-- Specialist Charles "Chas" Shaffer's co-workers have an easy way to tell if he's still in the building.
They simply glance at his cubicle at the Army's Military Surface Deployment and Distribution Command.
If Shaffer's two-wheeled Segway, a self-balancing transportation device, is leaning by his desk, then they know Shaffer's still around.
As Shaffer spoke, his eyes darted from the Segway to his artificial right leg, a battery-powered latticework of sleek tungsten and steel, carbon fiber and molded plastic.
Shaffer admitted to some self-consciousness about his missing limb, but not much.
"People stare a lot," he said. "People are like, 'Don't stare at him, don't stare at him.'"
Shaffer, 27, lost his right leg on Sept. 1, 2008, while serving as a combat engineer with the Army's 4th Infantry Division. An insurgent grenade attack nearly killed him and the passenger of the vehicle he was driving while on patrol outside Mosul, Iraq.
Despite the severity of his wounds, and the two-dozen surgeries he's endured over the past three years, the O'Fallon resident isn't feeling sorry for himself.
Instead, Shaffer says he's grateful for all he good things that have happened to him since his injury.
They include taking part in a Army-sponsored pilot program that allowed him to re-enlist earlier this year and land a job at the Surface Deployment and Distribution Command. There he spends his day helping coordinate the shipment of military members' household goods around the world.
"I'm really glad I have the opportunity to sit behind a desk and do work," Shaffer said, "other than sitting at the couch at home and feeling sorry for myself."
Shaffer embodies the can-do spirit and pride of nearly 40,000 American troops who have come home severely wounded in either body or mind after a decade of war in Afghanistan and nearly nine years of combat in Iraq.
In addition, another 30,000 American troops are estimated to suffer some type of mental illness because of the wars, while 20,000 more veterans are suffering from a service-related brain injuries not counted in official casualty figures, according to the Archives of Internal Medicine.
Shaffer personifies something else: the fact the metro-east has become a magnet for severely wounded military veterans of all ages and disabilities, particularly veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq-era conflicts dating from 1990.
The Illinois ZIP code prefixes that begins with 622 -- a region that ranges south from Collinsville, across all of St. Clair County and northern Monroe County -- manifest one of the nation's highest ratios of seriously disabled veterans from Afghanistan and the Iraq-era wars.
The metro-east's wounded warriors are receiving disability payments for a wide gamut of injuries, from major depression and post-traumatic stress disorder, to limb amputations and brain injuries, these records show.
There are 209 Iraq-era war veterans who are disabled 50 percent and above per 100,000 residents in the metro-east.
That's five times the rate for the rest of Illinois and more than twice the national average ratio, according to an analysis of U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs disability payments performed by the Washington, D.C., bureau of McClatchy Newspapers, the News-Democrat's parent chain.
The chronic nature and scope of these injuries will impose immense price -- in terms of money, time and emotional costs -- for these veterans and their families for decades to come, according to experts.
But with America's role in Iraq set to end by Dec. 31, and the war in Afghanistan winding down, many veterans fear that American voters -- the great majority of whom have no direct link to the military -- will turn their backs on veterans and forget their debt to them.
"These are guys we sent to protect our way of life," said Will White, of Mascoutah, the founder of Camp Hope, in Farmington, Mo., which provides outdoor recreation to wounded veterans. "Hopefully, we're going to take care of them for as long as we need to take care of them."
In 2006, White's son, Christopher, while serving with the Marines in Iraq, died in an IED attack. Proceeds from his son's insurance policy enabled him to start the camp, White said.
"We basically wanted to give back to the guys who are coming back not as whole as when they had left," said White, himself an Army veteran who works with Shaffer at Scott.
The need for such a program, which allows wounded veterans to gather with comrades in an emotionally safe environment, is acute, according to White.
"When the guys are in the hospital there is somebody to talk to," he said. "But when the government's done with them and sends them back home, they don't have anything in common with the buddies they went to school with."
