Wounded, and Sharing War Stories

[unhappycamper]

Wounded, and Sharing War Stories
By GERRI HIRSHEY
Published: November 11, 2007


SOME wounded soldiers can and will assess the human costs of war and tell us civilians, so distant from the fray, what it is really like in Iraq and Afghanistan. Cpl. Phillip Levine, now medically retired from the Marine Corps, says it depends on the marine. “Some just can’t or won’t talk about it. I don’t mind. Sometimes it helps.”

This is why he and two fellow marines have agreed to speak on Sunday morning in a Veterans Day forum at Trinity Episcopal Church here. They come at the invitation of the Rev. Nicholas T. Porter, who has previously had imams, rabbis and Richard W. Murphy, an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, address his congregants.

Father Porter, who holds two advanced degrees in Middle East studies, expects that the program will be as well attended and as passionately engaging as the previous ones. He began integrating hot-button forums on Islam, politics and the war in Iraq with traditional worship in Southport as part of what he calls “a Lazarus ministry,” to revive a dwindling congregation. Since he arrived in 2005, membership has more than tripled to more than 300.

“People are thirsty for real news,” he said. “They’re keen to inquire more deeply beyond managed information. Americans feel a huge distance from events in the Middle East. And they want to be able to ask questions directly, of someone who truly knows.”

Also fielding the congregants’ queries on Sunday will be Cpl. Joshua Frey, who was hit in the face with shrapnel and suffered a traumatic brain injury, and Will Pearsall, a rangy, 6-foot-8 staff sergeant who was shot in the stomach by a sniper aiming for a gap in his ill-fitting body armor. Corporal Levine was shot at close range while doing a back sweep — rechecking homes for insurgents — in Falluja during Operation Phantom Fury, one of the bloodiest engagements of late 2004.

“The guy that shot me was just a few feet away,” said Corporal Levine, a Bronx native who left film school at New York University to enlist just before 9/11. “It was Dec. 23, the last firefight of that operation,” he said in a phone interview from San Diego. He recently had his seventh operation at the Naval Medical Center there to repair the shattered nerves in his shoulder.


Rest of article at: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/11/nyregion/nyregionspecial2/11colct.html?_r=2&ref=nyregionspecial2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin