The Engineer: Dave Henson
And then I actually lost my legs …
Dave Henson, interview in the sound archives of the National Army Museum
Dave – Everyone is thinking about you.
Can I have your Timberlands?
Is it too early …?
Entry in Dave Henson’s patient diary, 2225 hrs, 13 February 2011
MORE THAN ANYONE ELSE in this book, Dave Henson understands every single step on the journey back from the first moments of survival on into the future of living fully as a double amputee. His grandfather had served in the RAF in the Second World War. He’d been a radar operator, and the constant strain of staring at one of the early video screens in dim light for hours on end had ruined his sight. So Dave knew from an early age that military service could have its costs, that one rarely came without the other, and just in case he hadn’t registered it growing up, his grandfather made sure he knew that this was why he had reservations about him joining the army but at the same time, at the end of the conversation, how proud he was of his grandson.
Dave had registered everything, and not just in a very general way but quite specifically, about the war he would go to. He’d been thinking about injury even before, during his engineering undergraduate degree, where his final-year project was to build an access mechanism for getting people in wheelchairs in and out of go-karts. He’d spent a fair bit of time in a wheelchair, to understand how it felt and what the constraints were. So when he went to Afghanistan as a Royal Engineer working as part of the Counter-IED Task Force, he was, in the strangest and most thoughtful way possible, ready.
I knew the risks that were associated with it. I’d spent time adjusting before to the possibility of not having any legs when I came back so before I went on tour I made sure I’d climbed a mountain so I could tick that box off my To Do list just in case it happened, and then I actually lost my legs so I was aware of the possibility and that helped a lot. All the guys seemed to make jokes about losing their legs before they go but I think I really knew it was a possibility and had accepted it before I went so I came back and I had an idea of what it would take to get on with things. And then you just crack on, I guess.
There are simpler reasons too why Dave remembers every step of his journey. He was, unusually, awake for most of them. On Sunday 13 February 2011 he was leading a patrol into two compounds previously used by the enemy as firing positions, and this usually meant IEDs had been left behind for the next occupants to discover. They were an experienced team by now, with over twenty IEDs found and disabled. They cleared one compound: nothing. Then into the second: something. Weight placed on to a trigger, heartbeat thuds under the beaten sand floor, Dave thrown up into the air, and then falling forward, landing on his head, his face on the ground. No blue sky bright above him, or seconds to reflect. Just pain and trying to right himself, to sit up, to use his hands – gloved, but he’d cut the tips off so his fingers were already scratched and bleeding from the day’s earlier work – to lift his weight and drag it so he could lean up against a wall, backing away from whatever was left of the device and the sight of what it had done to him, as if it could be left behind under the settling dust with all the other debris. He didn’t recognise what came with him as he moved, what he was dragging, and he began to scream even as the echo of the blast died.
His men got to him immediately. He knew what to do: lots of drills. He knew because he’d made them do them, over and over again. There were a few raised voices, to get him to stop screaming, as they gathered round him and started to work. So he stopped. He breathed a few times, and started to give instructions instead, that they should get the radio, get the camera to take a picture of the site of the explosion for future reference (he uses the picture of the hole in presentations), but he saw that they were doing everything before he said it, calling down MERT, reading out the 9-Liner, a T1, one of their own, needing a stretcher, no particular concerns about the safety of the landing site outside the compound walls, and someone was taking a picture of the small crater and its consequences. He calmed himself and looked again at his shredded legs and realised as he dared to scan down that he could see to the end of his limbs. That his boots were still on his feet and what was left of his legs was just about attached to his body, but the engineer in him knew they weren’t viable as walking implements any more. And then he had the bottle of water one of his lads handed him, and because he smoked, he had a cigarette, and by the time he had finished it and a few others, and stubbed them out in the bloody sand, they’d finished working on him, and the helicopter was landing, and MERT crew were bursting out of the back, heading for him.
He was still awake and not yet crashing, but had lost a lot of blood, so the medics bent over him got the lines in, and because he still wasn’t crashing or needing intubating, the helicopter became a pre-operative ward, prepping him at a steady pace for surgery, giving him the anaesthetic in advance, so that thirty-seven minutes after the blast he would be on the table in the operating theatre at Bastion. A double amputation, right one off above the knee, left one through the knee. Then he was back on the ward, and the nurses started his patient diary:
I was your nurse today at Camp Bastion. This morning when I came on shift I woke you up. You are doing really well. Well enough to moan about having a cigarette. When your CO turned up we took you outside in the sunshine for a smoke and you seemed really happy with that. Of all the patients I have cared for you have the most visitors so you sound like a popular guy. Good luck with your rehab. Don’t lose that lovely spirit on this road to recovery.
