Jacob Knospler: 'I'm a Marine. I Had to Go In and Help Them.'
He lost part of his face in Fallujah. Surgery has only partially eased the
pain. But he has no regrets.
By Jonathan Darman
Newsweek
March 20, 2006 issue - Cpl. Jacob Knospler, his jaw mostly blown away by a
grenade, did not wake up for a month. His first clear memory is of President
George W. Bush standing over his bed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. "How the
hell you doin'?" asked the president. Knospler couldn't really answer, but
he liked Bush. "I felt bad for him 'cuz he comes down to the hospital, sees
all the wounded people there and knows he put them there," he said.
Knospler's brain was so swollen, his face so disfigured, that his mother
later told him that she had been able to identify him only by the tattoos on
his arm. A 175-pounder when he arrived in Iraq, he had ballooned to 239
pounds from the water pumped into him. But then a case of meningitis sent
his weight plummeting down to 125 pounds. "A good-looking girl weighs 125
pounds," said Knospler, who stands six feet tall. "Not me." Sent home to
East Stroudsburg, Pa., in January 2005, he has had to return every month to
Bethesda. There was little that doctors could do for his partially blind
right eye, but they put a plate in his skull and tried to rebuild his face.
In November 2004, surgeons extracted flesh from his shoulder to close a
large open wound in his cheek. But thick, ropelike knots disfigured him and
made it difficult to talk. Sometimes, painful surgery seemed to make little
or no difference. Slowly, he has learned to lower his expectations. He hates
the hospital and appreciates only the doctors, he says bitterly, "who are
honest with me."
Knospler thinks his personality has changed. He can be testy with his wife,
who has the burden of raising an infant daughter as well as caring for him.
"I think the part of my brain they removed was the part with my
inhibitions," he says. "If I think something, I just say it. Sometimes my
wife will say to me, 'You're being an a--hole,' and I'll think, 'Huh? Am I
being an a--hole?' "
As a boy dreaming of becoming a warrior, Knospler had hunted deer with his
father. He has begun hunting in the Pennsylvania woods again, though he has
changed shooting arms because of his blind eye. His shooting skill, he says,
has come back more easily than he might have thought. He feels a jumble of
emotions about his wound, including bitterness, though never regret. "I'm a
Marine," he says. "Marines were going down and I had to go in and help
them."
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