At long last: Legs

Editor’s note: This is the first in a series of stories about Harry Shaw, a Port Aransas man who lost his legs to injuries he suffered while serving as a U.S. Army paratrooper in the Grenadan conflict. The series traces Shaw’s experiences from his childhood to present, as he attempts to walk again for the first time in nearly three decades.

Harry Shaw has been in a wheelchair for 27 years.

As recently as April this year, Shaw held no expectations that he ever would walk again. But, today, the 47-year-old Port Aransan is planning to be standing upright and putting one foot in front of the other again very soon.

It might sound strange, but the tragedy of a parachutist’s accidental death in Port Aransas March 25 sparked a serendipitous series of events that have led Shaw to the unexpected position he finds himself in today.

On Monday, May 24, Shaw will travel to Houston, where he will be fitted with a pair of state-of-the-art prosthetic legs. For the first time ever, his wife and children will see him walk.

The drama that led to Shaw’s loss of his legs began in 1983, when he was a 21-year-old Army Spec 4 stationed at Fort Bragg, N C.

The Grenadan conflict was about to erupt.

Growing up in southwest Missouri, Shaw knew early in life that he wanted to be a soldier when he grew up.

“When I was 11, I started writing to recruiters,” he recalled. “They would write back and say, ‘You’re a little too young,’ and they’d send a poster or something.”

He entered the Army when he was 17. Spent the summer vacation between his junior and senior years of high school at basic training at Fort Leonard Wood, Mo. Went on active duty after graduating from high school in 1981. Attended field artillery school that summer. Went to jump school – where they teach soldiers how to parachute – at Fort Benning, Ga., that same year.

Shaw became a fire direction specialist in the Army’s first battalion of the 320th Airborne Field Artillery in the 82nd Airborne Division. His job was to do mathematical computations to help the soldiers firing howitzers know where to aim. Shaw started off as a private and eventually worked his way up to the rank of sergeant.

On the night of Oct. 24, 1983, Shaw was off duty and drinking a beer while watching Monday night football in his barracks at Fort Bragg, N.C. A fellow soldier stepped in and said everyone had been ordered to fall out with their gear.

Shaw figured it was one of many drills he had been through, but he did as he was told. He got his gear and got into formation outside.

A sergeant addressed the troops. He told them they would be heading out within 24 hours on a mission.

He said it wasn’t a drill.

Shaw had earlier trained with a Canadian airborne regiment in Ontario. And he had spent five weeks training in jungle warfare school in Panama. Other than those two stints, he never had been involved in military activity outside the United States.

Shaw and his fellow soldiers didn’t know where they were being deployed. But he was rarin’ to go.

“I was all for it,” Shaw recalled. “You’re talking about one of the most elite units in the U.S. military. No one questioned authority. You were given a job, and you were there to do it.”

All of the soldiers were ready to get going, Shaw said.

“Society needs its safety valve for its pirates and rogues,” he said. “That’s what the 82nd Airborne is. It’s just the attitude. Airborne is a state of mind. It’s this: There isn’t anything you can’t do. If there isn’t a way, you make a way.”

Shaw ended up being among several thousand U.S. troops that invaded Grenada in Operation Urgent Fury, a response to a military coup in the island nation and what the U.S. government said was a growing influence of Communist Cuba. In addition, the safety of American students at a medical school in Grenada was in jeopardy, according to federal authorities.

Shaw landed on Grenada on Oct. 25 with fellow soldiers aboard a C-141 jet.

In a battle three days later, he would suffer wounds that would nearly kill him.

Shaw helped spot targets for other soldiers manning artillery. Backed by the artillery, infantry soldiers took control of a barracks compound that had been built by Cubans, Shaw said. Numerous Cubans were captured, and some were killed, he said.

The next day, Shaw and other troops, including Army Capt. Jean-Luc Nash, were at the compound when they began receiving small-arms fire from some of the enemy, about 600 yards away.

Shaw returned fire with his M-16 rifle, along with other soldiers.

During the battle, Shaw heard an A-7 Navy jet aircraft approaching low and firing hundreds of 20 mm high-explosive rounds at the ground. Also in the building, perhaps seven or eight feet from Shaw, was Sean Luketina, a soldier with the 82nd Signal Battalion.

“I turned to Sean and said, ‘This doesn’t look good,’ ” Shaw recalled. “ ‘What’s he doing here? He’s right level with our barracks.’ ”

The jet’s gunfire ripped through the barracks. Shaw and a number of other American soldiers became victims of friendly fire.

“I turned and got maybe three steps, and I got cut down. I was hit everywhere,” Shaw said. “I lost both legs immediately. They always tell you that you won’t feel that kind of thing. Bull. It hurt. It hurt a lot. I remember looking down and trying to find my right boot, and I couldn’t. I thought: What the hell? And it was up by my head.”

Shaw later would learn that the friendly fire had injured 16 Americans and killed one because a soldier had mistakenly provided the wrong firing coordinates to the jet fighter. Luketina was the soldier who was killed.

Most of the wounded were outside the barrack. No one was even sure anyone was inside the barrack. But Nash and another soldier went inside to search for wounded. They did that despite the risk that the structure might be strafed again.

