News From the Cause
Double amputee happy to fill NCO leader role (LEDGER-ENQUIRER, COLUMBUS ,GA)
May 24, 2011
FORT BENNING, Ga. — Sgt. 1st Class Ray Castillo is again flourishing as a senior noncommissioned officer at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, Wash., but that almost didn’t seem possible two years ago.
That’s when his 10th combat deployment with the 75th Ranger Regiment resulted in a life-changing event on the dusty battlefield of northern Iraq. Today, he’s a double amputee — above the knees — but set to graduate next week from Fort Benning’s seven-week Maneuver Senior Leaders Course.
“Just because I lost my limbs doesn’t mean I can’t give my experience and my knowledge to other guys, (but) I understood eventually I was going to be behind a desk,” said Castillo, 30, of San Antonio, now an operations sergeant with 2nd Battalion. “There’s nothing I could’ve done about that. I still wanted to be in the military, I still wanted to contribute.”
The incident occurred Feb. 9, 2009, near Mosul. Castillo was a platoon sergeant with the regiment’s 2nd Battalion with the unit in pursuit of a high-value target. The Soldiers had dismounted and were approaching the objective on foot when they got ambushed.
A command-detonated improvised explosive device hit Castillo.
“It was real quick,” he recalled. “(The enemy) hid it really well in the ground. I got to that location, and it just went off. … I blacked out for a short period of time, but I remember the explosion going off and flying through the air.”
Covered in blood, Castillo went into shock. A platoon medic treated him at the scene and he got evacuated within a half-hour. On the ride to the hospital, he slipped in and out of consciousness.
“I was in so much pain,” he said. “I told my medic, ‘Hey, you need to give me something. I don’t care if you punch me in the face or whatever, but I’m in so much pain.’”
Castillo had multiple lacerations, including to his liver, spleen, intestines and right kidney. A lung was punctured in three different areas.
After the blast, when he was dragged to a stretcher, Castillo remembered looking down and seeing his right leg severed at the ankle. He figured he might lose part of one leg, but woke up from an induced coma about a month later at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., to find both gone. The infections had spread too quickly, doctors told him.
“I wasn’t expecting to see 70 percent of my legs gone,” he said. “Because of the infection, they had to keep cutting off more and more and more, because of all that bad stuff they have in the dirt over in Iraq.”
