A TEST OF WILL.

Byline: Randi Bjornstad The Register-Guard

From the frame of his official U.S. Army portrait, taken five years ago, Sgt. Will Glass stares out with the set-jawed determination and clear-eyed confidence of the well-trained young GI.

It's a look changed drastically by two tours of duty in Iraq, the second cut short almost nine months ago by a roadside bomb that nearly killed him.

Now, 23-year-old Glass struggles daily to regain the physical and mental agility he once took for granted. He is buoyed by the strength of two

women - wife and mother - who love him.

"Depending on my frame of mind, sometimes I'm just happy that he has recovered as well as he has so far," said his mother, Karen Mitchell. "But then I look at pictures of how he was before, and I know that he won't be quite like that again."

His wife, Amelia Glass, works to recapture the joys of the young couple's pre-Iraq days as she charts a future vastly different from the one they had planned.

"Will had this talent - working on cars - that would have been a career as well as a hobby, and he was already accepted at one of the top schools in the country to learn it," Glass said. "Now he can't do the one thing he really loved to do."

Only 21, she draws from her own parents' example of solidarity through good and ill to cope with what is, while hoping for what will be.

"I feel grateful Will's alive," Glass said. "I couldn't even imagine what life would be like if he wasn't in it."

Tremendous strides

Will Glass came back from the Iraq war in the second-worst way: not among the more than 3,400 U.S. troops returned to their families in coffins, but one of 14,500 others coming back with severe physical or mental illnesses or injuries.

Glass, a sergeant with the Army's 4th Infantry Division, was brought back from Iraq in a medically induced coma, his head and limbs swollen beyond recognition, minus one eye and a good-size chunk of his skull.

"I was totally unprepared for what I would see when his mom and I got to the hospital in Bethesda," Amelia Glass said. "No one had told me what to expect - he didn't even look like a person."

Will's face was bloody, bruised and covered with thick black scabs from the blast, Glass said. "The bed was raised up high, and there were wires coming out of every place possible. His arms were encased in huge foam blocks to keep them elevated, and his hands were bandaged. We couldn't even touch him or get near him."

Mitchell said the two women became fixated on looking at Will's legs, "because they were the only part of him that was OK. There were all these machines that made all this noise - I can still hear them."

Eight months later, after multiple surgeries and endless hours of painful rehabilitation, Will Glass has made tremendous strides toward recovery, but he knows his life will never be the same. He still has a rock lodged in his brain, in a spot too critical - the area that controls speech and memory - to remove it unless his life someday depends on it. The upper-left half of his skull, removed to accommodate brain swelling from the blast of the "improvised explosive device" that shattered him, has been replaced by high-tech plastic, crafted to perfect shape by using head X-rays and CT scans to re-create a three-dimensional model of his cranium.

His forearms and hands are mangled, his left forefinger gone altogether. The damage has dashed his plan to turn a youthful obsession with cars - epitomized by his highly customized 1992 Honda hatchback - into a career, although he has regained enough use of his hands to drive.

Several teeth damaged by the blast will need repair. The purplish "traumatic tattooing" on his face normally can be diminished by laser surgery, but doctors now fear that the debris embedded in his skin by the IED blast may contain explosive material that could burst during treatment, creating disfiguring burns.

Doctors replaced Glass' missing left eye with a prosthetic one in early April.

"It moves like his other eye, and it's painted really, really cool," Amelia Glass said. "He has to tell people it's not his real eye, or they don't even notice."

A direct hit

On Sept. 18, 2006, on patrol with his platoon in Taji, a few miles north of Baghdad, Glass took a direct hit from an IED planted underground by Iraqi insurgents.

`I was standing on top of the IED when they blew it up,' said Glass, who grew up in Eugene and graduated from Churchill Alternative High School. `Our guys said that after it happened, I was still standing there. I walked myself to the helicopter. I woke up in Bethesda (Naval Hospital) with part of my skull gone, my finger gone. I don't remember any of it.'

What Glass doesn't remember, his wife and his mother will never forget.

Amelia Glass got the dreaded telephone call at 5 a.m. that Monday; it was already late afternoon in Baghdad, several hours after Glass had been hit.

"I always had my cell phone by my bed. The phone rang, I looked at the caller ID and saw it was a Texas 254 area code - Will's unit was stationed at Fort Hood - so I knew something was wrong."

The caller said Will had been hit by an IED, that he would lose his left eye and that they were trying to stabilize him, Amelia recalled.

"I was so distraught - I kept asking them if he was going to have to go back (into action) - I just couldn't even imagine the magnitude of his injuries," she said. "They told me I'd either be flying to Germany or stateside to see him. I found out later they only fly you to Germany if the soldier isn't going to make it."

Mitchell remembers being "so in shock" when her telephone rang.

"They told me what his injuries were, and they kept saying, `Do you have any questions, ma'am?' ' she said. `I said, `It's hard to say - I can't even take it all in.' '

Both women flew to Bethesda, Md., at Army expense. Although the Navy runs Bethesda Naval Hospital for its personnel, while the Army maintains the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for its troops, "all the brain injuries go to Bethesda," Amelia Glass said.

While that spared her husband from experiencing the recently publicized deficiencies of the Walter Reed facilities, he did end up in a no-man's-land that delayed some of his treatment, she said.

"Being Army in a Navy facility, everyone assumed he was someone else's responsibility, in terms of paperwork and orders for treatment and stuff," she said. "That part was totally ridiculous, but that absolutely wasn't the case with his care - he got the best care anyone could have gotten."

At one point, it took the intervention of Will Glass' neurosurgeon at Bethesda, Army Col. Rocco Armonda, to cut through the red tape.

