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Neb. vet still recovering from Iraq wounds

FREMONT, Neb. — Ben Marksmeier lost his right leg below the knee in 2006.

More than two years later, the Fremont man still is struggling with the physical effects of all the metal embedded in his body.

Follow-up surgery to remove shrapnel above his knee swelled his stump so much he was unable to wear the artificial part of his leg for weeks this fall.

That meant that when 2-year-old Caiden spilled his juice on the rug, his 22-year-old father had to hop to the rescue. With wife Heather away at work, the thin young man who once pole vaulted more than 12 feet in high school finally reached the sink on his good leg to grab a wad of paper towels.

“I don’t think you ever fully recover,” he said. “Physically, obviously, I can’t. Emotionally, I have my days.”

A tattooed message on his body includes the name of his buddy from Pender, Josh Ford, along with his birth date, the date of his death an arm’s reach away in Iraq on July 31, 2006, and the words “Don’t say never.”

Marksmeier spent 10 1/2 months at Walter Reed hospital in Washington, D.C.

Early on, things were not going well for him emotionally.

“The only thing I’m saying is it did break my pride ... my soul.”

Then he met Sgt. Bryan Anderson. At the time, Anderson was one of five triple amputees among Americans who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“After that: Don’t say never,” Marksmeier said.

As son Caiden shuttles back and forth between his lap and TV cartoons, Marksmeier tells about his new job as a Primerica financial consultant in Omaha and about the roadside bomb that changed his life forever. He calmly revisits what he remembers of the first of many surgeries.

The doctors “weren’t expecting the best of me.”

He thinks back to his stabilizing stop of four to five days at Landstuhl Air Base in Germany. “I remember I woke up twice screaming in pain.”

Later, doctors told him he might be at Walter Reed for as long as three years.

He left in less than one.

“I had to come home. I had a wife and kid to take care of.”

Adding to his emotional turmoil while he was at Walter Reed was an attention-grabbing series of stories in The Washington Post about substandard care, mostly in the form of unsanitary conditions.

To this day, Marksmeier regards complaints about the hospital as largely off base. He said most of them came from two patients.

“I dedicated my life to Walter Reed and all the people out there,” he said, “because, basically, they saved my life.”

Back home, as he tried to handle his share of household chores, “I hurt bad every day. I couldn’t do the laundry because it hurt my hands.”

Eventually, he taught himself to ignore pain. More recently, he ignored his wheelchair as an option for leaving the house while he couldn’t wear his artificial leg.

“I’ve never taken my wheelchair out of here ... ever.”

Marksmeier met Heather Holtz, West Point Central Catholic student, cheerleader and future wife, at a volleyball game.

As she got ready to graduate in 2004, Ben was already involved in National Guard training. “He didn’t go to my prom,” she said. “I took my cousin instead.”

Ben was also in training in California in 2005 when a daughter named Madyson Marksmeier was born, prematurely and too small to survive.

Adversity arrived again with Ben’s wounding in Iraq. It has settled in for a long stay.

“We’re getting through it,” Heather said. “It’s hard. A hard time. Even after two years, we’re still trying every day to get through it.”

Some of the bomb fragments will probably be embedded in his body for the rest of his life. And that’s probably not the only lasting effect.

Still, “I honestly don’t think of it as he lost a leg,” Heather said.

“Obviously, I see it every day and I see all the pain he goes through every day. But I guess I don’t really see it as losing anything, because he’s still here.”

How have his physical and emotional wounds affected their relationship?

“We try to get through it ... ‘One day at a time’ is our motto,” she said.