He had to wait longer than normal for the CCAST flight to bring him home, so Dave’s nurse and CO wheeled his bed outside the ward so he could smoke. His new stumps were examined by the hand surgeon, with the Doe a Deer bleep, and who remembers conducting a ward round outside during Dave’s fag breaks and that this wasn’t standard NHS practice. Dave remembered studying the rest of the camp from where he lay in his hospital bed outside and being impressed with how it had developed.
In 2006, as a student, he’d been part of an army engineering team that planned and drilled the original four bore holes for the water essential to the camp’s establishment. He hadn’t actually gone to what was becoming Bastion, he’d been too junior for that, but he’d done all the paperwork they needed back in the UK, and made the noticeboards that went up for the equipment and read the reports that came back of what the bore holes were drilling into. Dust and fines on the top, plenty of water 150 metres down, in a hard coral aquifer that drained fresh water from the snowmelt of the Hindu Kush mountain range into the camp in the middle of the desert, so there’d be no more problems with supply lines. Enough for 100,000 litres to be pumped up a day: about half used for drinking and the rest for dampening down the dust and fines, and for the fire engines, one of which always waited by the MERT landing site. So when he arrived he could actually see what his team had achieved, and he always admired anything to do with the water he had helped to bring to the surface: things like the water purification and bottling plant, which were kept as clean as the hospital and produced stacked pallets’ worth of bottled drinking water every hour.
More visitors. Dave’s unit had come back to Bastion during the day of his wounding, so they all made their way to the field hospital and braced themselves for what they would find, and fought for the pen so they could write in his patient diary (three volumes in the end, the only multi-volume diary produced in the whole Afghan campaign, from what I’ve found so far), and tried not to let him see what they were feeling when they looked at him. They had brought his belongings with them, so he could take them home. Like all soldiers, Dave had been shopping before coming out to Afghanistan, and he hadn’t worn much of it before he was injured.
One of the first to visit him found him still sleeping from the anaesthetic. He sat by the pile of belongings he had brought and was able to write the difficult thing he might otherwise have had to say face to face. Dave had no more need of the trousers he had bought on leave; it would be shorts from now on.
Just arrived and got a chance to speak to the MERT dr. Apparently you were hard to shut up LOL. He said the boys did an awesome job treating you, all that content training by you paid off and the boys came through. Couldn’t find any shorts when getting your things together so you’ve got mine instead – hope they fit as I’m a short arse.
Another friend was less reticent about tackling the subject of Dave’s most recent purchases. They all had heavy-duty desert boots to work in, but Dave had brought another brand-new pair out with him as well, to wear back in camp off-duty, a bit flashier than the work ones. His were top-of-the-range, waterproof, seam-sealed, insulated, anti-fatigue midsole, leather-covered foot-bed for premium feel and optimum comfort, with a padded collar that eases ankle pressure and, in a nod to ecological considerations, long durable laces made of 100 per cent recycled plastic bottles. (‘Disco shoes’ is the technical military term.) They had cost a fortune, and he had hardly worn them.
Dave. Big Love!!! Everyone is thinking about you. Can I have your Timberlands? Is it too early?
And then they all came, one by one, his unit. The young men who had stood and watched alongside him at the patrol base, there to fight, not to write, and now fighting for the pen, words streaming on to the page: old-fashioned for the generation used to keyboards and textspeak, but somehow, in this place, the right thing to do.
Alright Troopy [Dave’s nickname], don’t know where to start. Before I do you will have to excuse my Johnny age 3 handwriting and spelling. When I found out, I couldn’t quite believe what had happened. [We] are a bulletproof lot but when I came in to see you and saw you in the bed it sunk in. The doc looking after you at the time told us of your progress which put my mind at ease a bit …
Then CCAST arrived to take him home. He was flying back with another Critical Care patient, and as they were being wheeled out to the Globemaster, the other patient crashed, trauma medics swarming over him, reviving him three times before they got a stable heartbeat. Dave could do nothing but watch, adding his voice to those calling out numbers and vital signs, encouraging him to hold on, hold on. He did, so they moved off again, both patients on board.
