Lee Woodruff, Huffington Post, November 11, 2011

Debbie Schultz, Photo Credit Huffington Post

  On April 19, 2005, Debbie Schulz of Friendswood, Texas, got the call every parent of a service member in Iraq and Afghanistan dreads. Her child had been wounded. When she hung up the phone, in shock, all she knew was that her son was considered to be “VSI”, an acronym that she would later learn meant: “very seriously injured.”

More than 48 hours later Debbie began to learn some of the details. Her beloved eldest son, Steven Schulz, a Lance Corporal in the United States Marine Corps, had been patrolling Fallujah, Iraq when it happened. His unarmored humvee was hit by a roadside bomb, a mortar shell cleverly built into a concrete curb in order to elude detection. Insurgents remotely detonated the device and within the fraction of a second, thousands of pieces of shrapnel penetrated the vehicle. One piece of metal shrapnel flew into Steven’s face near his right eye and lodged in his brain. Doctors told the family that he had sustained a severe traumatic brain injury and devastating damage to his right eye. Steven was paralyzed on his left side, lost most vision in his right eye as well as peripheral vision in his left.  Read More