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Soldier donates kidney, then promptly goes to Iraq
When Army Pfc. Danielle Carpenter retrieved an urgent message about her mom, she was camping with her M-16 at Fort Carson in Colorado, in the throes of a last combat drill before deploying to Iraq. It was snowing. Temperatures had hit minus 4. And suddenly the 20-year-old Carpenter had a perfect excuse to avoid the war and stay home.Her mother, Diane Brogger, needed a kidney. Dialysis wasn't working; Brogger's blood pressure was fluctuating wildly. Tests had shown that while Carpenter's kidney was not a perfect match for a transplant, this was her mother's only hope. A high school valedictorian "definitely interested in college," Carpenter had joined the Army for the money she needed to continue at Central Michigan University. But once enlisted, the Army embraced her. Her fellow soldiers showed her around Colorado Springs when she reported for duty in February 2004. "They were, like, 'You want to come over instead of being by yourself?' " She was among brothers and sisters, she says. Now Carpenter, weighing the news about her mom, felt deeply torn. She cared just as much about not letting these brothers and sisters down. In the pumped-up atmosphere before her 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment deployed, the last thing she wanted was for anyone to feel she was bailing out. "The two things that were going through my mind were, one, my dedication to my family," Carpenter said. "This is something I had promised my mom, it was something I'd told her I'd do. I didn't want to go back on my word." On the other hand, "I raised my right hand, I enlisted. I said I was going to do this," she said. "And I didn't enlist blind," but rather accepted that, in return for a chance to finish college, she might be sent to Iraq. A commander heard her crying that night. When Carpenter confided to Staff Sgt. Claudia Huffman what she'd learned, Huffman told her to pray. Huffman then relayed Carpenter's dilemma up the chain of command. Command Sgt. Maj. John Caldwell and other superiors relayed that Carpenter should do what she thought was right. They would support her.
Her unit was moving into hot spots south of Baghdad in April as she slept on a cot by her mother's bed, after Brogger began experiencing complications. "I was pretty distraught," she said in a telephone interview from her camp near Iraq's northern border with Syria. The former part-time cookie-factory worker in Grand Rapids, Mich., didn't surprise relatives with her loyalty to both family and the Army. "I couldn't have made it without her," said Brogger, 54. "She said, 'I gotta stay right by your side.' That's the kind of girl she is. And all the time she was worried. 'When am I going to rejoin my troops?'. . . She's just a wonderful person." Army doctors have cleared Carpenter for combat duty. Since June 15, she's been back with her 3rd ACR unit in Iraq, resuming normal duties -- including night shifts in a guard tower with her finger on the trigger of a .50-caliber machine gun. Troops at the camp are trying to disrupt insurgent supply lines. Carpenter chugs water regularly as advised and makes sure she eats three meals a day. Transplant experts say kidney donors can live normal lives with no restrictions. The only problem is what happens if Carpenter gets hit on the side where she has her lone kidney, said Tom Bak, transplant surgeon at the University of Colorado Hospital in Denver. That would put her on dialysis indefinitely, he said, unless she could get a transplant, too. In Iraq, Carpenter said: "I'm like any other soldier." The tower where she stands guard looks out across the steppe where the Yezidi people who inhabit the region, persecuted under Saddam Hussein, worship fallen angels. "It's a good feeling, just being here with my troops," she said. "I'm out here fighting the war. To me, it was nothing heroic. Posted by: SC88 2005-09-04 |
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