Army Veteran Wears Purple Heart with Pride and Passion By Raquel Rivas, Wounded Warrior Project At Wounded Warrior Project® (WWP), we acknowledge the price servicemen and women have paid for our freedoms. We serve veterans who left pieces of themselves on the battlefield and survived. Many of them received a recognition they did not seek: a Purple Heart award. David Guzman is one of those veterans. He has a long family history of military service and, for better or worse, a long history with the Purple Heart. His uncle, Francisco Guzman, a World War II veteran, earned a Purple Heart for his service in France. David only knew that his uncle had a disability of mysterious origin. After David was injured, his uncle let him in on the story. “The day I got home from Iraq, a month after my injury, my uncle was there at the airport along with other relatives,” David recalled. “He just leaned over and whispered in my ear, ‘You’ve become a blood brother whether you like it or not. Wear it with pride.’” A year later, Francisco visited David, and they talked until 4 a.m. Francisco related the trials he lived through in France during the last days of WWII. How he survived the fighting and the cold during the Battle of the Bulge, how people from the countryside helped him recover and walk again, and how the experience haunted him. “My uncle seemed to have tunnel vision as he told me his story,” David said. “We were sitting in my backyard, but he brought me there – I felt like I went to France with him.” “My uncle walked me through the steps of this unique brotherhood of Purple Heart recipients,” David said. “I was always pushing to be in the military because I looked up to my dad, my uncle, and my older siblings.” Heritage That Hurts David was born in Utah and raised in Texas. After high school, he went to technical school and learned about trucks and engine repair, so he felt comfortable working as a truck driver when he joined the Army in 1989. 8
WWW.HomelandMagazine.com / AUGUST 2022
David rose through the ranks to become a sergeant and had several duty stations. He was deployed to Iraq in 2004 at age 38. He had been in the country for four months when he was wounded in September 2004. Normally, David would lead a truck convoy that traveled at night. But this time, he was assigned to a daytime trip out of Camp Taji, north of Baghdad. At the time, the 5-ton trucks used by Army personnel did not always have armor, but this vehicle had a steel plate welded to the bed of the truck – and open windows. David was in the front passenger side, and he remembers passing a small white truck – from which someone detonated multiple improvised explosive devices under, and around, his U.S. Army vehicle. David blacked out and was pulled out by unit members. “The shrapnel from the blasts went through my door and through me,” David said. A shrapnel fragment went through David’s face, knocked out a molar, and pierced his tongue. The gunner in the back also suffered facial wounds from shrapnel. David believes they survived because of the steel plate welded to the bottom of the truck. The explosion was on a Friday, and David woke up on a Sunday. He remembers the pain, the dirt in his eyes and ears, a gauze in his mouth, and stitches on his tongue and face. In addition to the shrapnel that tore through his face and mouth, he had a ruptured eardrum, and rods in his wrist and right leg. A larger shrapnel piece went in and out of his leg, severely damaging his calf muscle and tendons. After five days in Baghdad, David expected to be medically evacuated, but that didn’t happen. He was sent back to his unit despite his injuries. It would be another 25 days before a doctor saw him and prompted his command to get him evacuated. This delay was detrimental to his physical health and deeply affected his mental health. He was finally sent home on a regular flight, with his swollen leg. He could tell his leg wounds were infected. He was sent to Texas first, where he received medical attention in the ICU at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. The swelling turned out to be gangrene.
