BETHESDA, Md. — President Obama stood outside the room, rubbed sanitizer on his hands, set his face into a smile and knocked on the door.
No one answered. He looked at the hospital floor polished to a sheen and knocked again. Still no answer. So Mr. Obama turned the knob and gently pushed his way inside.
“Hello? Jeremy, what’s going on?” Maj. Jeremy Haynes remembers the president saying as he came into his room at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center two years ago.
It was the first of several visits the president paid Major Haynes, an Army officer who was told he would never walk, feel below his waist or have children again after his spine was hit by a Taliban bullet in Afghanistan. The visits, Major Haynes said, “were truly inspiring to me” and gave him hope for the life ahead of him.
Continue reading the main story
On Tuesday, for his 23rd and probably last time as president, Mr. Obama will helicopter to the military hospital to spend another afternoon with the wounded from Afghanistan and Iraq. The visit is likely to unfold much as Major Haynes and hospital officials described the ones the president paid to him.
Mr. Obama will arrive at the hospital in suburban Maryland on Marine One with a minimum of ceremony, having memorized the names of the wounded he will visit from a list he received the night before. At a side entrance to the hospital, a military aide will update him on their conditions. If he visits those still hospitalized, he will climb the stairs to 4 West and 4 Center, known as the soldiers ward. After greeting the doctors and nurses on duty, he will begin his rounds with a knock. If instead he visits the physical therapy center, he will wander one giant room filled with exercise machines and patients learning to live without limbs.
For Mr. Obama, who has served as a wartime commander longer than any of his predecessors, meeting with the wounded and their families is among the most sacred duties of his presidency. He rarely talks about his trips to Walter Reed, but his aides say that they have affected him deeply.
David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s longtime political aide, said the president often returned to the White House from Walter Reed, first when it was in Washington and later after it had merged with Bethesda Naval Hospital, in a somber mood. After one such trip, he recalled, Mr. Obama described a young woman attending to her newlywed husband, whose body was shattered and head terribly wounded.
0 comments:
Post a Comment