Cape Cod Times
By Karen Jeffrey and Anne Brennan
kjeffrey@capecodonline.com | abrennan@capecodonline.com
May 27, 2012
The road home from war is difficult for veterans. Memories, adjustment to civilian life, answering all the questions.
But for many veterans – the numbers for Iraq and Afghanistan vary from an estimated 63,000 to 170,000, depending upon definitions – the return to civilian life is complicated by injury. For some, such as Cape residents Dominic Davila and Vincent Mannion-Brodeur, life will never be the same.
Mannion-Brodeur was 19 years old and a corporal with the Army's 82nd Airborne Division when he was wounded in Iraq on March 11, 2007. He was on patrol outside the city of Tikrit when a bomb exploded, causing a building he was about to search to collapse. A fellow soldier was killed.
Mannion-Brodeur was knocked unconscious. He came home with multiple wounds, including what has become known as the signature wound of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – a traumatic brain injury.
An estimated 360,000 veterans from those two wars have been diagnosed with some sort of brain injury, many not until after they have left the service, according to a report from the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force.
The Pentagon estimates 60 percent of those serving in Iraq and Afghanistan have had some sort of injury due to explosions.
Mannion-Brodeur, a 2006 graduate of Barnstable High School, suffered other wounds from shrapnel that ripped apart his belly and tore large chunks of flesh and muscle from his left arm and shoulder. While under treatment for those wounds, he suffered two strokes.
He has had to relearn how to swallow, eat, walk, talk, shower and brush his teeth. At least once a year he visits a military hospital outside Washington, D.C., for checkups. Rehabilitation and physical therapy will be lifelong challenges.
Mannion-Brodeur will never be 100 percent independent. For as long as they can, his parents will take care of him. His father, Jeffrey Brodeur, has dedicated his life to helping his son. “We aren't the only family to go through something like this. There are families all over the country struggling to give their wounded veteran children the best quality of life possible,” he says.
Mannion-Brodeur's parents rearranged their lives and their home to accommodate their son's recovery and new life. They got a grant from the Department of Veterans Affairs that let them adapt a bathroom for their son's use. But there was not enough money left to widen the exterior staircase, install grip bars on the front of the house, or make other necessary changes.
The veterans community on Cape Cod last fall pitched in with money and sweat equity. Cape Cod Veterans Inc. – a nonprofit group that raises money and helps members of the armed forces, veterans and their families – along with the Dennis VFW Post 10274, held a fundraiser that enabled Mannion-Brodeur's family to make the needed changes to its Centerville home.
Coming to the Cape
After spending 5½ years in the Marine Corps, Dominic Davila, 24, is finding out what civilian life is like. And rather than do that back home in Chicago, where he grew up, he moved to Cape Cod in early April.
Video: Marine Dominic Davila charts his future on Cape Cod:
“I am trying something new,” says Davila, who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. “I really don't know what it's like being an adult as a civilian. Everything is so different, not worrying about checking in with people or calling people.”
Before he joined the military, Davila always wanted to become a police officer, like his uncles and cousins. But he says the college route to that goal was not for him. So he joined the Marines when he was 19, figuring he would serve four years and become a police officer when he finished.
On July 23, 2009, Davila was stationed in Mian Poshteh, located in the Helmand River valley of Afghanistan. A machine gunner, he was riding with three others in a Humvee on a mission to relieve another unit.
“On the way, one of our trucks was falling into a canal and we needed our tow straps ... we went back to go grab them,” he says. “Going back we went over an IED.”
The driver, Cpl. Jeremy Lasher, 27, of Oneida, N.Y., and vehicle commander, Cpl. Nicholas Xiarhos, 21, of Yarmouthport, were killed. Davila was thrown from the vehicle, both his legs shattered. His right leg was amputated below the knee, but doctors were able to save his left leg.
Davila spent the next 2½ years at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., recovering from his injuries, including 12 to 13 surgeries and physical therapy. He was strong enough to start walking with a prosthetic leg by November 2009. But he has five or six screws and a metal plate in his left ankle.
“I don't get much movement (in the ankle), but I am able to walk so I am happy.”
In Afghanistan, Xiarhos was Davila's team leader for about three months before the improvised explosive device attack. Davila says initially they did not get along very well, but they became friends after spending so much time together. In December 2009, he met the Xiarhos family at a Marine Corps memorial at Camp Lejeune, N.C.
The Davila and Xiarhos families grew fond of each other, and the Davilas came to Cape Cod a few times to visit and take part in fundraisers for veterans. Davila fell in love with Cape Cod and quickly bonded with the Xiarhos family.
“I visited here a few times and I loved it. My buddy's family took me in. I asked if they would let me stay here.”
The day Davila was discharged from the Marines, his father, Dominic Sr., and uncle Daniel drove him from Bethesda to Yarmouthport. And while Davila's family members wish he would return to Chicago, they support his choice to find a new beginning on Cape Cod.
“I'm planning on going to school in the fall, and, once I get done, I want to take as many police tests as I can and go from there,” Davila says.
“Whatever he pursues in life I just want him to stay on that path,” Davila's father says. “You don't want to see everything that they have experienced and gone through go for naught.”
Staff Writer Jason Kolnos contributed to this report.