Wounded warrior returns

Wanda Landowski paces the floor of the Chattanooga Metropolitan Airport waiting for her son’s homecoming, thankful that he’s returning at all.

“Each of those guys came home on their own two feet. They could have come home being carried by six people,” Mrs. Landowski said. “And that is remarkable.”

She was astonished when her son, Georgia Army National Guard Spc. Anthony Landowski, walked with her and his father down the hallway and into the airport’s main terminal.

Six short months ago in Afghanistan, while he was on combat patrol in an armored humvee, an improvised explosive device blasted the vehicle 10 feet into the air, killing an Afghan civilian nearby and seriously wounding three of the four soldiers inside.

Spc. Landowski was the most critically wounded with multiple breaks to both legs, his elbow and pelvis. He also suffered minor traumatic brain injury.

The 22-year-old specialist is one of thousands of soldiers returning home alive but with extensive wounds from bomb attacks that once plagued Iraq but now have shifted as a primary insurgent tool against coalition forces in Afghanistan.

Since the May 17 ambush, the Ringgold resident’s job has been to recover at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. He said his recovery will continue for at least the next six months.

Thursday was the first time he’s set foot on Georgia soil since leaving for Afghanistan in April with C Troop 1st Squadron 108 Cavalry, 48th Brigade Infantry Combat Team of the Georgia Army National Guard.

At the airport, Spc. Landowski sets one foot after another while wearing a walking cast on his right foot. It’s the same foot that shattered during the explosion, wedging so tightly into the floorboard his fellow soldiers had to cut off his boot to pull him from the burning vehicle.

Facing a bank of TV cameras and bright lights, Spc. Landowski told reporters he “could see everyone in the background, and that put a big smile on my face.”

While in Georgia on Thursday night, he’s joining the other soldiers wounded in the humvee attack — who have been recuperating at Fort Gordon in Augusta — on a tour of the unit’s home base in Dalton. It will be the first time he’s seen the men in person since the explosion.

“Hopefully they’ll tell me some stories, because I don’t remember a thing about it,” he said.

The C Troop tour is part of the Wounded Warrior project, which is designed to raise public awareness and help for severely wounded veterans.

Of the 68,000 troops now in Afghanistan, about 350 are wounded each month, according to Department of Defense numbers.

Afghanistan casualties have passed Iraq surge proportions, and the violence there is directed more against coalition forces than in Iraq, where fighting was more sectarian, according to the Pentagon.

In August, more than 1,000 IEDs either exploded or were discovered in Afghanistan, twice the normal monthly total. Between 70 percent and 80 percent of coalition casualties come from IEDs, according to the Pentagon’s Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization.

With improved armor and medical equipment and techniques, many who might not have survived bomb blasts or other wounds in past wars are living through such attacks, said Phillip Elliott, who works with more than 120 local veterans at the Chattanooga Vet Center.

“In Vietnam, the guys I talk to now say, if they hit a land mine there wasn’t survival,” he said.

The No. 1 injury he sees is traumatic brain injury, but any serious wound brings a host of challenges that are hard to prepare for, he said.

“They might have lost a limb and, besides the adjustment of feeling that they are half the person they used to be, they still have to push through that and be there for their families,” he said.

A phone call to his mom was one of the first things Spc. Landowski did from the hospital after the explosion.

But he doesn’t remember it.

“He said, ‘Mom, I’m fine. I just got blown up,’” his mother recalled.