her to the hospital. So, instead, the squadron arranged a special convoy just to take her to the Green Zone.
"What this has been all about is teamwork," said Williams. "Everyone from the Soldiers out on patrol who found her, to the orthopedic surgeons at the CSH, to the people transporting her there, they all pitched in to make this happen."
At the CSH, Rusil will have to have surgery to clean out her wound and put in pins and a plate to hold her bones together. After that, she'll need physical therapy to learn how to walk again, Williams said.
"She still has a good, long road ahead of her," Reynolds said. But Reynolds and the other Soldiers are now guardedly optimistic about her prospects.
"I want her to be outside playing soccer in a few months," Reynolds said.
Many of the Soldiers who pitched in to help Rusil said they felt obligated to do so, because it may have been an American bullet that hurt her in the first place.
"We want to put right any harm that we cause," Gassman said.
But for others, there was something like a sense of redemption in their efforts to help the little girl. For Soldiers accustomed to operating in gray areas, it was a rare chance to do something purely selfless and positive.
"This little kid had nothing to do with our fight," Graves said. "She's just a 5-year-old girl who needed help. You need to do something good like that over here just to make everything else worthwhile."
Baghdad may still be a city of sad stories, but now it has one less.
| Date Taken: | 08.13.2007 |
| Date Posted: | 08.14.2007 14:38 |
| Story ID: | 11816 |
| Location: | BAGHDAD, IQ |
| Web Views: | 370 |
| Downloads: | 320 |
This work, For Rusil: Troops Go the Distance to Care for Wounded Iraqi Girl, by SSG Michael Pryor, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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