James Lathan Jr.’s experience is like those of thousands of other spinal cord injured vets from previous wars. His attitude makes him rare.
by Michael Lee
James Lathan Jr., with son James III, is back home in Omaha after six months of rehabilitation for a spinal cord injury sustained during a mortar attack in Iraq.
When James Lathan Jr. graduated from Omaha’s Central High School in 1995, he wasn’t ready to go to college or take orders at McDonald’s. He decided to follow in his father’s footsteps and join the Army. They offered to train him in aircraft repair and Lathan jumped at the chance.
“I was with First Armored Division and Alpha Company 427 ASB,” he says. “My contribution wasn’t running around with a rifle. It was fixing aircraft.” Lathan worked on hydraulic systems, mostly on helicopters. During his eight years of service, he rose to the rank of sergeant.
In 2004, Lathan was deployed from his home base in Germany to Iraq for 14 months. He operated mainly in the hangars at Baghdad International Airport, supervising the repair and maintenance of aircraft employed by coalition forces in Operation Iraqi Freedom.
Split Second
On July 4, 2004, Sgt. Lathan was getting some R&R, anticipating a leave in a couple of weeks and visit to his home in Omaha, Nebraska. As he was heading to the recreation tent to watch a movie, a mortar suddenly hit his compound. The mortar splintered, and a fragment hit Lathan in the upper spine at C-3. “I tried to scream for help, and I couldn’t,” Lathan recalls. “I couldn’t get up or move. I passed out. I don’t remember the first couple days after that. I guess someone saved my life.”
Lathan was flown to a hospital in Germany where his home base and family were, then on to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC. There, x-rays were taken of his spine for doctors to see if any shrapnel remained. Luckily, there wasn’t any. “They said my spine was bruised, not severed,” he says.
In early October 2004, because there was no adequate SCI facility near his home, Lathan was moved to the West Roxbury Campus of the Boston Veterans Administration Healthcare System to continue his rehabilitation.
The Long Road Back
If you get the chance to speak with Lathan, you’ll notice long pauses in his speech.
“I have a cuff, which is a balloon in my throat that inflates and deflates,” Lathan says. “If you inflate it, it doesn’t allow air to pass by my throat, so what happens is the vent machine that I’m on pumps air through a hole in my throat.”
The cuff requires the user to adjust his speech to follow the rhythms of air passing over the vocal chords. Learning to work with the cuff was a major part of Lathan’s rehabilitation regimen when he was at West Roxbury.
“I was able to learn how to eat and talk again. And they got me a wheelchair. I’m able to operate it by a series of sips and puffs which allow me control the chair directionally.
“For a while I wasn’t able to eat, so at first they had a tube down my throat that would give me liquid supplement.” The doctors worried about the effect of his injury on the functionality of his epiglottis. “When you eat there’s a flap that closes over your windpipe to keep food from going down there,” Lathan explains, “so they weren’t sure the flap was still working.
“That’s basically what rehab was about—talking, eating, learning to be mobile in the chair and getting all my equipment right and learning how to use it so I could go home.”
Lathan’s social worker at West Roxbury, Shirley Jackson, says Lathan was an unusual patient because of his profound optimism.
“The remarkable thing about Jim,” she says, “is that he’s really acquired a quality of life since his injury, and he’s aware of it. He said to me he thought he has been lucky, in a way, because his injury opened up a whole new world for him.”
Lathan got a computer with a voice recognition program that allows him to write letters and to control the whole computer environment. The program he uses, Dragonâ„¢ Naturally Speaking®, is used mainly by doctors. “He says he might never have learned how to use a computer if it hadn’t been for injury,” Jackson says. “He’s working with the cards he’s been dealt.”
Going Home
Like so many veterans with SCI from previous conflicts, the length of Lathan’s time in the hospital was partly determined by how soon he could move into an accessible home. In World War II, veterans would sometimes spend years before being able to be discharged to a home with wide-enough doors and minimal stairs and steps. Fortunately, Lathan’s wife Amy had been setting up a wheelchairaccessible apartment in Omaha for James’s return.
Lathan’s goal was to be home in time for Christmas with Amy and his young son James III. He left Boston just in time, on December 22, 2004. “That was our Christmas present to Jim,” Jackson says.
But the apartment was not totally ready, so Lathan was transferred to the Omaha VA Medical Center in early January 2005. Now retired from the army, and as a veteran with a 100% serviceconnected disability, Lathan began earning a monthly income, courtesy of the VA. His level of service-connection, due to his combat injury, entitles him to a range of benefits, from his tax-free monthly income to free college education, grants for home and vehicle modification, and, of course, free health care for life.
Once home, Lathan’s father and stepmother wanted to take him to Disney World so they threw a fund raiser. They even had enough money left over to get rid of the hospital bed. “It wasn’t doing me a whole lot of good because if you lay on one side too long, you’re not able to turn and you get sores.” Since then, he’s gotten a bed more to his liking and is able to sleep next to his wife.
Keeping the Mind Busy
Lathan isn’t sure what he wants to do with his life, but he does know he wants to do something. He feels he can leverage the skills he learned in the army and the computer skills he learned in rehab to start an on-line business. “I’m really more of an intellectual so I play strategy-type games,” he says. “I get together with friends and play chess. And also I have been trying to learn about the real estate market. I do those by audio CD. I sometimes listen to those all day.”
Another project that keeps his mind busy is with Trinity Omaha Church. “Someone who had seen my story on the news wanted to do something for me,” he said. “He belonged to a Trinity Omaha and they’ve got over 3,000 members. And what they did was got the community involved and they’re helping me to build a handicap accessible house . . . Since they are handling the project, I just try to stay out of their way mostly.”
Lathan tells other newly injured people he meets, “Change what you can or worry about what you can. If you can’t do anything about it, then there’s really no reason to worry about it. But at least do what you can. Things happen. You can’t control them all. Once those things do happen, you deal with them as best you can. And keep going.”
Michael Lee is a freelance journalist who lives in East Elmhurst, New York.
