A Patriot's Promise by Senior Master Sergeant (Ret.) Israel "DT" Del Toro Jr

Author:Senior Master Sergeant (Ret.) Israel "DT" Del Toro, Jr.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Publishing Group

CHAPTER 14

People ask this question most of all: Was there ever a time when you wished you had died in the explosion?

I always say no, I never wanted to give up. But if I am brutally honest, there was one time. It was the darkest day of my life, the day I saw myself in the mirror.

When a person is severely burned, the hospital staff covers the mirrors in the room. The work of rehabilitation is grueling enough, even without seeing the ways your appearance has changed. They want to ease you into your transition to what you look like now. So, most of the mirrors at my hospital were covered, allowing us patients to gradually ease into the reality of our injuries. I imagined I didn’t look the same, but I had no mirrors to tell me for sure.

I could look down at my body and see that some things were different. I knew I was missing some fingers, but I could see and feel that I still had my arms and my legs. I figured my face was pretty much the same. I considered maybe I had some singed hair, but I thought I’d look pretty similar to the man I once knew. You know what you look like in your mind’s eye, and I thought I did, too.

One morning, I was walking to the restroom. It was a slow and careful process, with helpers on each side of me. My wife assisted me, along with Gary, my therapist—a six-foot-six bald white dude whom I called my guardian angel. They were walking alongside me, helping me to keep my balance, and we were almost there. But when we got into the bathroom, I lost my footing.

As I stumbled, they grabbed me to keep me from falling, and one of them accidentally pulled the towel off the mirror. Nobody meant for it to happen, but suddenly I saw my face for the first time since I had been blown up.

I gasped aloud to see another someone in the room with us, a monster with a mummy’s body, a swollen head, and a disfigured face painted dark shades of red and black. Who was that monster?

Staring at the reflection, I made the connection. That monster was me. This is what I looked like now.

I broke down, weeping with angry rage.

“Why didn’t you let me die? Why did you let me live if I look like this?” I begged them as I sobbed on the bathroom floor, wishing I were buried with my teammates who had gone before me. Gary and Carmen tried to calm me, but I was inconsolable.

I was a grown man, thirty years old, and I just scared myself in the mirror. If I think I’m a monster, what will my three-year-old think? The thought that my face might terrify him—that crushed me. It wasn’t a question of vanity—that wasn’t it at all. But I couldn’t bear to let my son see what I had become. Guero was my strength, my spark, my entire inspiration.

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