As the hours and miles flew by, Dave dozed, naturally, and woke and got to know the team who stood alongside him working to keep him stable. He wasn’t intubated, so he could talk and eat; it was unusual for them to have a patient to talk to against the background noise and they enjoyed it. They gave him a pair of ear defenders, but he doesn’t remember the noise as being particularly bad. There were one or two quiet jokes about CCAST’s ability to smuggle contraband. Dave had his cigarette cartons packed in his luggage, and he wouldn’t have to pay the duty on them when he got back to the UK. They shared things with him, not just conversation, grateful for a living voice and laughter from the human under the straps.
David, so here we are, I reckon halfway home, somewhere in the sky. I’m one of the anaesthetic CCAST doctors; we have the honour of making sure you get back safe to the UK. You have been a stoical and determined patient – I hope this continues during the weeks ahead. Can’t believe I let you have my green Starburst – it’s my favourite too.
And then home. Less wakefulness at Birmingham. No bone infection, but plenty of pain and shrapnel wounds in his backside that wouldn’t heal. His weight dropped, muscle mass disappearing, weakness. More operations, weeks of pain, and deepening fug from painkillers, not much memory of visitors. Gradually he recovered. More days wakeful than dopey, getting nurses to wheel him out for a cigarette, just as he had at Bastion, making the Military Matron change ward policy just for him – no real cigarettes allowed on Critical Care but e-cigarettes OK for now (they aren’t any more).
Slowly he was becoming an engineer again, looking back down at where his legs no longer were, as brave every time as the first time he did it, braced up against the mud wall. A wheelchair was brought to his bedside for his trips outside. Unlike almost everyone else who lost legs in Afghanistan, he’d already been in one, knew the concept well, knew what limitations it entailed. When he grieved for his lost legs, he grieved like an engineer.
For me with my injuries, having no knee or ankle joints, your body’s natural way of correcting balance is completely shot. There is a whole chain of muscles and ligaments and nerve endings that go all the way up from your ankles, and from your knees all the way up to your pelvis and spine, which are responsible for keeping you upright. Breaking that chain from the knee and ankle, it adjusts your balance. It’s not great.
And so to Headley: a socket cast, then stubbies and then walking. He lived a short drive from Headley, so as soon as he got his car with the hand controls, he told them he didn’t need a room and drove home every evening – commuting to rehab. Evenings at Headley could be difficult. There was time to think, and that wasn’t always a good thing, not when a person wasn’t ready to do that kind of thinking. Headley was a point between two worlds – the world of the army, and the world of the civilian – and Dave wasn’t quite sure where his place was any more, and finding it was going to be difficult. He needed to be in both, as much as possible, until the gulf became smaller and the movement between them easier, and then hopefully he forgot about it.
Not far along the coast from Headley, in Brighton, his grandfather was having a holiday in a place created a century before to meet the costs of military service. The St Dunstan’s centre at Ovingdean was specially built in 1938 to provide respite care for those, like Dave’s grandfather, with serious visual impairments. Compared with Headley, Ovingdean’s gardens aren’t much to speak of, but the surroundings are soft rolling downland and carefully fenced pathways leading to the seafront. Dave drove out to visit him for the first time since he lost his legs. A notice in the main hallway that told him that each of the floors was laid out in exactly the same way so their blind visitors could keep their bearings wherever they were, and to make sure he always walked on the right-hand side in the rooms and corridors – same principle as the yellow brick road at Headley. Dave followed instructions, step by step, swaying a bit on his brand new legs, but keeping to the right as instructed. His grandfather could tell as soon as he heard his voice that Dave was walking again.
Like almost everyone else at Headley, Dave had made running his primary goal for rehab. By the end of the year in which he was injured he was back in the prosthetics workshop getting fitted for his running blades. The first time he ran on the blades, his steps, one after another, faster and faster, speed for the first time in so long, speed, faster than those around him, remembering how that felt, feeling like he used to. He was good at the running, and began to think about, and then to train for, actual sports. The London Olympics were on, and the Paralympics, and he could see himself there, so he gave up smoking and started to train properly.
But running blades aren’t big legs; the whole mechanism is more delicate, and if the wearer is pushing themselves, and Dave is always pushing himself, then they can fail. In a training session in 2014 one of the blades snapped and he fell, and as he fell he saw the flaw in falling-down class at Headley, because it only taught him how to fall on big legs, not blades and, as it now appeared, the skills and techniques were not necessarily transferable. As he would have done any day before 13 February 2011, he put his hands out to break his fall, and at his new fighting weight and at speed, he dislocated his shoulder, fractured his wrist and damaged his hands.
