Soldier attacked by comrades struggles to walk, remember
PALO ALTO — Three weeks after a brutal attack by fellow U.S. soldiers, Spc. Eric Huff is learning to walk again.
Shortly after midnight on Dec. 10, three soldiers from the 305th Quartermasters Company attacked Huff outside his barracks at Yongsan Garrison in Seoul, South Korea.
According to a preliminary report by the Army’s Criminal Investigations Division, the three soldiers knocked Huff to the ground, then punched, kicked and stomped on his face and head, leaving him with a fractured skull.
The next thing Huff remembers is waking up in the base hospital, his parents at his bedside. Huff had been scheduled to leave South Korea on Dec. 10 after a two-year tour of duty.
Only a week ago, Huff could only take a few steps on his own. He did not leave his mother’s Lancaster home without a wheelchair. Now, he walks independently through the halls of a Veterans Affairs hospital in Palo Alto.
“I got a little bit better walking, but I still ain’t walking straight,” Huff said. “But my left side is the same. It’s numb and tingly. I’ve got half my arm, half my lip, half my face.”
Physical therapist Beth Pittman helps the young soldier walk up and down stairs, holding a blue fabric belt around his waist in case he loses balance. The attack initially affected Huff’s equilibrium, confining him to the wheelchair.
Using parallel bars for support, Huff practices walking forward and backward, on his toes and on his heels. Pittman sometimes walks right behind Huff, shadowing his movements and gripping the belt on his waist.
Pittman makes Huff stand on an inflated rubber disk, which bobbles and undulates under the soldier’s feet. Huff has a hard time staying upright, even with the bars; then Pittman tells him to close his eyes.
“Now he’s having to rely a lot on his inner ear and on feeling from his feet,” Pittman explained.
Huff’s strength, balance and coordination are returning, but that takes time.
In the hallway, Pittman tells Huff to walk back and forth as fast as he can. His stride is uneven, and his left foot twitches with each step, as if it wants to go in its own direction.
“In physical therapy, we try to challenge you to go beyond what you’re doing now in a safe environment,” Pittman said. “With a brain injury, we just have to see what comes.”
There are some things Huff never will get back, a VA doctor said. He will never remember the attack.
Dr. Harriet Zeiner, a neuropsychologist who has been working with Huff, said there is an up side and down side to this.
“It’s a disadvantage because there’s a part of his life that’s missing,” Zeiner said. “What’s the advantage? He’s not going to have post-traumatic stress disorder, because he doesn’t remember the attack.”
Flashes of time before and after the attack are returning, and more may come.
“He has some events of that day,” Zeiner said. “He knows that he was around some of the people from the group that attacked him in the barracks. He says he knows who was in the group that might have attacked other people.”
Previously, Huff had said he did not remember ever meeting any of his attackers until they knocked on his door.
Most outward signs of the beating are fading. Huff still has cuts and bruises around his eyes, and a large bruise on his left shoulder inhibits arm movement.
When the soldier’s father first saw him in the hospital, there were footprints on Eric’s face and head.
Huff’s movements are still slow, and he pauses for long moments between sentences. He often stares at his palms while talking.
“He is classic for the symptoms of head injury,” Zeiner said. While his outward injuries are healing, the brain damage Huff suffered will probably take 18 to 24 months to heal.
“People who have a gross head injury don’t remember the blow. They remember what people tell them has happened,” Zeiner said. “They don’t remember the event itself, and they also have a very spotty memory for events immediately preceding or leading up to it, and they have very altered or poor memory of events afterward for a period of time.”
The condition after an attack when a victim will have difficulty forming new memories is called post-traumatic amnesia, or PTA. Zeiner said the length of PTA is a strong indicator of how much a person will recover from a brain injury.
“His period of PTA was a couple of weeks, and that’s a pretty good prognosis that, at the end of recovery, he’s going to have a significantly good recovery,” Zeiner said. “Does that mean he’s going to be 100%? No. He’s lost brain cells.”
Depending on how his brain recovers, Huff and those around him may notice changes in his behavior, personality and ability to learn new skills. It likely will be many months before he can perform the complex telecommunications tasks he did as part of the 17th Aviation Brigade in South Korea.
“Many people with brain injury tend to run out of mental energy around 2 o’clock in the afternoon, because everything they’re doing, like tracking or carrying a conversation, they’re doing with conscious effort,” Zeiner said.
Pulling a large, colorful model of a human brain off her shelf, Zeiner used it to point out the frontal and temporal lobes, which were injured in the attack. The frontal lobe allows complex, abstract thoughts, as well as planning and prioritizing. The temporal lobe houses memory.
“The brain itself has the consistency of Jell-O at room temperature,” Zeiner said. “Injuries that occur are not just the blow, it’s the brain sloshing back and forth and injuring itself on the inside of your skull.”
The neuropsychologist added, “What’s amazing is not that people have injuries. What’s amazing is just the opposite. What’s amazing is that people recover.”
Huff will leave the VA hospital Tuesday and spend 30 days on convalescent leave closer to home. He still will receive physical, speech and occupational therapy, but he will not have to stay in a hospital. After that, he will return to active service on light duty.
“He’s going to be able to hold a job,” Zeiner said. “Whether he’s going to be able to achieve what he could have achieved before, that’s the big question.”
Huff’s enlistment in the Army is slated to end in August 2006. He has said that he does not want to re-enlist.
“Chances are that he remembers and knows how to do what he was trained to do, but I’m sure his desire was to translate that into something in the civilian sector,” Zeiner said. “That’s new learning, and that’s going to be impaired right now. I think … at the end of his recovery, he’s going to be able to go through training. But he’s not going to be able to pick it up as fast as he did before. It might take twice as long.”
Huff will need to figure out how to live with his injuries and incorporate any disabilities into his future.
“The job of a person with a brain injury is to re-invent themselves, and to re-invent themselves to include the disabilities and the handicaps that they have, and still feel OK about themselves,” Zeiner said. “They still have to feel they can do something meaningful in the world and they can have what other people have.
“They have to have hope that life can get better. And what’s amazing about most of the people here is that they do that.”
Table of contents for Spc Eric Huff
- AV GI survives Korea barracks attack
- Soldier attacked by comrades struggles to walk, remember
- Huff still not recovered from attack; ready to dump Army