Injured vet says recovery takes time
The top two Iraq-era war injuries in the metro-east are:
* Tinnitus -- noise or ringing in the ear -- accounting for 771 injuries, or 33 percent.
* Strained back, which accounted for another 518 cases, or 22 percent.
The two types of wounds that are considered the Afghanistan and Iraq wars' "signature injuries" are post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and traumatic brain injury, or TBI. They accounted for about 6 percent and 1.3 percent of severe wounds in the metro-east, respectively, the McClatchy analysis shows.
PTSD and TBI are also two of the most resistant to treatment and most chronic, engulfing the lives of wounded veterans and their families for decades.
Even so, these injuries are manageable with the help of the right treatment and enough time, said James Sperry, of Lebanon.
Sperry, 26, should know.
Sperry suffers from both TBI and PTSD after a 2004 tour in Iraq with the U.S. Marine Corps.
Sperry's injuries have left him 100 percent disabled, the result of a serious head injury he suffered when a rocket-propelled grenade bounced off his Kevlar helmet in November 2004, during the first hours of his battalion's attack on the Iraqi insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.
Sperry, a 2003 graduate of Belleville West High School, acknowledged some tough times during his first years back home, including a divorce from his wife.
But he turned a major corner after spending five months at the Shepherd Center, a private treatment program in Atlanta, he said.
With the help of intensive in-patient counseling, Sperry said he learned the skills that enable him to cope from one day to the next.
Almost every hour of the day was filled up with some type of therapeutic activity, from speech and occupational therapy, to group outings and visits to the pain clinic, he said.
"It gave me time for me to sit down and deal with everything," he said. "I couldn't go in for an hour every two weeks."
One of the most powerful therapeutic activities he takes part in is the volunteer work he does on behalf of other wounded veterans, especially those with PTSD.
"I get a lot out of it," he said. "I feel it's something I got to do."
Why is there a concentration of disabled vets in the metro-east?
The VA has not issued any public analysis of these data to determine the reasons for this high concentration of disabled veterans.
Experts and veterans interviewed, however, speculate the high ratio of wounded veterans in the metro-east stems from an array of related factors including the presence of two big VA hospitals in nearby St. Louis, as well as veteran-friendly hiring programs by military and civilian employers based at or near Scott.
For Shaffer, the biggest reason for the high ratio of wounded veterans in the metro-east stems from the high number of military families living here, thanks to Scott Air Force Base.
"I would probably guess there are a lot of people from this area who joined the military, a lot more than normal," said Shaffer, whose father Chip Shaffer is a Navy veteran and the founder of Hope For Heroes, a nonprofit group that advocates for wounded GIs.
Stan Brown, the president of the Gateway Chapter of Paralyzed Veterans of America in St. Louis, attributed the region's high ratio of wounded veterans to the values of the Midwestern regions like the metro-east.
"There is a real patriotism in small town America," Brown said.
Another factor, in Brown's view, is economic: Metro-east young people of working class backgrounds often join the military to gain job skills and earn money for college.
"They don't have the full funding to go to college or they don't inherit money," he said.
For Sperry, the metro-east's high percent of wounded veterans is a direct reflection of the region's support for the military.
"I just think there's a call of duty here," said Sperry, who turned down golf scholarships to college to join the Marines. "It's more the morale of the area."
In less than four weeks, the war that Sperry fought in -- and that changed his life forever -- will be over, at least as far as American involvement is concerned.
That fact is a source of deeply mixed feelings, Sperry admitted.
Twenty-one "really close friends" died in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said.
"But we freed 25 million Iraqis, and they're destined to make their own life choices," Sperry said. "I take pride in that."
# As reported by - BND.com BY MIKE FITZGERALD
Read more: http://www.bnd.com/2011/12/04/1966266/disabled-veterans-are-drawn-to.html#ixzz1fZOn057Z
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