2026 HONOREE
U.S. AIR FORCE EOD MASTER SERGEANT (REIRED) JOE DESLAURIERS
CONTINUED FROM HOME PAGE
Some of what Joe now knows, even remembers about those five days of his life, he’s fairly certain he learned after the fact. Unconscious, Joe had been airlifted from the battlefield to a British Combat Surgical Hospital, a CSH where doctors feverishly worked to keep him alive. Feeling that they may have bought more time, they flew him to Bagram, to the large military hospital there, where doctors performed immediate life-saving surgeries, then on to Landstuhl, Germany, to the American military hospital. At Landstuhl, doctors briefly woke Joe. He opened his eyes, looked up, saw a bright white light, and faces staring down at him.
“I want you to try and squeeze my finger,” one doctor said, and Joe, instinctively using his right hand, reached out and squeezed the doc’s finger. “You know what? You’re going to make it,” the doctor said, then gave instructions to ‘put Joe back under.’ Joe was on his way to Walter Reed Hospital, where his wife Lisa, seven months pregnant, waited for him. Joe’s first sergeant and a chaplain met Lisa at Walter Reed. “He’s alive,” they said. She watched as Joe was lifted from the ambulance that had transported him from Andrews Air Force Base to Walter Reed. He was still dirty from the battlefield; his beard and hair crusted with dried blood and dust, too. What must have been even more alarming than how he looked was that Joe was unconscious. Lisa grabbed his hand as Joe was lifted from the ambulance.
Lisa and Joe had discussed what would happen if Joe died, but they had never discussed what would happen if he was injured, all the things that go along with the life changes that impact a catastrophically injured soldier. Joe was suddenly a triple amputee, with other severe injuries, too. What? What will all this mean? What happens next?
Later that day, Joe was back in surgery. The next morning, out of the ICU and into a recovery room, Joe regained consciousness. Lisa, Joe’s family, a few friends, too, had gathered in the room, surrounding the hospital bed. Joe, his voice sounding like the turn of a rusty faucet, brought a smile to the faces staring at him when he asked for a cheeseburger. They were pretty sure he was going to live.
Hours later, Joe, for the first time since he’d been blown up, was able to sit up. More awake now than he’d been in days, beginning to remember what happened, Joe looked at the bundle of bandages on what remained of his left arm. Even through all the bandaging, Joe could see how short his arm was. He looked down at his legs, where they should have been, and realized that he’d lost both legs, even more surprised at how much of each leg was missing, the amputations high up on each thigh. Very high up. Joe didn’t know yet, couldn’t know yet, that amputations above the knee make walking again, even with a prosthesis, in his case two, very challenging, impossible for some. Only inches of Joe’s legs remained, and that would make using a prosthesis unusually difficult. Some with amputations that high, with wounds like Joe’s, confine themselves to wheelchairs – forever.
And pain. Pain didn’t disappoint. It showed up, hungry and mean, testing the limits of Joe’s endurance. Battered, exhausted to the point of insensibility, the pain, growing instead of subsiding, was worse than Joe could ever have imagined or expected. He’d been in and out of surgeries, two, three, sometimes even four times a week, and had begun to realize that this was likely to continue for weeks. What he didn’t know was that surgeries would continue for much more than a few weeks. Years. Somewhere on the other side of fifty surgeries, Joe lost count of the actual total.
The pain, what Joe thought would be sharp and piercing, felt as if one of those big up-armored vehicles was rolling over him, then backing up again, and again, back and forth, an endless, continual loop. Doctors explained that the next step in pain management would be Ketamine; that’s most likely what it’s going to take, they told him, to get the relief you need. Still, Ketamine was something that, until now, Joe had wanted to avoid. He closed his eyes and thought for a moment, contemplating the complications of Ketamine.
Missing the days when his life had been pain-free, he wondered, Will the Ketamine give those days back to me? Wearily, one morning, his father at his bedside, Joe turned to him. “I don’t think I can do this anymore,” Joe said. He was losing the fight. The debilitating pain was exhausting his reserves, draining the energy he needed for his recovery; he relented. The doctors began the treatment.
Ketamine made its way through the labyrinthine corridors of Joe’s body. The effects ambushed him just as surely as if they’d been a buried IED. He entered an untenable zone where voices took up residence, hallucinations romped wildly, night terrors invaded his sleep, and a buzzing confusion filled his waking hours. The changes in Joe frightened Lisa. They scared the hell out of Joe. Ketamine created its own alternative universe, one that Joe needed to escape at warp speed. He quit the Ketamine, deciding instead to try and deal with the pain as best as he could. And he did.
