Wounded Calif. vets remain works in progress

Published online on Sunday, May. 03, 2009

WASHINGTON -- Norberto Lara showed off his new arm, a terrible beauty.

The Visalia resident and wounded Iraq veteran can do wonders with his latest prosthetic. His nerves fire, the elbow rotates, and pincers open and close. He demonstrated his golf swing and mimicked pedaling a recumbent bike.

It will look really cool once it's covered with black carbon fiber, Lara said.

Nearly five years after platoon sergeant Lara and his lieutenant, Dawn Halfaker, lost their arms to the same rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq, however, both veterans remain works in progress.

Lara's last surgery hurt for a long time. Nightmares still dog him. He has returned to Walter Reed Army Medical Center four times in the past six months.

"We're doing some further adjustments, some fine tuning," Lara said.

On his prosthetic arm, he meant. He's had the new model for only about a month, following the surgery to relocate the nerves that power it. It's called targeted muscle re-enervation, and he's still learning the ins and outs of it.

Life, too, requires some fine-tuning for both Lara and Halfaker as they approach their Alive Day, June 18, 2004 -- the day they didn't die.

The Iraq and Afghanistan wars have left about 830 U.S. troops without arms or legs. Among them, Lara and Halfaker share a ghastly distinction: A man and a woman lost their right arms at almost the same instant to the same rocket-propelled grenade.

It happened early in the morning. Lara was in the right front seat of an armored Humvee. Halfaker sat behind him. The members of the 3rd Infantry Division's 293rd Military Police Company were patrolling the town of Baqubah, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad.

Halfaker and Lara had a good history together. Some weeks before, he'd thrown himself over her when another rocket-propelled grenade had skidded into their presence.

"He was going to save his lieutenant," Halfaker said, affectionately.

Lara could have handled the June 18 patrol on his own, but the local U.S. commander had ordered that an officer should accompany patrols. So there was Halfaker, riding in the back seat.

It was calm in Baqubah.

Then, it wasn't.

A rocket-propelled grenade punched through the Humvee.

Hurtling at roughly 965 feet per second, it sliced Lara's arm off at the shoulder, flew on and then exploded near Halfaker.

Noise, fire, fade to black.

That moment will forever bind two Californians with very different backgrounds.

Halfaker was one of the top 10 graduates in her West Point class and a varsity basketball player. Now Capt. Halfaker (ret.), she's about to receive a master's degree in security studies from Georgetown University, and she runs Halfaker and Associates, her own, 110-person, $10 million-a-year consulting firm.

"She is a busy woman," Lara said. "Very busy."

Lara is a tattooed high school graduate. Now 36, he's been taking classes at the College of the Sequoias in Visalia and hopes to become a social worker.

They've stood by each other from the start of their long rehabilitation, though Halfaker got better faster.

"He was worried he would never make it out of the hospital," Halfaker said. "I said, 'Listen man, we're walking out of this hospital together.' "

Both abound in physical will. Halfaker was a quick-handed guard on the West Point women's basketball team. At Fort Stewart in Georgia, she bonded with Lara over their mutual love of grueling PT -- physical training.

"He was, across the board, just good at everything, very competent," Halfaker said. "Norbie is the guy you look to when you want to get it done."