Team Infidel

New York Times
April 5, 2007
Pg. 1

By Deborah Sontag
DUNBAR, Pa. — Blinded and disabled on the 54th day of the war in Iraq, Sam Ross returned home to a rousing parade that outdid anything this small, depressed Appalachian town had ever seen. “Sam’s parade put Dunbar on the map,” his grandfather said.
That was then.
Now Mr. Ross, 24, faces charges of attempted homicide, assault and arson in the burning of a family trailer in February. Nobody in the trailer was hurt, but Mr. Ross fought the assistant fire chief who reported to the scene, and later threatened a state trooper with his prosthetic leg, which was taken away from him, according to the police.
The police locked up Mr. Ross in the Fayette County prison. In his cell, he tried to hang himself with a sheet. After he was cut down, Mr. Ross was committed to a state psychiatric hospital, where, he said in a recent interview there, he is finally getting — and accepting — the help he needs, having spiraled downward in the years since the welcoming fanfare faded.
“I came home a hero, and now I’m a bum,” Mr. Ross, whose full name is Salvatore Ross Jr., said.
The story of Sam Ross has the makings of a ballad, with its heart-rending arc from hardscrabble childhood to decorated war hero to hardscrabble adulthood. His effort to create a future for himself by enlisting in the Army exploded in the desert during a munitions disposal operation in Baghdad. He was 20.
He was also on his own. Mr. Ross, who is estranged from his mother and whose father is serving a life sentence for murdering his stepmother, does not have the family support that many other severely wounded veterans depend on. Various relatives have stepped in at various times, but Mr. Ross, embittered by a difficult childhood and by what the war cost him, has had a push-pull relationship with those who sought to assist him.
Several people have taken a keen interest in Mr. Ross, among them Representative John P. Murtha, the once-hawkish Democrat from Pennsylvania. When Mr. Murtha publicly turned against the war in Iraq in 2005, he cited the shattered life of Mr. Ross, one of his first constituents to be seriously wounded, as a pivotal influence.
Mr. Murtha’s office assisted Mr. Ross in negotiating the military health care bureaucracy. Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit group based in Massachusetts, built him a beautiful log cabin. Military doctors carefully tended Mr. Ross’s physical wounds: the loss of his eyesight, of his left leg below the knee and of his hearing in one ear, among other problems.
But that help was not enough to save Mr. Ross from the loneliness and despair that engulfed him. Overwhelmed by severe symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, including routine nightmares of floating over Iraq that ended with a blinding boom, he “self-medicated” with alcohol and illegal drugs. He finally hit rock bottom when he landed in the state psychiatric hospital, where he is, sadly, thrilled to be.
“Seventeen times of trying to commit suicide, I think it’s time to give up,” Mr. Ross said, speaking in the forensic unit of the Mayview State Hospital in Bridgeville. “Lots of them were screaming out cries for help, and nobody paid attention. But finally somebody has.”
Finding a Way Out
Fayette County in southwestern Pennsylvania, once a prosperous coal mining center, is now one of the poorest counties in the state. The bucolic but ramshackle town of Dunbar sits off State Route 119 near the intersection marked by the Butchko Brothers junkyard.
Past the railroad tracks and not far up Hardy Hill Road, the blackened remains of Mr. Ross’s hillside trailer are testament to his disintegration. The Support our Troops ribbon is charred, the No Trespassing sign unfazed.
Mr. Ross lived in that trailer, where his father shot his stepmother, at several points in his life, including alone after he returned from Iraq. Its most recent tenant, his younger brother, Thomas, was in jail when the fire occurred.
Many in Mr. Ross’s large, quarreling family are on one side of the law or the other, prison guards or prisoners, police officers or probationers. Their internal feuds are so commonplace that family reunions have to be carefully plotted with an eye to who has a protective order out against whom, Mr. Ross’s 25-year-old cousin, Joseph Lee Ross, joked.
Sam Ross’s childhood was not easy. “Sam’s had a rough life from the time he was born,” his grandfather, Joseph Frank Ross, said. His parents fought, sometimes with guns, until they separated and his mother moved out of state. Mr. Ross bore some of the brunt of the turmoil.
