Corporal Jason Poole (L) spending time with a fellow Marine veteran (R)
He doesn’t remember the IED exploding.
He remembers one thing, which probably saved his life: He had just turned his head to tell the two Iraqi guards with him to move farther back. The IED was designed to kill immediately. And it did. The two guards, along with the squad’s interpreter, died instantly.
Twenty-one-year-old Corporal Jason Poole lived. Just barely. A piece of shrapnel entered behind his left ear and exited his right eye. Along the way it fractured his skull, broke every bone in his face and shattered his eye sockets.
It was June 30, 2004, and he was on his second tour of Iraq, just 10 days before he was to leave the Marine Corps.
“I literally have no words to say how dangerous it was,” Poole said.
It was his third deployment. His first, which he referred to as “cool,” was on a ship that went to Australia, Thailand and Hawaii. After returning stateside to Camp Pendleton in San Diego County, California, for training, he and his squad watched on the TV as the Twin Towers fell on 9/11.
“We knew then we were going to war,” Poole said.
Corporal Jason Poole serving his second tour of duty in Iraq, circa 2004
In 2002, he served in Kuwait for nine months.
After those two deployments, his squad was waiting to be released from service. But the military had other plans. A few of them were “voluntold,” as he describes it, to be deployed to the Iraq and Syrian border. And that’s where he was forever changed.
Following the explosion, Poole was transported by helicopter to Baghdad, then to Germany and, finally, to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. During the transport, his arm had swollen to three times its normal size. The doctor had to cut the arm open to reduce the swelling. Today, he has two large scars running the length of his arm.
He was in a coma for eight weeks when the doctor approached Poole’s parents and asked if they wanted “to pull the plug.”
“My dad said, ‘I’d like to wait another week,’” Poole said.
Four days later, Poole woke up to the sound of his twin sister, Lisa, crying.
“After I woke up, I couldn’t talk for an entire year,” Poole said. “All I could do was thumbs-up or thumbs-down. Before the accident I was very independent, but then I was smashed, and I knew I needed help. I looked in the mirror, and in my head I knew I was Jason. I knew I had to work harder than ever.”
Corporal Jason Poole receiving a military distinction while at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center
Twenty-two years later, Poole, 43, has undergone 14 surgeries and thousands of hours of physical, speech and occupational therapy to relearn how to walk, talk, eat and use his new face. Poole is now blind and deaf on his left side, extremely weak on his right, walks with a cane and experiences short-term memory loss. He has a 24/7 ringing in his left ear.
He is thankful every day for two things: his wife, Angela, and the dual citizenship he was granted for his wartime service. Poole, who was born in Bristol, England, didn’t move to the U.S. until he was 12. He’s extremely proud to be an American citizen. To celebrate his dual citizenship, he has a Union Jack and American flag tattooed on his left arm.
Poole felt he needed a bit more discipline after high school, so he joined the Marines to make something of himself. He has advice for anyone considering joining the military.
“Think carefully about what you actually want to do when you join. Be cautious. The infantry is a gamble, whether we are at peace or war. The military makes you grow up.”
Poole is currently medically retired and volunteers in sports every summer. He and his wife, who married in 2010, have a wonderful home in Helena, where they live with their three dogs. Remarkably, one of his Marine buddies lives right down the street from him.
And as for his new face?
“Kids make me feel a lot better than adults do when they see it,” he said. “Adults just look at me and stare. I wish they would ask what happened, but they don’t. With the little kids, they ask and I tell them I got blown up and blah, blah. And then, we get along great.”
