Controlling her destiny

By NOREEN HYSLOP

Managing Editor

A moment in time in 1991 when Bonnie Jacobs was in the worst possible place at the worst possible time will forever be etched in her mind. Recently, however, she found herself in the best possible place at the best possible time, and that moment as well has had a permanent impact on her life as a U.S. foreign war veteran.

It was Feb. 25, 1991. Jacobs was then Bonnie Covert, an LPN serving in the US Army. She and an Army buddy named Tony had made a trip that day from their outfield hospital post to Dahran to pick up some needed medical supplies. They were to spend the night at the 475th Quartermaster Group, an Army Reserve unit in Al Khobar, Saudi Arabia, and return to their makeshift tent hospital in the desert on the morning of the 26th. Jacobs was 35 years old and a 14-year career soldier. It was her first -- and last -- overseas tour of duty.

"It was just going to be a night's stay for us," she says of the night when everything in her life was changed.

"I don't remember anything at all about the scud missile hitting or the building being blown up. The last thing I recall is sitting on a cot and talking with Tony."

It was the most devastating Iraqi stroke of the Persian Gulf War. An Iraqi missile demolished the barracks that housed more than 100 American troops. Twenty-seven soldiers were killed and 98 were wounded -- among them was Bonnie (Covert) Jacobs. Witnesses to the event said they saw "a gigantic explosion" 100 feet off the ground, then another as bits of glowing metal fell to the ground and set fire to the barracks. Within an hour, the building was reduced to a charred skeleton. The attack was the first of the Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles to take a sizable number of lives.

Jacobs awoke in a hospital in Riyadh, the capital of Saudi Arabia. Her injuries were too severe to allow her to be transferred immediately.

She suffered severe head trauma -- a closed-head injury, meaning that the shrapnel that was imbedded in her head did not penetrate her brain. She had a temporal skull fracture, and shrapnel from the SCUD penetrated her back and right hip. One ear drum was totally blown away from the impact of the barrack's debris that slammed into her head. A long list of lifetime injury-related disorders would not become evident until months later, including memory, visual and balance issues, and headaches.

Her friend, Tony, did not survive.

"I was told later that he was found on top of me in the rubble," she recalls. "It will always be my belief that he was shielding me. It all happened so fast. I'll never know for sure."

Eventually, she was flown to Germany to be hospitalized there. Weeks later on a flight back to the states, the plane was forced to land in England because of pressure Bonnie was experiencing at the flying altitude. Eventually, she would return to the US, where she would spend 18 months hospitalized. And then there was rehabilitation. In 1995, she would marry the man of her dreams, with whom she credits living as normal a life as possible. Robert Jacobs, a career veteran himself and her husband of 17 years, would die in 2012 of cancer believed to be related to exposure to Agent Orange while he served in Vietnam as a young soldier in the 1960s.

In December 2013, Jacobs made the decision to move to Dexter from her former home in Georgia.

"I have family here, and I finally came to the realization that I just couldn't function entirely on my own any longer," she explains.

Her family, especially a brother, Jeff, with whom she now resides, helps Jacobs survive the day-to-day challenges that still exist as a result of her life-changing experience in Desert Storm. It was that brother who took her on a ride on a recent Saturday. They had decided to get out and pay a visit to the Stars and Stripes Museum in Bloomfield.

Looking over the vast number of military exhibits and recorded history secured over the years, Bonnie Jacobs found herself in the right place at the right time.

"My brother saw it first, and he called me over," she recalls of that day four months ago. "He said there was something I needed to see."

On display at the Stars and Stripes was a recently acquired relic -- a burned and twisted chunk of iron salvaged from the Khobor barracks where Jacobs' life was forever altered.

The piece, about a four-foot span, is encased in a glass display. A nearby placard describes the remains. It reads, "This is a piece from a rafter in the Khobor building that was hit by a scud missile on February 25, 1991, killing 28 servicemen. This was the single most deadly event for U.S. forces in Desert Storm."

"I was so moved and so emotional, I could hardly speak at first. I think I cried for awhile. How ironic that after more than 23 years, I'd come face to face with a piece of my history in Bloomfield, Missouri."

The piece was donated to the Bloomfield facility from Don Rice, a current resident of Ironton, who was working at the King Abdulaziz Airbase Hospital at the time the scud missile hit. After helping with the casualties at the barracks, he went back to the bomb site. He found the piece of wreckage symbolic in some ways, and decided to transport it back to the states.

"That particular piece caught my eye," he said when contacted recently, "not only due to its twisted mutilated status, but were it not associated with such a tragedy, it had esthetic elements."

Rice added, "I found it compelling that I salvage the piece and present it to a suitable location. To me it is most telling -- the sharpness of its innumerable blast surfaces the twisted aspect, the holes burnt through as if through butter."

Therapy in the

written word

In the early years following her injury and eventual rehabilitation, Jacobs found writing about her emotions therapeutic. In one journal entry she entitled, "Why am I so angry?" She described the torment she felt -- not from the physical pain and loss -- but for having survived the attack while others did not.

"I am really angry at myself for not dying in Saudi," she wrote. "I don't know why I lived and Tony died. I did not complete the job I was sent there to do. I failed by getting hurt. I do not want my head injury to be real. I have not accepted the fact that I was wounded and that my brain no longer works like it used to. It is unacceptable to me, totally unacceptable. I am angry that I was wounded. I am angry that my brain is damaged....Angry that it won't just go away as if it never happened. Angry that I can no longer pretend it is not real....I am damaged goods. Each day the rage consumes my soul until soon there will be nothing left of me..."

Through significant physical and emotional therapy, Bonnie Jacobs has come a long way since the years immediately following the blast in Desert Storm. She has fought a different battle stateside in her lengthy attempt to secure military disability. In spite of meticulously kept medical and service documentation, it was 1997 before word finally came that she "qualified" for a monetary compensation for her injuries.

Still, Bonnie Jacobs only looks forward. "It's faith that brought me this far," she says. "And it's that same faith that will keep me going."

"It is not about me anymore," she concludes. "It's about all those young servicemen and women who are fighting the battle now. "That should be our focus now," she says. "We've got to remember them every day."