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This is the Spirit that Makes America Great
I’m generally against women in the military, but this is an incredible story:
Wife joins Army after husband loses leg in Iraq
By MICHELLE ROBERTS
Associated PressSAN ANTONIO — More than a year after infantryman Alejandro Albarran lost part of his right leg to a blast in Iraq, he still hasn’t decided whether he’ll stay in the Army.
“Right now, I’m leaning against it,” Albarran said, looking ahead with distaste to a possible desk job.
But whatever he decides, Spc. Albarran, 20, won’t be leaving Army life behind now that his wife enlisted to take his place among the ranks.
“After everything he’s gone through — and he loves the Army — he kind of inspired me,” Janay Albarran said. “I made him a promise that I would finish what he started.”
So, while he underwent five-day-a-week rehab to recover his balance and strength on a prosthetic leg at an Army rehabilitation facility here, she learned to shoot a rifle and stand in formation in boot camp at Fort Jackson, S.C.
Mrs. Albarran became Pvt. Albarran on Friday. The couple’s 2-year-old daughter is staying with a grandmother in Arizona.
. . . He was in a Humvee escorting a unit that was sent to the scene of a detonated bomb in November 2006 when a second blast hit. The vehicle reared up and slammed to the ground. Alejandro Albarran only remembers flashes: a medic over him, the helicopter.
A 5 a.m. phone call told Janay Albarran her husband was hurt and she should have a bag packed.
She met him at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington several days later, and they traveled to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where some of the most severely wounded are treated.
It quickly became clear that efforts to save Alejandro Albarran’s lower right leg were failing. When the pain became too great, he told his wife to let the doctors amputate.
At first, Janay Albarran had to help her husband dress and get out his wheelchair.
“She had to be my memory. My short term memory is bad,” said Alejandro Albarran, who also suffered a head injury in the blast.
But as he got more mobile, the teen wife who was afraid of guns decided to take her husband’s place in the ranks.
Janay Albarran will not, strictly speaking, be replacing her husband in the Army. He was an infantryman, a position not open to women. (But he notes with chagrin that she outscored him on her basic training rifle test.)
She expects to get a human resources assignment, one less likely to lead to deployment in Iraq.
“It’s just another job,” Alejandro Albarran said, taking a break between weight lifting sets at the large amputee rehab facility here.
But a safe assignment isn’t guaranteed.
Janay Albarran said she worries about possible deployment when she thinks about their daughter, Iliana.
“That’s the only thing that scares me. He’s already been hurt,” she said. “If I do get deployed, I’m going to miss him so much. But it’s nothing I can’t handle.”