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Nearly seven months after suffering a devastating head wound from a roadside bomb in Iraq, a former Fort Lewis Army chaplain is spending the Christmas season in a continuing fight for life.
Maj. Henry Timothy Vakoc, 45, a Roman Catholic priest and the first chaplain wounded in Iraq, has been in and out of a coma since he was wounded in May. In early October, Vakoc, who was retired from the Army late last summer, was transferred from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to a long-term care unit at a veterans hospital in Minneapolis, near his family.
“It’s in God’s hands – and a little divine intervention wouldn’t be bad at this point,” the priest’s brother, Jeff, said by phone from the family’s home in Brooklyn Park, Minn.
“His body is healthy, but he’s in a vegetative state,” Vakoc said. The priest’s condition remains critical but stable, unchanged for the last three months.
At Fort Lewis, Col. Clarke McGriff, who as I Corps chaplain is the senior among the base’s approximately 42 chaplains, said, “We fully consider Tim a part of our team.”
As the only Catholic priest with Fort Lewis’ 5,000-member Stryker brigade in Iraq last year, Vakoc was kept busy “going between forward operating bases doing Masses. That’s what he was doing when his vehicle was struck,” McGriff said. Returning chaplains still talk about Vakoc’s work there, and they plan a remembrance for him, McGriff said.
Vakoc, who, like all chaplains, was considered a non-combatant, was driving when he took the brunt of an explosion that sent shrapnel into his brain and resulted in the loss of his left eye. An assistant accompanying him, Spc. Nathan Copas, escaped with less serious injuries.
Vakoc, who, like all chaplains, was considered a non-combatant, was driving when he took the brunt of an explosion that sent shrapnel into his brain and resulted in the loss of his left eye. An assistant accompanying him, Spc. Nathan Copas, escaped with less serious injuries.
The attack occurred exactly 12 years to the day after Vakoc was ordained in the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis.
Physicians last summer kept Vakoc in a chemically induced coma to allow his brain to heal but soon concluded he was medically fragile and will not recover neurologically. Vakoc’s condition was compounded by a series of meningitis infections, common to soldiers wounded in Iraq, and bleeding in his brain. On occasion he has opened his eyes or squeezed the hand of a visitor, as he did that of a senator who awarded him a Purple Heart last summer.
seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/204774_priest22.html?source=rss
Maj. Henry Timothy Vakoc, 45, a Roman Catholic priest and the first chaplain wounded in Iraq, has been in and out of a coma since he was wounded in May. In early October, Vakoc, who was retired from the Army late last summer, was transferred from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to a long-term care unit at a veterans hospital in Minneapolis, near his family.
“It’s in God’s hands – and a little divine intervention wouldn’t be bad at this point,” the priest’s brother, Jeff, said by phone from the family’s home in Brooklyn Park, Minn.
“His body is healthy, but he’s in a vegetative state,” Vakoc said. The priest’s condition remains critical but stable, unchanged for the last three months.
At Fort Lewis, Col. Clarke McGriff, who as I Corps chaplain is the senior among the base’s approximately 42 chaplains, said, “We fully consider Tim a part of our team.”
As the only Catholic priest with Fort Lewis’ 5,000-member Stryker brigade in Iraq last year, Vakoc was kept busy “going between forward operating bases doing Masses. That’s what he was doing when his vehicle was struck,” McGriff said. Returning chaplains still talk about Vakoc’s work there, and they plan a remembrance for him, McGriff said.
Vakoc, who, like all chaplains, was considered a non-combatant, was driving when he took the brunt of an explosion that sent shrapnel into his brain and resulted in the loss of his left eye. An assistant accompanying him, Spc. Nathan Copas, escaped with less serious injuries.
Vakoc, who, like all chaplains, was considered a non-combatant, was driving when he took the brunt of an explosion that sent shrapnel into his brain and resulted in the loss of his left eye. An assistant accompanying him, Spc. Nathan Copas, escaped with less serious injuries.
The attack occurred exactly 12 years to the day after Vakoc was ordained in the Archdiocese of St. Paul-Minneapolis.
Physicians last summer kept Vakoc in a chemically induced coma to allow his brain to heal but soon concluded he was medically fragile and will not recover neurologically. Vakoc’s condition was compounded by a series of meningitis infections, common to soldiers wounded in Iraq, and bleeding in his brain. On occasion he has opened his eyes or squeezed the hand of a visitor, as he did that of a senator who awarded him a Purple Heart last summer.
seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/204774_priest22.html?source=rss
Bless his heart. Another story I would like to see on the major news network.But,alas it is probably not what they would like to see,they want sensational sorted scandals.A priest fighting for his life for serving God and the soldiers,that would be too heart warming and might cause people to think"maybe there is a bigger truth out there".Anyway, just a thought.God Bless and Merry Christmas
