I. The Damage
The thick steel body of the grenade flexed and swelled before exploding and tearing flesh and bone from Lance Corporal Kyle Carpenter’s face. The date was November 21, 2010. The place was Marjah, Afghanistan. For seven days, the extent of Carpenter’s wounds remained a mystery to his family. Despite e-mails, voicemails, and calls with Marine Corps representatives, his mother and father knew only that their son was being evacuated from Afghanistan in critical condition. The military told them that Kyle had been badly wounded and that his chances of survival were unknown. On November 25, Thanksgiving Day, Robin and Jim Carpenter drove 12 hours, slowed by the holiday traffic, from Gilbert, South Carolina, to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, in Bethesda, Maryland, to await their son’s arrival. His flight was delayed because of blood clots in his legs. A flight at high altitude could have killed him.
Carpenter arrived at Walter Reed on Sunday, November 28. Robin held his hand all the way from the ambulance to the elevator taking him to the intensive-care unit. Carpenter’s head appeared roughly double its normal size—it was wrapped in gauze and pressure dressings to deal with the effects of the explosion and the aftermath of emergency brain surgery. The doctors in Afghanistan had to remove shrapnel before Carpenter could be flown to Landstuhl, in Germany, and then to Walter Reed. Tubes protruded from his neck, head, chest, abdomen, and each of his limbs. The Carpenters had not seen their son in four months. His mother remembers thinking that Kyle looked worse than anything she had seen while working as a radiology technician in a trauma hospital. She knew it was Kyle only because the hospital staff told her it was.
Throughout Kyle’s deployment, Robin had worried that harm would come to her son. “For the four months Kyle was in Afghanistan, I felt like every time I came home a car would be sitting in my driveway. I did what I was supposed to do—the care packages, the letters—but I still feel like I didn’t have enough faith. My gut told me that he would come home wounded, or worse.”
VIDEO: Kyle Carpenter’s Recovery
Kyle Carpenter had been wounded when a hand grenade landed beside him and a fellow Marine in their lookout post. Without hesitation, Kyle lunged toward the explosive to shield his friend from the blast. He was wearing body armor, which offered some protection for his torso, but the exploding grenade left entry and exit wounds in his skull, shredded his face, severed major arteries, splintered his right arm, collapsed a lung, and left him hemorrhaging beneath a plume of grey smoke. For his action in Marjah, Carpenter would be awarded the Medal of Honor. Repairing the damage to his body would take years, and in some ways it is not over. This is the story of Carpenter’s recovery.
II. Patrol Base Dakota
The squad of Marines had spent the night of November 20 patrolling open fields and deep canals. Doing so was safer than using the roads. The men were four months into a seven-month deployment, and Private First Class Jared Lilly had already seen two of his friends killed by explosives. Others had been wounded by gunfire. Lilly and his 1,000-man unit were spread across fortified bases inside Taliban territory. That relative comfort and safety was now at an end. Lilly and the rest of his 14-man squad had just moved to an even more remote and dangerous location.
In a village, the Marines took over a compound—a collection of buildings behind 10-foot-high mud walls—to use as its patrol base, which they called Dakota. The compound had been commandeered from a local family, which was evicted. Before sunrise, more than 250 sandbags had been hand-filled and stacked into makeshift guard posts. A request for heavy equipment to fortify the new patrol base had been denied hours before the mission began. Instead, the Marines chiseled at the ground with collapsible shovels.
There were walls at Patrol Base Dakota, but the enemy could maneuver within 30 yards of the Marines unseen. A canal ran alongside the compound, lined thickly with tall reeds. On the first day the Marines spent at Dakota, Taliban fighters heaved grenades over the walls. One Marine took shrapnel to his abdomen. Another had his scrotum peppered with shards of metal. Later that night, the owner of the compound came for some of his belongings. He brought a message from the Taliban: Tomorrow the Marines would be attacked worse than they just had been.
Kyle Carpenter compares his scars in photographs taken shortly after the injury occurred to the way they exist now at his parent’s house in Gilbert, South Carolina on May 14, 2016.
Sunrise brought machine-gun and sniper fire. A barrage of grenades began exploding throughout the courtyard. Marines who were sleeping scrambled to put on their gear. There was a second barrage of grenades, then screaming in Pashtu: an Afghan soldier had been wounded. Two more grenades exploded in the courtyard. Then another grenade. Then another. The last of the explosions came from the rooftop of one of the buildings. Two Marines were known to be there.
