Disfigured soldier speaks out in Las Vegas for veterans suffering pain, injuries
The standing ovation for retired Army Staff Sgt. Shilo Harris was so long and loud that he pulled his ears off — the artificial ones doctors had made for him during his long road to recovery from a bomb blast in Iraq.
The impromptu act was an ice-breaker for this 40-year-old soldier, disfigured by burns that nearly killed him eight years ago. He charmed the audience of a few thousand at the Foundation for Chiropractic Progress’ Parker Seminar who stood and clapped. Tears welled up in the eyes of some when he walked across the stage Jan. 30 at Mandalay Bay’s convention center.
“I thought I’d pull my ears off first, but I was almost ready to cry,” he said as he popped his prosthetic ears back in place.
“Instead of tears, let’s go back to laughing and stuff. Ready to turn up the volume?” he asked.
With that, he spent more than 10 minutes telling his story about the deadly explosion Feb. 19, 2007, in Baghdad. The blast from 700 pounds of explosives buried in the road shredded his Humvee and killed three of his buddies — Sgt. Shawn M. Dunkin, Pfc. Matthew C. Bowe and Pfc. Adare W. Cleveland.
It was that experience and another near-death accident in his home state of Texas, where his car was rear-ended by a big truck that launched him on his crusade for the nonprofit Patriot Project. The project aims to heal veterans through chiropractic techniques and nutrition instead of relying on pain pills and mood-changing drugs that Harris and his doctor blame for the high rate of suicide among veterans.
“It just demolished that vehicle like it was a toy,” he said, recalling how he struggled to get out. “I’m standing there taking in all this carnage around me. My body armor is on fire. It’s running down my legs.”
Another soldier “ran up and grabbed me. He’s shielding me with his body and I hear a ‘pop’ and a ‘zing,’ right by my head. The bullets inside my Humvee were clicking off.”
Soldiers in the convoy rushed to his side to check his injuries, including his roommate who is “kind of straddling over me, looking down.”
“I get a glimpse of the reflection in his glasses,” Harris said. “My face was charred black. My nose was pretty much gone. My ears were pretty much gone. I had blood running out of my nose, my mouth, my eyes, my ears. I couldn’t imagine that was me I was seeing in that reflection.”
He was flown by helicopter to Baghdad’s Green Zone, then transported to medical centers, first in Landstuhl, Germany, then in San Antonio. His life hung in the balance during a medically induced coma for 48 days, and he spent three years in surgeries and recovery.
He was wrapping up his book, “Steel Will: My Journey through Hell to Become the Man I was Meant to Be,” when the truck accident happened.
“In 2012, I really felt like I was on the right track. I was able to start moving forward, moving in the right direction, and out of the blue I got rear-ended by a semi. It practically crippled me,” he said.
He credits Dr. Timothy P. Novelli, a chiropractor from North Canton, Ohio, who specializes in neuromuscular and skeletal injuries and has provided care for the Cleveland Browns and Olympic athletes, for saving his life.
“For three days, they put their hands on me and gave me my life back,” Harris said.
Harris recalled the pain and depression and Novelli’s efforts to relieve his pain and cure his injuries. “I couldn’t stand for very long. I couldn’t walk very far. It was all these things that I felt like I was back in the hospital again.”
He said Novelli’s team was “finding things wrong with me from my first appointment: a rib out here, this was messed up, that was messed up. They put my hips back in place. When I left after those three days I hadn’t felt that good since 2003.”
Novelli said the military and the Department of Veterans Affairs need to set a new course for treating troops and veterans with lingering injuries, putting more emphasis on chiropractics.
“Currently, the United States military global complex in all their hospitals, in all their clinics and all their bases have about 50 chiropractors that are subcontracted,” Novelli said. “We have almost 800 (in the Patriot Project), and we’re woefully short.”
“They really don’t have chiropractic care. Some of them have to wait six weeks, eight weeks, and in the meantime, they’re given drugs. It’s more cycle of addiction, more cycle of misery,” he said.
Retired Brig. Gen. Rebecca Halstead backed up Novelli’s perspective. The first woman out of West Point to achieve the one-star rank, she commanded troops in Iraq and served 27 years in the Army but was forced into retirement due to chronic fibromyalgia, a soft-tissue disease that attacks nerves around the skeletal-muscular system.
“I was on 15 prescription drugs in the military, and today I’m on zero,” she said, describing how Dr. Carol Ann Malizia helped her find a holistic solution to her chronic pain through whole food supplements and routine chiropractic treatment.
Like what has happened in professional sports with chiropractors now present on the sidelines, Novelli predicts the same will happen with the military and the VA.
“It’s the athletes themselves that insisted our inclusion, and now it’s going to be the soldiers, the Marines, the airmen who are going to insist on our inclusion in the military,” he said.
“We can never compete with the money and the dollars that the pharmaceutical companies spend, the AMA (American Medical Association) spends, but we have an Army growing, and it’s growing from a real Army, from real Marines, who are saying we insist on this for us and for our families. … To this day, not one chiropractor has ever been commissioned in the United States military. That is a crime because they need us.”
Contact Keith Rogers at krogers@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0308. Find him on Twitter: @KeithRogers2.
