Dole Shares War Story in Memoir
Former Senator Says Battle Scars Help Him Connect With
Today’s Veterans
The Washington Post
Sunday, April 10, 2005; Page A05
By Eric Pianin, Washington Post Staff Writer
On Christmas Day 2004, former Senate majority leader Robert J. Dole
had a chance encounter at Walter Reed Army Medical Center with Craig
L. Nelson, a 21-year-old soldier who had been seriously wounded by
a bomb in Baghdad.
Dole tried to comfort Nelson and his family as the National Guardsman
from Bossier City, La., lay paralyzed from the neck down, hooked up
to a respirator and a bunch of tubes.
“It was like seeing a mirror image of myself 60 years earlier,” Dole
recalled. “He was tall and muscular, about 6 feet, 1 1/2 inches,
and about 185 pounds, almost identical to my World War II height
and weight. For a moment I was back there in a similar hospital bed,
encased in plaster, unable to move, paralyzed from the neck down.”
Sixty years ago this week, German shrapnel or machine-gun fire ripped
through Dole’s right shoulder as the young Army second lieutenant
desperately tried to drag one of his men out of the line of fire in the
mountains of northern Italy. The fragments ripped apart his shoulder,
broke his collarbone and right arm, smashed down into his vertebrae
and damaged his spinal cord.
That incident, in the waning days of World War II, left Dole’s
strapping, athletic body irreparably shattered. It would take years
of surgery and therapy — and enormous willpower — before Dole could
pull his life together and launch a political career that took him to
the pinnacle of leadership in the Senate and now a premier lobbying
job in Washington. Dole’s war story is a familiar one, and it became
an important motif of the Kansas Republican’s failed presidential
campaign in 1996 when Dole tried to shed a dour, taciturn image.
But as recounted by Dole in his new memoir, “One Soldier’s Story,”
the tale assumes a fresh resonance as the toll of U.S. troops killed
or maimed in Iraq and Afghanistan continues to mount. More than 1,700
U.S. troops have been killed and 6,316 wounded so seriously they will
never return to duty.
Dole opens his book with a tribute to Spec. Nelson, who died four days
after the visit. Dole and his wife, Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.),
are frequent visitors to Walter Reed — where Dole himself was
hospitalized late last year with internal bleeding caused by a fall
after hip replacement surgery. Advocates for disabled veterans say
Dole, 81, is an inspiration to many of the wounded soldiers struggling
to overcome their disabilities.
Col. James K. Gilman, commander of the Walter Reed Health Care System,
says that many of his patients who are amputees quickly bond with
Dole. “They clearly recognized him, and they had an appreciation for
someone like him. . . . To watch what [Dole] did with his life after
being very seriously wounded and given a permanent disability —
it gives them a bond that I don’t have with them. It’s special.”
“In a sense, you can say his story is their story,” said David
E. Autry, a spokesman for the 1.3 million-member Disabled American
Veterans.
Seated yesterday morning in the VIP suite of Alston and Bird LLP,
the downtown law and lobbying firm where he works, Dole obligingly
whistles a bar from “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” or at least tries. That
is the Rodgers and Hammerstein show tune that Dole says helped him
get through the darkest days of his wartime convalescence, the tune
he whistled the first time he ventured alone outside his parents’
modest house in tiny Russell, Kan., after the war and walked to
Dawson’s Drugstore to get a chocolate milkshake.
Today, Dole, as usual, looks good and well-tanned. The onetime pitchman
for Viagra is meticulously groomed and dressed, with his pinstriped
suit pants neatly creased, his tassled loafers polished and his hair
newly coiffed.
Dole is sensitive about his appearance and still, after all these
years, self-conscious about his deadened right shoulder and his
left arm and hand that have limited mobility and utility. He avoids
looking at himself in the mirror — frequently recalling how shocked
he was when he first saw himself after being wounded and looking like
“a scarecrow in a body cast.”
His right arm hangs limp, emaciated and 2 1/2 inches shorter than the
other arm, his fingers molded into a ball. For years he has shaken
hands with his left hand, which most people have assumed is fine.
Actually, he reveals in his book, “I have no more feeling in those
fingers today than I did in June 1945
. . . After shaking hands with a few too many folks,.
my left hand starts turning black and blue.”
Dole launched his book project after he discovered that his two
sisters had kept about 300 family letters dating to the mid-’40s,
including many that Dole had written as a student at the University
of Kansas and during his time in the military.
He said that he tried to frame the story “so that it wouldn’t be a
‘poor Bob Dole,’ a kind of pitiful thing.” He said he was eager
for disabled veterans — especially young soldiers who had fought
in Iraq and Afghanistan — to understand that “you can be in pretty
bad shape and still have a good life and do a lot of good things —
and you don’t have to be a senator.”
Dole said that many of the disabled veterans he has met at Walter
Reed are fairly upbeat and do not complain about their fate.
“I don’t know what’s in the mind of a young man or his mother today
when they’re out there [at Walter Reed] with two limbs gone,” he
said. “What are they thinking? ‘The whole thing was a mistake?’ I
didn’t get that impression.”
Dole paused. “But I’ve got to believe that when the parade is past,
that’s the hard part,” he said.
Dole’s war story reads like a Jimmy Stewart movie: About two years
after Pearl Harbor, Dole enlisted, leaving behind the University
of Kansas, his fraternity house and a girlfriend. After boot camp,
he was accepted into an officer’s training program, but for a while
it looked as though the war would end before he saw any action. But
by the spring of 1945, Dole’s number was called and he shipped out
as a second lieutenant.
Dole was a platoon leader in the legendary 10th Mountain Division in
Italy and led his men in an attempt to flush out entrenched Germans
on Hill 913 in the Italian Alps. On April 14, 1945, as the young Dole
scrambled to rescue his wounded radioman, “something terribly powerful
crashed into my upper back behind my right shoulder,” he recalled.
“For a long moment I didn’t know if I was dead or alive,” he wrote. “I
lay face down in the dirt unable to feel my arms. Then the horror
hit me — I can’t feel anything below my neck.”
Dole’s long road to recovery led him through field hospitals,
veterans facilities, and the old Percy Jones Army Hospital in
Battle Creek, Mich., which was the Army’s premier facility for
neurosurgery, amputations and deep-X-ray therapy. At Percy Jones he
met and befriended two other future U.S. senators, Daniel K. Inouye
of Hawaii and Philip A. Hart of Michigan. He also met his first wife,
Phyllis Holden, an occupational therapist.
One of the country’s top orthopedic surgeons at the time — Armenian
refugee Hampar Kelikian, or “Dr. K” — repeatedly operated on Dole
without ever charging him. And Dole’s strong-willed mother, Bina,
played a central role in helping Dole through his long, agonizing
convalescence and keeping up his spirits.
Yesterday, Dole recalled that his mother sobbed uncontrollably the
first time she laid eyes on him after his return from Italy. He had
never seen her cry before. “She cried once,” he said. “But then she
bucked up.”
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