Injured soldier gets new face — and anonymity

updated 12:10 p.m. ET April 26, 2009

SAN ANTONIO - His first glimpse in the mirror was largely a blur.

Sgt. Darron Mikeworth had just come out of a drug-induced coma — his mind was still in a fog and he was so weak he could barely stand.

Three weeks before, in Iraq, a suicide bomber had raced up to the right side of his Humvee, igniting a barrel of explosives that tore into the machine gunner's face. He nearly died.

Mikeworth awoke in a hospital bed, thousands of miles away.

He was relieved he still had his arms and legs. He was thrilled, too, that his ears had survived the blast. But he had wounds he could not see, life-changing wounds. His wife, Dea, helped break the news: His face was in bad shape. His left eye was useless.

And there was more.

At first, Mikeworth was too groggy to absorb it all. He was caught up in hallucinations of basketball players shooting hoops in the hospital, of cars on the highway floating in air. He didn't know what was fantasy and what wasn't — until he shuffled into the physical therapy room and stood numbly before a full-length mirror.

"I just had to keep telling myself I'm NOT going to wake up out of this one," he says. "THIS is not a dream. THIS is real."

Eric Gay / AP Sgt. Darron Mikeworth, center, spends time with his sons Ryan, 7, left, and Connor, 6, in San Antonio. Mikeworth lost an eye, his nose, and broke every bone in his face when he was attacked by a suicide bomber in 2005 in Iraq.

His head was one giant purple bruise, his eyelids were nearly swollen shut. His left eye had been removed (he'd given his OK from his hospital bed.) His eyelashes and most of his eyebrows were singed off; so, too, was his hair halfway back on his scalp. His nose was mostly gone, just a sliver of cartilage remaining; skeletal-like bones revealed his sinuses. His top right lip was curled into a snarl, making it impossible to close his mouth. His right jaw was torn. His bottom teeth, loosened by the blast, were wired together.

His face — every bone has been shattered — was splattered with pinkish third-degree burns.

"I could have just flipped out," he says, pausing to remember. "But I looked in the mirror and said, all right, there's no changing it. I just have to deal with it. This is me now."

Darron Mikeworth's face was his identity.

So, too, was his life as a soldier.

He was about to embark on a long journey to regain both.

Operation Mend
Sgt. Mikeworth, the warrior, will tell you he is the same man he was Before The Bomb.

The 32-year-old soldier who served two stints in Iraq (and two more in Kosovo and the Sinai) still wants to take down the bad guys, still thrives on being a cog in the big Army machine.

But Sgt. Mikeworth, the survivor, also knows that no matter how much he heals, he'll forever be defined, in some way, by what happened near Baghdad on April 29, 2005.

"I'm going to be ‘the blown-up guy’ wherever I go," he says. "Anytime I walk into a room, I just know I'm going to be different looking and I'm going to be perceived differently."

Mikeworth knew with the severity of his wounds there was no way doctors could turn back the clock. The smile his wife adored, the laser-like vision he was proud of, the slender face that was uniquely his — they were gone for good. He refused then — as he does now — to dwell on the losses.

"I see guys with injuries five times worse than what I have," he says.

"I have no reason to feel sorry for myself. I could be in a box underground somewhere. Every day above ground is a GOOD day."

But he needed to become himself again, so that he at least would recognize the face in the mirror and so that the people he encountered would see him as a man, not as a victim.

That's where Operation Mend came in.

A one-of-kind partnership between the UCLA Medical Center and Brooke Army Medical Center — the military's main hospital for burn patients — the program provides reconstructive surgery to members of the military who've been severely disfigured in Iraq and Afghanistan. So far, 24 men and women have been treated.

Mikeworth is now nearing the end of his surgeries.

His road to recovery is a war story that has been part medical marvel, part profile in courage — the stalwart soldier who rebuilds his confidence as doctors rebuild his face.

All along, as UCLA surgeons have tucked and trimmed, adding a bit of cartilage here, a flap of skin there, Mikeworth has yearned to return to the simple routines in life, dreaming of the day when he could:

Pick up his two sons without worrying he'd scare their classmates.

Walk around the mall without turning heads.

Be a face, not THE face, in the crowd.

‘He's never going to look the same’
"Is your husband a vain man?" the nurse asked Dea Mikeworth.

No, Dea replied. This was a day in May, 2005, and she was still reeling from seeing Darron's bruised, swollen face for the first time. His head was twice its normal size.

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"That's good," she was told. "He'll have an easier time adjusting. He's never going to look the same."

Dea knew instantly what would bother Darron most: Half his vision was gone. His features were mangled. People would stare.

She knew, too, how hard that would be for Darron, an introvert who preferred the sidelines to the spotlight, a soldier who'd rather slip into a room, do his job, then slip out quietly.

"I used to like to be able to stand in the back of the crowd and not be noticed," he explains. "I like to be anonymous."

Suddenly, he was the center of attention, and often not in a good way.

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