[Cagdu] FW: USA: L.A. Times feature on Sgt. Maj. Jesse Acosta

[tina thomas]

Subject: USA: L.A. Times feature on Sgt. Maj. Jesse Acosta



>From the Los Angeles Times

His courage knows no darkness
Steve Lopez

November 11, 2007

He was a soldier in Iraq and he's a soldier now,
shoulders squared and head held high on a street
corner in Santa Fe Springs at 6:30 a.m., waiting for a
bus with his guide dog, Charley.

Sgt. Maj. Jesse Acosta's hat says "Army." His green
jacket says "Military Order Purple Heart. Combat
Wounded." Dark shades conceal his prosthetic eyes.

Better to fight the enemy on distant shores, the
argument goes, than fight the enemy here. But that
doesn't mean the war doesn't eventually come home. For
Acosta, a 50-year-old gas company employee with a
wife, four children and three grandchildren, what
happened in Iraq will permanently complicate his life.

"OK, we're going to take the 62 to the 108," says
Felicia Echeverria, an orientation and mobility
trainer with Junior Blind of America who is teaching
Acosta
how to travel by bus.

Echeverria has been working with Acosta since
February, helping him adapt to 24-hour darkness.

"He's amazing," she says, telling me she hasn't had
many students with his courage and determination. He
has already graduated from white cane to German
shepherd, and now he's making his first attempt to
ride a bus with his new dog and report for computer
and GPS training at Junior Blind headquarters in
the Southwest Los Angeles area.

"Forward," Acosta commands when the bus door opens.

Charley sets a paw on the first step of the bus.
Acosta, with a firm grip on the dog's harness, dangles
a foot off the curb and searches the empty space
between sidewalk and bus.

The move is daunting. It's a short step, but it's also
a leap of faith, with invisible geometry to negotiate.
Acosta is balanced on one foot, dog tugging,
passengers waiting and watching.

With Charley's help, Acosta finds his way. He's up the
stairs and telling the bus driver to please announce
his transfer stop when they get to it. He asks
her if there's an open seat on the left or the right,
and looking in her rear-view mirror, she gets it
wrong. Acosta is about to sit in someone's lap when
the passenger tells him the open seat is on his right,
not his left.

He sits down, relieved, pulls Charley back out of the
aisle and takes a breath. Everyone on the bus is
watching. When you're blind, Echeverria says, you
lose your privacy.

The driver forgets to tell Acosta his stop is next, so
Echeverria fills the gap.

"I guess I better get used to this," he says without a
trace of self-pity. This is a man who lifts weights
every morning in the backyard and still has a
military bearing and sense of purpose.

The transfer is clean. Acosta doesn't trip or bump
into any poles, as he's done more than once. He has to
get this down cold, he says, because early next
year he'll go back to work with the Southern
California Gas Co., traveling by bus to Downey. His
days of house calls as a customer service rep are
done,
but the company has told him it will find something
else for him.

Bumping along on Slauson, I ask Acosta why he did it.
Why, in 2002, did he re-enlist in the Army Reserve, as
he had done previously after seven years of
active duty following high school? Was it Sept. 11?

"No, not really. I'm a warrior, and I still had a lot
left in me."

The call to duty came in the spring of 2005, with
deployment to Iraq in late October. His wife, Connie,
had trouble with it, proud of her husband but tired
of sharing him with the Army. He told her it was a
safe assignment -- a logistics and supply operation at
Camp Anaconda along the Euphrates River near
Balad, Iraq.

"Little did I know they called Anaconda
'Mortaritaville,' " Acosta says.

The mortars flew into the base every day. Then a first
sergeant, he commanded 43 soldiers and routinely
ordered them to dive for cover. He was doing just
that Jan. 16, 2006, when he was hit. A shard of
shrapnel ripped through his left eye, destroyed the
nerve that controls taste and smell, nicked his brain,
then took out his right eye.

"They say I was crawling around on the ground,
shouting orders," says Acosta, who remembers nothing.
Only later did he learn that surgeons spent more than
seven hours trying to save him. Then he was flown to
Germany for more treatment.

"I got a call from the doctor in Germany," Connie
says. "He said, 'You know, I tried to get him to where
he would ever see light again.' He cried with me
-- the doctor. He said, 'I'm sorry, but he'll never be
able to see again.' "

Several surgeries followed, with more to come.
Acosta's palate and several teeth were blown out of
his head, and doctors have taken bone from his hip to
rebuild the palate. When he eats a hamburger, he puts
familiar textures together with memories of what
cheese and mustard tasted like. "I try to savor
it," he says.

"I hope it was worth it, Mr. Bush," says Echeverria,
who has a tear in her eye.

But Acosta doesn't engage. He says he believed in the
cause when he re-enlisted, and even now, traveling
across the city in eternal darkness -- and weighted,
perhaps, with a touch of guilt for the sacrifice his
wife and family must make -- he doesn't question his
service.

What he does question, his voice taking on an edge, is
the quality of care he received after coming home.
Walter Reed Army Medical Center released him too
soon, he said, and he was sent to a Palo Alto rehab
center for the blind while still reeling from the
brain injury.

"I received no care whatsoever coming back to the
U.S.," he says, exaggerating only a little as he
describes it. "You come back from the battlefield, you
can't eat, and if not for older vets saying, 'Hey,
kid, you've got a plate of food in front of you,' I
wouldn't have known it."

He was so depressed, he began wishing the surgeons
hadn't saved him. That piece of shrapnel could have
hit almost anywhere else on his body and caused less
damage. How could it have been so perfectly angled to
take both eyes and prevent him from ever seeing his
wife and children again?

"Every day I had massive headaches from my injuries,
and I didn't even have access to staff. Nothing. If
you needed them before 8 a.m. or after 4 p.m.,
forget it, they were gone. They expected me to get on
with my life.

"Who sent me here from Walter Reed like that? I had to
seek my own medical care, believe it or not. I told
them I was leaving Palo Alto and they said, 'You
can't do that.' I said, 'Watch me.' "

Acosta says his new mission is to advocate for injured
vets.

"I've learned enough about the system to help them
figure things out," he says, and he's already begun
networking, using VA sources and other contacts.

They shouldn't have to figure it out, I tell him. He
made the sacrifice, and the care should be there,
period.

"I know," he says. But with Charley at his feet, and
with some passengers listening in, I can tell he's
done with that subject.

He does credit the West Los Angeles VA with referring
him to the nonprofit Junior Blind (
www.juniorblind.org),
where, for the first time, he believed he could
rebuild his life. He was inspired by such staffers as
Bert Borja and Les Subotnick, both blind, who are
showing him how to read books and write letters with
voice-assisted software.

A director named Ken Metz, blind since birth, is
already taking Acosta around to serve as a
motivational speaker to other visually impaired
people.

It's almost 9 a.m. when the 108 stops at Alviso
Avenue. Sgt. Maj. Acosta and his dog Charley get off
the bus, cross the intersection and turn north for
a two-block walk. They're getting the rhythm down,
marching at a good clip now, with Echeverria marveling
at Acosta's discipline and determination.

Last March, he ran the Los Angeles Marathon with his
14-year-old daughter, Brittany. She was the one most
devastated by his injury, and he wanted to prove
to her that he still has a lot left in him.

"I don't want anyone to do anything for me," Acosta
had told me on the bus when I asked why he doesn't ask
his wife to drive him to these training sessions.
"If I have to bounce off every pole and fall off every
curb, that's what I'll do."

steve.lopez@ <mailto:steve.lopez%40latimes.com> latimes.com

If you want other stories on this topic, search the
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