If only that was the worst that Joe and Lisa faced. Unknown to doctors, certainly to Joe, a perfect storm was brewing inside his body. Everything that was happening to him created the conditions for a deadly, very uncommon, muscle-devouring condition known as Rhabdomyolysis. Rhabdo. The severity of Joe’s injuries, the blood loss and transfusions, the cocktail of medications, and the month-long wait in the heat, the purgatory that he’d lived through while waiting for the convoy to finally roll out, and with nothing to eat but MREs – all this caused his muscles to break down, to disintegrate, which was leading to muscle death. Toxic components of Joe’s muscle fibers had entered his circulatory system, poisoning his blood and kidneys. Joe was devouring his own body. He was dying. The cure in medical lexicon, well, most of us would have a better chance translating Plato, is more simply explained. Joe’s body needed to be flushed free of the toxins while he continued to regain his strength. Doctors figured it out, and Joe continued to fight for his life, winning more battles than he was losing.
The emotional side of Joe’s recovery, like the pain that plagued him, was just as hungry and mean. At times, for someone with injuries like those suffered by Joe, it almost feels like part of you just wants to disappear. You’re ripped apart, so far on the other side of battered and bludgeoned that the way back seems impossible. Joe faced the reality that life was over,
at least the life that he’d lived until being ripped apart by a Taliban IED. That life was over – gone. Joe understood that to recover, he would have to bury that life, mourn it, and a new life had to begin. There wouldn’t be any disappearing act for Joe, for Lisa, too.
Everyone grieves differently. Joe and Lisa needed time alone. If they were going to find their own way, their new beginning, they needed to become invisible to the people around them. Eventually, they chased everyone out of their room. The time had come for them to deal with the shock, the instant change to their life together, to all the “now what do we do?” questions that had plagued them. They had to step off the rollercoaster of emotions, come to grips with everything, and find their new normal, their new life. There was no training manual for the minefield of emotions that Lisa and Joe had to clear. It would be so easy to give in to the despair that comes along with tragedy, but Joe and Lisa refused to give up or give in.
Alone together, Lisa held out Joe’s dog tags. “These are yours,” she said, then she held out their wedding band, the one that had been on Joe’s left hand before it was ripped from his body. She slipped the dog tags over Joe’s head and slid the gold band onto the ring finger of his right hand.
In the silence of their room, Lisa and Joe held each other. Overwhelmed with love, free from gazing eyes, their emotions unleashed, Joe and Lisa cried. They had their own private funeral for Joe’s past life, the missing legs, the hand that wore the wedding band, the unfinished life of a soldier, a warrior, all that was gone. The 6’1” former football player who’d ripped off a 64-yard catch and run- that guy was gone, too. And Joe was about to become a father. What kind of father will I be now, like this? He couldn’t know, not yet, that the enormous love he had for his unborn child would make him a good father, better than many with two good legs and both hands.
Love works that way.
Joe and Lisa were in it together, and together they were unstoppable. They understood the important things, the ones that would keep them together and living life to the fullest. They understood what mattered most — family and each other.
Until that morning, Joe’s recovery had been a struggle, the ancient push of the stone uphill, to see it roll back down, but the release of emotion, an unleashed tide that carried Joe and Lisa forward, changed everything. Accepting that his old life was over, unearthing that pain just as if it were a buried IED that had to be disarmed or destroyed, Joe and Lisa began to move forward emotionally. Joe’s body, anxious to recover, came along, too.
He set goals. It was time to get moving, time to kick this recovery into high gear. First up, let’s get out of this hospital. Map it out. It’s like any mission. Plan. Execute. First step, get out of this bed, and get into a wheelchair. Sure, there was bedside physical therapy, but that wasn’t going to get Joe out of the hospital. He had to get down to the physical therapy floor.
Others, men who’d been where he was now, encouraged him. He’d see them coming back from physical therapy, months ahead of where he needed to be. They were walking with their newly fitted prosthesis, and some had even discarded their canes. Joe looked at them differently now.
“Hell, if they can do it, so can I.” And the guys on the ward, they looked at Joe and would assure him that he was going to be fine. The shouts of hey, man, you’ve got this. I was right where you are just weeks ago, and look at me now, encouraged Joe.
With the support of other wounded soldiers, the demands of the physical therapists, and Lisa, too, Joe began physical therapy in earnest. The warrior in him, the muscle memory of days on the football field as a teenager, the rigors of EOD training, and the everyday life of a soldier down range propelled Joe forward. He pushed himself.
Amazing everyone and himself, too, Joe, on his birthday, November 24th, two months after almost dying, left the hospital. He and Lisa moved into military housing units for couples. For the first time since he’d been injured, Joe and Lisa were alone. Free from the knock on the hospital room door, the constant interruptions, the necessary flow of people into the hospital room, and the lack of privacy. Joe and Lisa could be a couple again.
