by Kaylee Townsend

During 2010, my brother deployed to Afghanistan when he was nineteen. When he left, I was in the fifth grade. At this time in my life, I was confused why someone so important to me had chosen to go to a place so scary. My parents told me that he would be back in less than a year and we would pray together to make sure he stayed safe. I hoped that our efforts would work, and for the most part they had.

On his first deployment, Nick realized quickly that hygiene was not a priority of soldiers. An “Afghan shower” as he described it was an open roofed, three wall plywood box with no drainage. The water came from a bag that sat in the sun all day. This created an open forum for bacteria to multiply and flourish. If the soldiers were lucky, these showers came about every few weeks. The first few months of deployment proceeded as follows: your fight or flight instinct was always prepared. You were a creature of war. You were not looking to make sure your feet were clean.

During deployment, there were limited resources. For twenty men and nine months, there were only a few pairs of socks for each soldier. “Recycling socks” quickly became a trend. Recycling socks meant turning your socks inside out after three weeks and then wearing them for another three weeks or so. On top of recycling, there was no such thing as access to a washing machine while deployed in Afghanistan. When there was a chance, the soldiers were able to go down to the stream and put their clothes in the river. The river was feces infested and very contaminated but it was their only option. After washing their clothes in the river without soap, the clothes would air dry and the mission would continue.

Due to having no other choice than to practice terrible hygiene, Nick contracted “grunt foot” halfway through his first tour. Plantar warts covered the bottom of each of his feet. He could feel something just wasn’t right. But Nick knew that he was in no place to be complaining about sore feet. He continued his duties as if nothing were wrong, only making it worse. When his first tour ended, he went back to Germany where he was stationed.

In Germany, Nick turned twenty and the warts were still there. With everyday he pushed himself in the gym to pass his physical tests, the warts continued to spread. With every mile ran, the warts rooted a little deeper. One day, Nick felt like this may have been something he needed to see a doctor about. He asked his platoon sergeant what he should do and his platoon sergeant told him to “stop faking it.” This is why he had waited to say anything. Even though it was obvious that his feet were bad, it wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened on a tour.

As Nick explained it, “We had guys losing legs, arms, lives. I wasn’t about to get sent home for a few sores on the bottom of my feet. I had a war to fight that I was not finished with. My country needed me.”

He begged to return for a second tour. If no one realized how bad his foot was, he was going to use their ignorance to his advantage. He would return to Afghanistan if it was the last thing he did. So, he deployed.

This deployment was to Shirake, Afghanistan and the hygiene was even worse. Nearly every moment of every day, other than a few hours of sleep here and there, he was on his feet. The warts were continuously “spreading like wildfire” and there was nothing he could do. Nick started having second thoughts on why he decided to come for another tour. It got to a point when he woke up he would take a Gerber knife and shave and dig into the warts to keep them short enough to walk on. When that lost its effect, they went to even more extreme measures of “desert medicine.”

“An E-9 medic would flip me on my stomach and inject a few syringes of lidocaine into me. Next he would shave those warts until they were as flat as could be. I got ready for the next part by clamping onto a piece of concrete and stuffing a towel in my mouth. He took an air duster to the freshly shaved spots to try and freeze the inside. After that he packed it with acid to try and burn out the infection and scraped the rest out with a scalpel. It hurt like a mother fucker.” The saddest part was that with every treatment he knew it was only getting worse. What held him back was that he knew he needed there. Being sent home simply wasn’t an option. He was twenty-one at this point. There would be weeks, two to three at a time, with nothing but a rucksack (hundred pound backpack), and a tent under the Afghan stars. No shower, no laundry, and no clean socks to change into. As soon as he got back to home base, the first thing he would do would be to shave down his feet.

A few months passed and Nick’s unit crossed paths with a Special Forces unit. An 18th Delta Special Forces Medic heard about his feet and asked to took a look at them. As Nick repeated, his first words were, “Holy fuck dude, I can’t believe you’ve made it this far.” The medic told him he needed surgery very soon and Nick told him that he didn’t care if they had to cut it off, he would be finishing this tour, and that he did. Nick returned home on leave and his first stop was to see his family instead of meeting with a surgical podiatrist. Each of his family members, including I, told him that this was something that needed to be treated as soon as possible. Upon meeting with the doctor, he went into surgery a few hours later.

The doctor knew this was serious. Nick was shocked that he was that high on the priority list. “It was weird. As soon as the doctor thanked me for my service and checked out the bottom of my feet, he pushed every other one of his patients to the left and I went to the right.”

After the surgery, Nick realized that the warts were each about the size of a dime with the exception of four that were the size of a quarter. What was even worse about the size of them was the depth. The surgeon had to cut all the way into the “white meat”, where they were able to cut without it bleeding. Giant holes, craters, were the only thing left, so he thought, in the foot. What was supposed to be a six week recovery quickly turned into so much more.

