Female Soldier's Recovery Called a 'Miracle'

Dec. 4, 2004 — -- Jessica Clements never told her mother what it was really like Iraq.

She smiled in the pictures she sent home, and said nothing about the bombings or the bodies she saw.

"I think I was very vague," said 27-year-old Clements, an Army staff sergeant. "I never went into detail because I didn't want her to worry any more than I know she already would be."

Jessica's mother, Kim Wyatt, who works at an Ohio nursing home, was worried about her daughter but didn't fully realize the dangers she faced.

"Her letters were always upbeat," said Wyatt. "The only thing she told me was that it was really dirty. ... She was always, 'Fine, everything's going great.'"

Then came May 5.

Wyatt got the call at 10:30 that morning.

"I don't know who called me," she said. "I just remember the phone call, and he told me that Jess was injured in an accident, and I dropped the phone ... and took off running."

Clements' truck had been hit by a roadside bomb near Baghdad. She had taken shrapnel in her hip and back, and, much more serious, to the right side of the brain. She had been in Iraq just five months.

Lt. Col. Jeffrey Poffenbarger operated on Clements in Baghdad.

"The situation was fairly desperate," said Poffenbarger, a neurosurgeon normally based in San Antonio. "The bleeding was ongoing, the brain was swelling and I really had a lot of concern that potentially she might die on me on the operating table."