"The Army was supposed to pay for my hotel while I was in Bethesda - I had orders to accompany Will to help take care of him - but instead when we were ready to leave, they were trying to charge us $1,000 before they would release him," Amelia Glass said. "When Dr. Armonda found out what was happening, he was so angry he told them to transfer the whole bill to his personal credit card."

Armonda, who has performed 300 surgeries like Will's, said the offer "was just a way for me to make action happen in a more timely fashion."

"As a colonel in the Army and an Iraq war vet myself, I consider Will and all the others to be VIPs," he said. "I want to see them all get the best treatment possible."

``It's really sneaky''

Were it not for the military's "stop loss" policy that has returned thousands of young men and women to additional deployments in Iraq, Will Glass would have been out of the Army five months before the insurgent attack that wounded an Iraqi translator and left him permanently disabled.

"I wasn't aware that (stop loss) could happen," Glass said. "I joined the Army for four years - I signed up to get out in April (2006).'

He says he's not angry about what happened, and his wife agrees that - at least so far - he has shown no bitterness at his situation.

"His personality is to take what comes, to just accept it," Amelia Glass said.

Nonetheless, neither she nor Mitchell accepts the stop loss policy as readily as he does.

"In my mind, it's really sneaky," Amelia said. "It amounts to a back-door draft."

Maybe because the country had not yet gone to war in Iraq when her son enlisted right out of high school in 2002, neither he nor many other young soldiers paid enough attention to the "fine print" in the contracts they signed, Mitchell said.

"He joined to get the education benefit. I thought it wasn't a bad idea back then, but of course we weren't at war (in Iraq) at the time," she said.

After basic training in Atlanta - "It must have been rough, because Will asked me to send him a Bible, and he wasn't deeply religious," Mitchell said - Glass went to Germany with the 1st Armored Division. Orders to deploy to Iraq came soon after; he served there for 15 months during his first tour of duty.

"He didn't talk about it a lot, but he called once and said he had been shot at and had to shoot back," Mitchell said. `Two people shot at once, and (an Iraqi) was hit, and he died. Will asked me, `Do you think I'll go to hell?' '

When he came home on leave, Glass had a tattoo on his left forearm of praying hands flanked by the words "I gotta make it to heaven, for makin it through hell."

"He didn't say he was afraid, but I know he was - he clenched his jaw all the time," Mitchell said. "I could see a change."

After returning to Germany, Glass transferred to the 4th Infantry Division, based in Texas, "to try to avoid a second tour of duty in Iraq," his mother said. "But then they got sent to Kuwait in December of 2005 and to Iraq a month later."

Couple hopes to return

Will and Amelia Glass met when he was home on leave from basic training in late summer 2002 - and quickly became inseparable. She was drawn by their "mutual likes and interests." He "liked everything about her," especially her ability to make him laugh.

"A lot of my friends couldn't accept the military stuff, but I was used to it," Amelia Glass said. "My dad retired from the Marine Corps. He and my mom started their family really late, so I wasn't a military brat in the usual sense, but I was pretty familiar with the way things work, and being on a base. I think that's helped me deal with all this."

So has the example set by her mother, who has nurtured her father during the past several years through a series of serious illnesses.

"My mom is like Superwoman," Amelia Glass said. "She takes care of everything." During the three years they dated, Amelia graduated from South Eugene High School and enrolled at the University of Oregon, majoring in psychology.

"When we realized he was going to be deployed again, we got married, on Aug. 17, 2005," she said. "Our plan was, he would get out of the Army, and I would graduate from college. Then he would go to school, I would work, and we'd start our little life together."

She was a week away from beginning her senior year at the UO in September when the call came about Will's injuries. She withdrew and has not returned, although she plans to complete her studies.

But Will's rehabilitation comes first, she said. "He absolutely could not have done everything for himself that needed to be done."

Wounded service members remain on active duty with a medical hold until their major surgeries and subsequent rehabilitation have been completed. Then a medical review board examines their cases to determine whether they remain in the military in some capacity or receive a medical discharge.

If discharged, they become part of the Veterans Administration system, with a disability rating that determines the monthly payment they will receive from the government to compensate for their injuries.

Because he's still in rehabilitation and on a medical hold until September, Glass does not know what his disability status will be.

"We're just hoping it won't be less than regular-duty pay," which is about $3,000 a month, Amelia Glass said. "We heard about one person who was disabled with PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) who gets $2,700 a month, and a guy who's in a wheelchair for life who gets $6,000 a month."

The Glasses do have an additional nest egg of $100,000, the maximum allowed as a one-time traumatic injury payment through the Servicemembers Group Life Insurance Program, available to service members.

Like many other disability insurance policies, TSGLI puts monetary values on the loss of limbs and organs, singly or in combination. Glass' injuries were compensated at $50,000 for the loss of his eye, $25,000 for the time he spent in a coma and $25,000 for loss of the use of his hands.

They found out about Will's payment while shopping at a local mall.

"We went to the ATM to get $20 so we could get an Orange Julius (drink), and when we looked at the receipt, it said our account had $100,000 in it," she said. "It was so amazing - we had never seen anything like that before."

Once Will completes his rehabilitation in Palo Alto, Calif., where he has been since March, the young couple will return to Eugene and start sorting out their future - perhaps as early as late summer, Amelia said.

While Will's mother relishes the prospect of having them close by, she worries that "normal life" will prove a harder adjustment than Will and Amelia think.

"I'm afraid that's when he might get depressed," Mitchell said. `When these (soldiers) get back into normal life and realize they're not the way they were and won't be the way they were, that's when it could start.

"I don't believe any of them can really be OK," she said. "Going over there is an inhuman experience - if they really were OK, that would be disturbing."

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