Nick told me, “The first thing I did after surgery was go to Chili’s. It was my first actual thing I was able to do now that I was back in the states besides being under the knife. I ordered a beer and it tasted great.” After eating out, he went back to the barracks in Savannah, Georgia and had a night’s rest in a real bed. When it was time to change the dressings on his foot, his friends were there to help him out. Each hole was stuffed with thick gauze to clot the bleeding and prevent infection. While sitting in a folding lawn chair, his friends pulled out the gauze and Nick collapsed the arms of the chair in agonizing pain. He soaked his feet in Epsom salts and prayed that they would stop throbbing. After six weeks they did and he had a check up appointment. The doctor told him that, unfortunately, this disease was in his blood and he would carry it for life.

He started running again and wasn’t experiencing any of the pain that he had been experiencing, so far. After a run one day he looked down and noticed they had started to grow back. The doctor apologized and said they hadn’t cut deep enough. Nick didn’t think that was possible, how was there any meat left on the bottom of his feet to grow back? But they had. Upon returning to the doctor, he was told that due to some “bad luck”, army insurance wasn’t about to pay for him to “go under the gas” again (receive anesthesia). There was another option. The doctor told him that without performing any surgery, the warts would spread even farther than they did last time. Nick opted for treatment while he was still awake because that was his only option. He only asked the doctor one follow up question, “Can I get drunk first?”

“I’m sorry bud, but I would rather you be sober for this one.”

It took three nurses and his best friend, Private First Class Bernett, to hold him down on the table. Six needles attempted to numb his feet but did not succeed in a way that local anesthetic would. The doctor took a tool that looked like an ice cream scoop to his feet and went to work. After scooping and digging out what he could, the wounds looked like hamburger. Nick knew that the recovery was going to suck even worse than the feeling of having the meaty part of the bottom of his feet scraped off. He was twenty-two at this point. As he recalled it, “They packaged me up and sent me home for two months. Because this was a secondary wound, it was going to take me twice as long to heal than the last one, which ended up being 6 months.”

While healing, Nick was using destructive behaviors as a form of coping. When he was supposed to be on bed-rest, he opted to go to clubs with his friends out of spite. He thought that his wellness was a mindset. For him, it was something he could adapt to and overcome like he did with most things in the military. His buddies would come over, help pack his craters with paper towels and gauze, get drunk, and go out dancing. He put the crutches in the closet and tried to pretend for a night that he was normal; he wanted to pretend like the war hadn’t gotten to him some way. He would wake up the next morning after a night out, in agonizing pain, unable to leave his apartment for days at a time. Each time he acted like this, he was delaying his recovering time although, eventually, he did recover.

At the medical “end” of his battle with the infectious warts, he was twenty-four. Five years were spent dealing with the consequence of not changing his socks, for reasons he couldn’t prevent, influencing his life in many ways. After surgery, there was no way that he was able to continue out his dreams of special forces selection, airborne school, or ranger school. While laid up after his second surgery, Nick also missed an opportunity to receive the rank of sergeant in three years time rather than five. He was unable to meet with the board of directors because he couldn’t get a dress shoe over the gauze. The board would only promote capable, healthy soldiers. They weren’t interested in limping ones.

The six months spent recovering were intense. From the platoon that returned, Nick was one of the few men whose physical ability was decreasing while everyone else was in the best shape of their life. Even though he was unable to walk without a severe limp, he realized that there were many others much worse than him.

Nick made it clear that, “We had guys that didn’t return. Some of my best friends didn’t get to see their baby girls again. We were all victims of the war. At least I made it back.”

Although he is unable to disclose some of the things he did and the some of the places he visited while deployed, he is aware that the foundation of who is, is shaped by those five years of a battle against the warts. Three years post-battle, at the age of 28, Nick can officially say that he has adapted and overcame his medical setback.

Currently, Nick is deployed and stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Iraq while employed by the government as an United States Mercenary. When he recovered, he came back stronger than ever. He had a point to prove. If anybody could do it, Nick would be the one to go from limping to sprinting in a matter of weeks, in which he did. He was running like he had just joined the military and was nineteen again.

Nick took on his struggle head on and became a stronger person because of it. He never looked at the warts as a big deal because there were other times on his deployment where it could have been much worse. While talking with him, he made it clear to me that there were countless situations that he may not have made it back.

Nick shared a flashback with me of a certain time that he and his battle buddy, Casey, were in a watch tower. When the watchtower was blown up upon being hit a grenade he was sure that would be the end. The condition of his feet wouldn’t have mattered if the grenade accomplished what it had intended. When the blood came running from his ears, Nick was just happy that Casey and he had made it out alive.

There were many times while Nick was overseas that he was very lucky. Although the health of his feet were and never will be 100% healed, he is thankful to be alive today and continue to give back to his country. As his sister, I am amazed to have seen him go from being on crutches for months to the man he is today. Watching someone so close to me persevere through such a hard time serves as inspiration for me and my family. His example reminds me on a daily basis how lucky I really am and why I should never give up on anything I do in my life. My parents and I are very proud of him and how he has adapted and overcame his situation.

Feet are the foundation of a soldier. Infantrymen (Nick’s official title at the time) are known to walk everywhere. A person’s posture starts at their feet and works its way up. It is difficult to build a strong man if he doesn’t have a strong foundation. If Nick wanted to continue in his line of work, it was essential that he overcame “grunt foot.” Without feet, a soldier is only good by horse.