It was so true, the thing they said in falling-down class: for every joint you lose, the more care you need to take of the ones that are left. The injured shoulder affected his entire body, all the muscles in his core weakening because he could no longer work out properly to sustain them. So he had to wait until the injury was somewhat healed, and in the meantime he put on weight and then his socket didn’t fit again, and there isn’t a mulberry bush at Headley but perhaps there should be. Shoulder rehab takes much longer than leg rehab: eighteen months so far and still giving him gyp.
Today Dave sits at a desk not far from mine and taps away at his computer researching while I tap away at mine writing about his plans (and occasionally he reads what I write and says things like ‘there wasn’t only a hospital at Camp Bastion, there was other stuff too’, which was how I found out about the bore holes). When he dreamed in the first couple of years after his injury, he dreamed of himself with legs. Now he dreams of himself with prosthetics, more and more. He’s an engineer, he’s well qualified to tackle the problem, he’s the expert. If he can’t find a way forward … he will find a way forward. And there’s a solid historical precedent for him to follow.
In 1861 a young engineer injured in an unprecedentedly bloody modern war, applied his skills and brought about the greatest innovation for amputees since the invention of carpentry tools. James Hanger was a student in the engineering department of Washington College. He left to join his brothers in a Confederate regiment just in time for the first real land battle of the American Civil War, at Philippi. There were no deaths, fewer than ten casualties per side, nothing like the stinking blood-soaked overlay the conflict would become. But one of the Philippi casualties was Hanger, who had one leg shot to pieces by a Unionist cannonball, and then was captured and operated on by a Unionist surgeon. One of the very first Confederate amputees, young and incapacitated, Hanger was returned home in a prisoner exchange complete with heavy wooden peg leg.
He spent the next three months hidden away in his bedroom at home, his family thinking he was unable to come to terms with his injury. Southern men were supposed to be whole, strong, staunch defenders of their way of life, not broken and dependent. But Hanger wasn’t sitting upstairs defeated by his condition; he was working in what was now mostly a workshop with a bed in the corner. And then one day his family, sitting in their parlour, heard him come downstairs. Not with the heavy, deadening thump of the wooden leg but with a different rhythm, lighter, more even. And there he was, at the bottom of the stairs, on a new leg, that he had made for himself. Not just a leg: he’d made a double jointed, articulated knee part that bent when he lifted up his thigh stump, and the leg itself was lighter, shaped like a leg, with a foot that could probably fit into a shoe when he turned his mind to that.
Hanger patented his new leg at the Confederate government’s own patent office (the drawings that he made up in his bedroom still exist) and began to develop the prototype for manufacture for the casualties of battles where thousands were falling, never to return home whole.1 Hanger went on to open factories and received approval from the eventually victorious Union government, who granted him a national patent in 1891. Driven by the needs of military amputees, Hanger’s company became the largest manufacturer of prostheses in the world, as they still are. Hanger supplies and fits Mark Ormrod’s three limbs. During the First World War and with the great need of its amputee cohort, Hanger went to Europe, where it was one of three American prosthetic companies to receive contracts to build workshops at the new Roehampton Hospital in London for convalescing amputees. The first Confederate amputee, on a leg of his own design, stood on the grounds of Roehampton and met casualties from the new century’s war. By 1935 Hanger had become the sole military contractor to the Ministry of Pensions to provide prostheses to old and new amputees, and they maintained their position and the relationships they built then a century later.2 One engineer in a workshop (and in case he’s still wondering, I think that’s where Dave belongs) can change the world, then as now.
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Postscript. In August 2016 Dave’s out of office email message changed.
Thank you for your email. I am currently out of office in preparation for the Rio 2016 Paralympic Games. Access to email is a little sporadic in this period but I will endeavour to get back to you. I am back in on Monday 26th September.
He was back in the office on the Monday, and he brought with him the bronze medal he won in the Paralympics T42 200 m final. It’s what he’s holding in the picture of him in the plate section. He has a new ambition now. His daughter is getting old enough for a bike of her own. One day, quite soon probably, he’ll stand behind her and watch her ride without training wheels, and centre himself to move quickly in case she falls. He’d like to be able to go out on family bike rides, but currently that is impossible for transfemoral amputees with stump and socket prosthetics. So that’s what he’s working on – not a bike or a new stump, but a whole system that means it will all become possible (see next section).