Three weeks later, in a room on the maternity floor, Lisa went into labor. The details are a little sketchy. Joe was asleep. Maybe Lisa buzzed the nurses, maybe they checked on her while Joe slept, then left, but rapid-fire, loud knocks on the door jolted Joe awake. He jumped out of bed, jumped is a relative term, and got himself into a wheelchair. Friends were shouting, “C’mon, Joe, you’re having a baby. Let’s go!
At 6am on December 8th, their son was born. Joe got to see him and spend some time with Lisa, but more reconstructive surgery on Joe’s arm was scheduled for later that morning. Two days later, Lisa was wheeled into Joe’s recovery room, where Joe, still feeling the effects of anesthesia and pain meds, held his son for the first time.
Getting the first set of legs is a huge step (no pun intended). Getting legs is not always a certainty. Joe’s amputations were very high up. A serious bone infection, it’s common, happens all the time, threatened the possibility that Joe would get legs, prosthesis. If the infection could not be cured, Joe would have to have more surgery. What was left of his legs would be too short for prosthetics. Another battle. Another fight. Another win. Joe fought off the infection.
Joe’s injuries left very little for doctors to work with. They did everything they could to ensure that Joe could be fitted with and use prosthetics. They worked for months to reconstruct as much of Joe’s legs as possible, preparing his limbs for prosthetics. Because of how high Joe’s amputations were, the traditional sleeve and socket prosthetics often presented more trouble than they were worth. They fit so high that they chafed Joe’s crotch, often slipped off, creating the risk of a fall and more injury. They held his sweat, creating infections. Using a toilet without removing them was out of the question. This is the why of how it’s easy to become wheelchair bound.
After two years of surgeries, physical therapy, and recovery from the battlefield, Joe and Lisa moved back home. Lisa went first. Joe still had final treatments to get out of the way. In October of 2013, just two years after Joe was blown up, the charitable foundation, Building Homes for Heroes, built and gifted a home to Lisa and Joe. Their new life began in earnest. Lisa, an educator, returned to teaching full-time. A second child, a daughter, was born. Today, Joe and Lisa’s children are beautiful, smart, happy, young teens, talented, and good members of society. The one question that worried Joe the most was answered. What Joe is most proud of, what he has done better than anything else, is to raise his children alongside his wife, Lisa.
But no story moves in a straight line. For years, the sleeve and socket prosthetics plagued Joe. After managing his own engraving business, often working with Building Homes for Heroes, the foundation that built his home, Joe stepped back and risked another life-changing surgery. In March of 2020, in a bold move to get free of the traditional prosthetics, Joe opted for a high-risk procedure, Osseointegration surgery, operations to surgically insert metal implants, titanium screws, into the bones of each of Joe’s legs. If the procedure is successful, if there are no complications, particularly infection, after the new incisions heal and the rods marry the bone, prosthetics can be attached to the end of the protruding rod. The initial incisions and implant take about three months to heal; there are more surgeries that come later, to prepare the implant for the attachment of a state-of-the-art prosthesis—twelve months total recovery, which includes the physical therapy and training to use the new prosthetics.
The surgery went well. The training didn’t. After years of frustration and failure, on the verge of giving up, Joe met a gifted physical therapist who solved the issues. Today, Joe manages the prosthetics well. Up in the morning, he puts on his legs, sees his two teenagers and Lisa off to school, then heads to the gym. He keeps his legs on until bedtime.
Joe was thirty-three years old when he was blown up. He feels lucky. No internal injuries. He and Lisa could still have children. He escaped the severe traumatic brain injury that usually accompanies the explosion that he survived; there is some residual TBI, but not what Joe might have incurred.
In the early days of Joe’s recovery, just days after arriving at Walter Reed Hospital, President Barack Obama visited Joe. He’d visit more than once, but during that first visit, Joe, only days removed from the battlefield, was in tough shape. Lines, some with blood, others with fluids and antibiotics, tethered Joe to multiple I.V.s. Wires connected him to monitors. Unaware that someone had taken a photo of the moment, one day, much to Joe’s surprise, he received a framed picture of the visit. A member of the White House Staff, as a thoughtful gesture, took the time to send the photo. The President had taken the time to sign it.
What happened on September 23rd, 2011, could never invade the place inside Joe and Lisa where hope lives. Joe never said, “Why me?” Lisa stood by him. He never felt sorry for himself. “Why me? Ha!” For Joe, that was a simple question with an even simpler answer. “Because it was my job, my duty. You know it can happen, getting blown up. You don’t expect it to happen, but you know it can. When it does, you have to accept it. I mean, what’s the alternative? Are you just going to curl up in a ball?” Life isn’t perfect; it’s not supposed to be, but there are plenty of perfect moments. “These wounds,” Joe is quick to tell you, “They can never define me. I define them.”
Wars touch the men and women who fight them. War indelibly marks those men and women, and their families, too. But war ennobles some like Joe Deslauries, husband, father, veteran. Joe wears the badge.
Story written by Ron Farina, June 2026
Author/Veteran
