Grateful American: A Journey from Self to Service(84)
After I finished speaking, Eden’s eyelids flickered. Once. Twice. The only movement he’d made since I walked into the room.
Over the next year, I would reach out to the hospital chaplain to receive updates about Eden, but the chaplain eventually moved to another assignment and I lost touch. Then, in 2012, I did an event in Chicago for the Marine Corps–Law Enforcement Foundation. A Chicago police officer started talking with me about a severely wounded marine he knew, and before he named the man I said, “Wait. I know who you’re talking about. Eden Pearl. Please, tell me what you know about him. Where is he?” The police officer put me in touch with Eden’s battle buddy, Marine Phil Noblin, a Florida resident. I called Phil, and he explained how Eden had moved around the country from convalescent home to convalescent home, his family always with him. Phil put me in touch with Eden’s wife, and we talked and caught up. I told her about the home-building initiatives for wounded veterans that we had going by then. We talked through a few specifics of the program, then I said simply, “It would be my honor if you would let us do that for you and Eden.”
Phil Noblin had raised some money to help, so I asked Phil to use those funds to purchase the land in San Antonio, not far from the Brooke Army Medical Center burn unit, and my foundation built Eden and his family a specially adapted smart-technology home. To see part of the immense burden lifted off his wife and family was gratifying. Over the next few years, in that new place of respite, his wife and family helped Eden live a quiet life, as they wanted.
Eden received all the help he could and never stopped fighting. His sacrifices were enormous, and I respect Eden and his family tremendously. In 2015, at age forty, after a long, six-year fight for healing, Eden Pearl passed away.
He will never be forgotten.
As the years went on, I found myself in a chain of initiatives. I would meet one person, who’d link me up with someone else and a different group, and from there I’d do an event, which would put me in touch with someone else at a different organization that served a different need. Wherever I looked for ways to help, a need or a contact appeared, which led to doing more and more.
As noted earlier, in 2009 I worked with Jim Palmersheim and American Airlines to send twenty-two tons of school supplies to Iraq. I couldn’t go on that trip due to my shooting schedule with CSI: NY, but Jim went along, and I asked our Operation International Children partner Mary Eisenhower, a few celebrity pals, and some of our volunteers to go in my place. On the way back, they stopped in Germany to visit wounded troops at Landstuhl.
There, they met a young soldier named Brendan Marrocco, just twenty-two years old, the first United States service member ever to survive after losing all four limbs in an IED explosion. The blast had happened during the early hours of Easter Sunday, while Brendan was returning from a night mission in the deserts of Iraq. He was in bad shape. In addition to losing both arms and both legs, Brendan’s nose, left eye socket, and facial bones were broken. He’d lost eight teeth from the blast and had taken shrapnel in his left eye and face. His face and neck had been burned, his left carotid artery severed, and his left eardrum pierced. Usually a soldier this severely wounded would die. But army medics had been making remarkable strides in treating battlefield wounds.
Jim called me from Germany and said Brendan soon would be moved to Walter Reed, and since I had a trip already scheduled to go there in about a week, I needed to visit him. During that visit, I saw Brendan and met his mother, Michelle. Under a lot of medications, Brendan didn’t talk much, but he was clearly very downcast and in a lot of distress, just beginning to adjust to his new reality. It was hard to see this young man in such tough shape.
In the car on my way back to the hotel, I called up Bryan Anderson, a triple amputee soldier I met at Walter Reed in 2005 who’d become a good friend. Bryan was now out of the hospital, retired from the army. I told him about Brendan and asked Bryan if he would visit. I knew Brendan could directly relate to Bryan in ways I couldn’t. Bryan has a highly resilient personality, and he’d been living with his injures for four years by then. His attitude was remarkable. He’d been blown all to hell, but he simply wouldn’t let things get him down. He’d even been featured on the cover of Esquire. He’d also done some acting, and I’d been able to bring him on CSI: NY. In 2011, he published his story of courage, determination, and hope in his autobiography, No Turning Back. Bryan agreed to a visit and soon flew to DC to spend some time with Brendan, where he was able to help him see that there would be life beyond the injury. Putting these two together helped Brendan at a crucial time.
Yet I knew I could do more.
The following year, CSI: NY was shooting in New York City. Normally we shot in L.A., but from time to time we went to New York to shoot extra scenes or stock footage. While there, I got together with my firefighter pals, the guys I’d helped raise money to build the Brooklyn Wall of Remembrance. Sal Cassano, the commissioner of the FDNY at the time, came by the set and explained how two nonprofit organizations, Building Homes for Heroes and the Stephen Siller Tunnel to Towers Foundation, wanted to raise money to build Brendan Marrocco a specially adapted smart-technology home in Staten Island. Would I help?
Having met Brendan at Walter Reed the year before, I loved this idea and wanted to support them in any way I could. I’d met enough wounded veterans by then to know how difficult the adjustments can be. Even basic tasks can prove troublesome. Plus, severely wounded vets often need additional live-in help. I knew Brendan’s brother, Mike, had quit his banking job in Manhattan and set up shop at Walter Reed to help Brendan recover. But how would they manage after Brendan was released?