They found Shaw, a badly injured soldier named Joey Stewart and Luketina.

“Harry was shot up really bad,” Nash said. “Do you know what a 20 mm is like? … Like little miniature grenades. Harry actually got directly hit by those rounds. As they hit, they exploded. … There was a lot of blood.”

Nash and the soldier who accompanied him administered first aid to Shaw, using two belts for tourniquets to stem profuse bleeding. Nash and three other soldiers carried the terribly wounded man to a truck that took him to a helicopter.

The chopper flew him to a Mobile Army Surgical Hospital – a MASH unit. There, Shaw said, a doctor refused to expend resources on him because he believed Shaw’s wounds were so grave that he inevitably would die.

But another medical authority on the scene believed Shaw might live, if given good treatment, and so he was sent to the USS Guam, just off the shore of Grenada, where he underwent surgery.

Next, Shaw was transferred to a medical facility aboard the USS Independence – the aircraft carrier that launched the jet that mistakenly fired upon Shaw and the other soldiers.

He continued undergoing treatment on the Independence for five days. Next was a hospital in Puerto Rico and then a medical center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio.

The seriousness of his wounds and resulting infections pushed Shaw to the edge of death many times over the first few weeks of his recovery. He was read last rites four times.

Doctors on the Independence had “huge fights” with each other over how to deal with their horribly injured patient. Shaw said he learned this later from a corpsman who was on the ship.

“Some doctors said, ‘Why are we giving this guy all our blood supplies? He’s going to die anyway,’ ” Shaw said. “Other doctors were saying, ‘He’s responding well.’ And they won out, thank God.”

Shaw remained hospitalized at Fort Sam Houston from November 1983 to June the following year. He was awarded the Purple Heart and Bronze Star with a V for valor, while still hospitalized.

Slowly, he recovered. Nash said it was amazing that he survived.

“I don’t think there are too many people who would have lived through that,” said Nash, who retired from the Army as a major. “It’s incredible, just his will to live. Harry has been thrown a few curves in life that a lot of people would not have been able to deal with, but he was able to overcome them, persevere, drive on and just do well in life.”

In 1989, Shaw met a Fort Sam Houston instructor who taught medicine to Special Forces medics. The instructor, a Green Beret himself, said he used Shaw’s case during the first few hours of his courses as a real-life example of the positive results that can take place if heroic measures are taken with a patient who is badly wounded in battle.

After Shaw won his weeks-long battle to survive, attention began to focus on how he would get around. He got prosthetic limbs while he was at Fort Sam Houston and walked with them for nearly a year before giving them up.

The prosthetic legs greatly irritated the scar tissue on his legs. And the prosthetics were big, heavy things that were difficult to lug back and forth with what Shaw had left of his real legs. Amputation procedures had left him with only about eight inches of his upper legs.

“Physically, it was draining,” Shaw said. “I could do it, but at a certain point, it becomes: How much benefit am I getting out of this? I would walk for a couple hours, and then it was all I could do for the rest of the day.”

And so he started using a wheelchair. He never again went back to prosthetics.

Honorably discharged from the Army in 1984, Shaw obtained a bachelor’s de- gree in history and politics at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio in 1991, graduating first in his class. He also worked toward a master’s degree in history at what at the time was Southwest Texas State University, now Texas State University, in San Marcos.

Shaw visited Port Aransas for the first time in 1984, when Corpus Christi VFW Post 2397 arranged for him and two other Grenada veterans to visit the area. He went on an offshore fishing trip and fell in love with the town.

Fast-forward to spring this year. Shaw is 47 years old and a resident of Port Aransas. He is married to kindergarten teacher Ginny Shaw. He has two step children, Sebastian Tugwell, 21, and Chloe Tugwell, 19, and a 7-year-old daughter, Lucie, whom he home schools.

Shaw also operates a GED program that meets twice a week at Port Aransas High School and at a Community Presbyterian Church building.

On March 25, a group of skydivers was making jumps over Port Aransas when one of them, 34-year-old Peter Gerencser of Hungary, crashed into the roof of a condominium at 11th Street and Beach Access Road 1-A. When Shaw heard of the tragedy, it struck a chord with him.

Shaw did 32 jumps from planes when he was a member of the Army Airborne. “I loved jumping when I was in the military,” he said. “I always dreamed I could do it again.”

Without legs, he couldn’t jump alone, because landing would be impossible.

For a time, Shaw considered a tandem jump with a friend, Chris Doody, a freefall parachutist with the 82nd Airborne Division. But, one day in about 1990, Doody made a jump and smashed into a house south of San Antonio. The impact killed him.

And so when Gerencser was killed in Port Aransas, Shaw felt compelled to offer condolences to Gerencser’s fellow skydivers. He drove over to Mustang Beach Airport, where he found a group of the skydivers getting ready to go on another jump.

When the skydivers noticed a decal that says “U.S. Paratrooper” on Shaw’s truck, they asked him if he’d like to parachute again. Shaw said he’d considered it. The skydivers suggested that he attend Airborne Amputee, a Houston area event put on by the TMC Orthopedic firm. The event raises money for a charity organization founded by TMC. Called Limbs of Love, the charity provides prosthetics for people who can’t afford them.

