HOLCOMBE, Wis. — Mitch Bocik waddles to the putting green, legs bent and unsteady, putter doubling as a cane. For balance, his left hand grips the right shoulder of D.J. Engel, his half brother.
Enjoying a round of golf, the two are home from war, taking care of each other just as they did that dreadful day in Iraq when a roadside bomb blew apart their lives.
Bocik misses his 15-foot putt, leaving it short. Engel picks up the ball, helping again.
The 22-year-old Bocik is paralyzed from the knees down. Lucky, he says, to be alive and able to even crudely walk.
Engel, 26, deals with emotional scars — and some guilt. It was just months after he had encouraged his little brother to join the Army that he rushed to rescue him from a mangled Army vehicle, thinking he was probably dead.
Today, they live together in a new home in northern Wisconsin filled with modern conveniences, including a 55-inch flat-screen TV and big-boy toys like snowmobiles, and medals from their tour in Iraq. They are young men who have lived the horrors of war as Army Reservists called to active duty and are moving on together.
“We have gone through hell,” Engel says.
“Hell on earth,” Bocik agrees.
Bocik, once a high school basketball star, now goes daily for physical therapy to strengthen his legs and hopes to play wheelchair basketball. He would like to become a banker.
Engel works full time as a prison corrections officer, though he is preparing to go back to Iraq in November.
Bocik is one of about 30,000 U.S. military personnel who have been wounded in hostile action in Iraq since the beginning of the war in March 2003, according to the U.S. Defense Department. The casualties include more than 4,000 deaths.
The brothers’ journey to Iraq together began one night in Milwaukee, with some beers after they played basketball.
“You should join my unit. Go join the Army,” Engel recalls telling Bocik. “He just kind of looked at me and thought about it for a second and said, ‘OK.’ ” Within two minutes they had a plan.
They arrived together in Iraq in September 2006, assigned on missions to escort soldiers and search for roadside bombs.
In seven months, the brothers’ unit found 100 roadside bombs, including the one that hurt Bocik on May 15, 2007.
“We drove over it once, and they hit us coming back,” Bocik says. “I don’t remember any of it. I got knocked out.”
Engel ran to Bocik’s side. The younger brother muttered that he couldn’t feel his legs and, to keep him calm, Engel lied that it was just temporary — a stinger, like happens sometimes in football.
Bocik spent five months in hospitals. “They didn’t know if I was going to make it or not when I first got to Germany,” Bocik says.
The brothers reunited last September when Engel’s unit returned from Iraq.
Bocik is able to do some chores, like grocery shopping, while Engel can more easily vacuum, cook and carry things.
And they talk.
“It is like talking to shrinks when we talk back and forth to each other. We have been through so much,” Bocik says.
“I would go back in an instant if I could, especially if he was going over there. That would be a no-brainer,” Bocik says. “I don’t like it because there is always that chance he might not come back.”
