Poor Mojo's Newswire

Thirty-six years ago, Clark Booth, a young Boston journalist, went to Miami to cover Super Bowl X. Though primarily a television newsman, Booth was on assignment for The Real Paper, an alternative weekly long since closed, for which he often wrote. His plan was to interview the players about the potential consequences of the injuries they suffered playing football. . . . I remember being thunderstruck reading it. D.D. Lewis of the Dallas Cowboys talked about having nightmares and his fear of breaking his neck. Lee Roy Jordan, a veteran Cowboys linebacker, was asked by Booth why he kept playing with a sciatic nerve condition. “By the time I’m 55, I feel they’ll have learned enough to medically treat me,” he said. “If they can’t, I can accept that.” Booth asked sportswriters and ex-players about the worst injury they had ever seen. The stories he heard were almost too gruesome to read. He wrote about Alex Webster, a former great for the New York Giants who had “developed a radical mastoid problem from repeated thumps to the head.” Eventually, Webster required surgery that “involved cutting off his ears and then sewing them back on.” He then developed middle ear problems. “Why maim yourself?” said Irv Cross, the former player-turned-sportscaster. “I don’t know. You just do it.” Jean Fugett, a tight end for the Cowboys who made $21,000 that year, said, “Injuries are just like death to a lot of players ... death of a career ... death of all that a lot of them want in life. So you say, ‘I’m not gonna worry about dying. I’m gonna go ahead and live!’ ” . . .

At will and sometimes against his will, Sam Brown can return in his mind to that hour in the Kandahar desert when he knelt at the edge of a blast crater and raised his flaming arms to the Afghanistan sky. He'd already run through the macabre slapstick routine of a man on fire, trying to put himself out by rolling on the ground. He'd resorted to pelting his face with fistfuls of sand. That failing, he'd run in helpless circles. Finally he'd dropped to his knees, lifted his arms, and screamed Jesus, save me. Each scream drew fire deeper into his lungs. Behind him his Humvee was a twisted inferno. Bullets whizzed around him. His men were scattering, taking cover, moving dreamily in clouds of so-called moondust, that weird powdery talc, which hung in the air and gave the soldiers the appearance of snowmen. It was going on dusk, and in the fading light the enemy gunfire blazed behind the walls of the village. Only the day before, Brown's brother, Daniel, had told him, in a phone call, You're invincible, they can't kill you. Best he could remember, he'd always felt invincible. Pretty much right up to the instant they rolled over the IED, he had remained the same man he'd been at West Point. That is, he was a man whose life still had meaning. Every action had been meant to hone him for the glory of battle. Even as varsity stroke, in command of a shell on the rowing team, out on the water every morning at dawn, the sun dripping off his oars, his arms burning as he counted off the strokes, welcoming the pain into his body, bronzed, sculpted, almost too good-looking, he sought hard perfection in himself and those around him. A diligent cadet who would spend the whole of an afternoon in the library reading about ancient Greek wars in Herodotus, immersed in the virtual reality of history, yearning for his own chance to test his mettle—but that was before eight brain-dead weeks of providing security for the construction of a new FOB in the middle of nowhere, watching bulldozers push sand, anxious for anything to break up the tedium, anything. When he was told his platoon would have to help provide security for a convoy coming through his sector on its way to a hydroelectric dam out in Helmand—delivering turbines, on a hearts-and-minds mission—he was all for the diversion, almost ecstatic when the call came from First Platoon reporting they'd been ambushed and needed backup. Brown had responded immediately. He was on the radio to his lead vehicle when he saw the bright flash. His body went inert as the Humvee lifted into the air. How he escaped from the wreck he couldn't recall. Kneeling there, on fire, he'd resigned himself to death. All he'd wanted to know was how long? How long would he have to burn? How many more torturous fractions of a second would he have to remain alive? . . .