The real purpose of Airborne Amputee is “to highlight the abilities of amputees” and advocate awareness of amputees, said Joe Sansone, chief executive officer of TMC.

The event also is meant to reward war veterans like Shaw, Sansone said.

Shaw called Nash, the man who rescued him in Grenada. They had remained in contact ever since the invasion. Shaw asked his old friend if he would travel from his home in Florida to parachute with him in Houston. Nash accepted the invitation.

The two men and their families traveled to Houston for the event May 1 and 2, but after they got there, Shaw was told there was no harness available that would fit him. Jump officials were afraid that Shaw’s legs were so short that he might slip out of a harness.

Shaw was angry and dejected at the news that he wouldn’t be allowed to jump. But Sansone told him he could jump at a later date. With some fitting work, Sansone said, the company could get Shaw into a short prosthesis that would keep him in a harness at a future jump.

But the really big news came when Shaw talked to a prosthetist who worked for Sansone. The prosthetist said he could make a full set of prosthetic legs that would get Shaw up and walking again.

Shaw’s reaction was “kind of a measured skepticism – until he started showing me what the technology was,” he said. It’s “pretty close to miraculous.”

Prosthetic limbs have come a long way since Shaw last tried one 26 years ago, Sansone said. Made of titanium and carbon graphite fiber, the legs today are lightweight, but strong. A more intimate fit is possible through custom liners that didn’t exist years ago, he said.

Microprocessors help control how the knees bend.

“These new limbs won’t do the walking for him,” Sansone said. “But they will assist him in walking. In the past, going down stairs was extremely difficult for an above-knee amputee, as (Shaw) is. These limbs will sense what’s going on with the patient over 100 times a second. It will take feedback from what the patient is doing, his gait, and control what his legs are going to do.”

Shaw told the TMC people he would go for it. Each leg costs about $40,000. Medicare and the military’s TRICARE program will fund them.

Shaw and his family are planning to head up to Houston Monday. He will be fitted with his new legs the next day, Sansone said. By Wednesday, he could be taking his first steps while holding onto parallel bars for support as he gets used to the prosthetics, Sansone said.

Shaw will have to work for months to gain the strength and lung capacity he needs to walk well with the legs. He will have to practice a lot, too, to get used to them.

If things go well, Shaw could be walking on his own, with crutches, in two or three months, Sansone estimated.

Shaw said his goal is to walk with only a single cane, or maybe with no such assistance at all.

“This opportunity is something I never expected,” Shaw said. “I look at it as a sort of circle completed. I know there are a lot of (soldiers) … who survived because of what I went through, because (medical personnel) rethought how they do triage. And, because they survived, the prosthetics are what they are now. And now they’re kind of reaching back and helping me.”

Shaw said he’s excited about the likelihood of walking again. But how likely is it that these legs, like the ones he tried many years ago, simply will be too difficult to walk with?

“It’s possible,” Shaw said. “You have to wait and try them out first, I suppose. But I don’t see it happening, because the weight, compared to the old ones, is so much less.”

Shaw also knows he has a lot learning, training and rehabilitation ahead.

“The excitement has to be tempered with the fact there will be a very large amount of work involved to make this happen,” he said. “It won’t happen overnight. I can’t just strap them on and go walk a 5-K.”

Even if the legs do work out as best they possibly can, Shaw won’t use them 24 hours a day, every day. They must be removed sometimes, to let his skin rest. And he can’t wear them out in the water. He won’t be seen wading around at the beach.

Ginny Shaw said she can’t help but be a little nervous. She worries about the possibility that the legs won’t work out. She doesn’t want Harry to be disappointed.

But she also is excited that things could work out. Having legs would be a benefit in a thousand little ways, she said. For instance, she said, it would be wonderful for her husband to be able to get groceries from a high shelf without having to ask someone for help.

“And just to be able to go for a walk and walk alongside each other would be great,” Ginny said.

Shaw said having the prosthetics will make him more physically able. He’ll be able to get around easier. He’ll be able to play golf again – something he enjoyed before losing his legs. He’s been looking at cowboy boots. He’d like to wear some.

One of the biggest advantages of having legs again will be in changing strangers’ perceptions of him, he said.

“Even today, I can go out somewhere, and someone will talk to me like I’m six,” Shaw said. “They see me in a chair and assume some sort of mental infirmity.”

New family experiences are what Shaw really looks forward to.

“I want to be able to walk Chloe down the aisle when she gets married. And Lucie,” Shaw said. “And, you know, I never got to dance with Ginny before.”

Once the prosthetics are on, Shaw also plans to parachute with his old Army buddy, Nash.

“Harry was a paratrooper. Harry, in his heart, is still a paratrooper,” Nash said. “For him, this jump is sort of spitting in the eye of fate and saying, ‘That the best you got? I’m still going to be able to jump.’ The thing I always admired about Harry is, he never played victim. He never felt sorry for himself. He just kept driving on.”