“When that kid was little, the way he got beat around, it was awful,” his uncle, Joseph Frank Ross Jr., a prison guard, said.
When he was just shy of 12, Mr. Ross moved in with his father’s father, who for a time was married to his mother’s mother. The grandfather-grandson relationship was and continues to be tumultuous.
“I idolized my grandpaps, but he’s an alcoholic and he mentally abuses people,” Mr. Ross said.
His grandfather, 72, a former coal miner who sells used cars, said, “I’m not an alcoholic. I can quit. I just love the taste of it.”
The grandfather, who still keeps an A-plus English test by Mr. Ross on his refrigerator, said his grandson did well in school, even though he cared most about his wrestling team, baseball, hunting and fishing. Mr. Ross graduated in June 2001.
“Sammy wanted me to pay his way to college, but I’m not financially fixed to do that,” his grandfather said.
Feeling that Fayette County was a dead end, Mr. Ross said he had wanted to find a way out after he graduated. One night in late 2001, he said, he saw “one of those ‘Be all you can be’ ads” on television. The next day, he went to the mall and enlisted, getting a $3,000 bonus for signing up to be a combat engineer.
From his first days of basic training, Mr. Ross embraced the military as his salvation. “It was like, ‘Wow, man, I was born for the Army,’ ” he said. “I was an adrenaline junkie. I was super, super fit. I craved discipline. I wanted adventure. I was patriotic. I loved the bonding. And there was nothing that I was feared of. I mean, man, I was made for war.”
In early 2003, Private Ross, who earned his jump wings as a parachutist, shipped off to Kuwait with the 82nd Airborne Division, which pushed into Iraq with the invasion in March. The early days of the war were heady for many soldiers like Private Ross, who reveled in the appreciation of Iraqis. He was assigned to an engineer squad given the task of rounding up munitions.
On May 18, Private Ross and his squad set out to de-mine an area in south Baghdad. Moving quickly, as they did on such operations, he collected about 15 UXO’s, or unexploded ordnances, in a pit. Somehow, something — he never learned what — caused them to detonate.
“The initial blast hit me and I went numb and everything went totally silent,” he said. “Then I hear people start hollering, ‘Ross! Ross! Ross!’ It started getting louder, louder, louder. My whole body was mangled. I was spitting up blood. I faded in and out. I was bawling my eyes out, saying, ‘Please don’t let me go; don’t let me go.’ ”
A Casualty of War
When his relatives first saw Mr. Ross at Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, he was in a coma. “That boy was dead,” his grandfather said. “We was looking at a corpse lying in that bed.”
As he lay unconscious, the Army discharged him — one year, four months and 18 days after he enlisted, by his calculation. After 31 days, Mr. Ross came off the respirator. Groggily but insistently, he pointed to his eyes and then to his leg. An aunt gingerly told him he was blind and an amputee. He cried for days, he said.
It was during Mr. Ross’s stay at Walter Reed that Representative Murtha, a former Marine colonel, first met his young constituent and presented him with a Purple Heart.
From the start of the war, Mr. Murtha said in an interview, he made regular, painful excursions to visit wounded soldiers. Gradually, those visits, combined with his disillusionment about the Bush administration’s management of the war, led him to call in late 2005 for the troops to be brought home in six months.
“Sam Ross had an impact on me,” Mr. Murtha said. “Eventually, I just felt that we had gotten to a point where we were talking so much about winning the war itself — and it couldn’t be won militarily — that we were forgetting about the results of the war on individuals like Sam.”
Over the next three years, Mr. Ross underwent more than 20 surgical procedures, including: “Five on my right eye, one on my left eye, two or three when they cut my left leg off, three or four on my right leg, a couple on my throat, skin grafts, chest tubes and, you know, one where they gutted me from belly button to groin” to remove metal fragments from his intestines.
But, although he was prescribed psychiatric medication, he never received in-patient treatment for the post-traumatic stress disorder that was diagnosed at Walter Reed. And, in retrospect he, like his relatives, said he believes he should have been put in an intensive program soon after his urgent physical injuries were addressed.
“They should have given him treatment before they let him come back into civilization,” his grandfather said.

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