For many young men, fighting in the military to support your nation represents the utmost in virility. How cruel, then, that so many young soldiers are suffering from genital wounds! Because the war in Afghanistan’s biggest threat is the makeshift bombs called IED’s, and because medical technology has progressed greatly in recent decades, we are seeing more and more of these sorts of wounds. In the last decade, 34,360  Americans have been severely wounded by IEDs, and since 2005, 1,500 of them have suffered genital wounds.

“Who’s going to want to be with me now?” asked Marine Staff Sgt. Glen Silva, 39, who shattered his leg and lost most of his penis in an IED blast, as reported in the Huffington Post. After 42 surgeries, the marine wheeled back to his room to find a handwritten note from his girlfriend: “I can’t take this any more. I’m outta here.”

Mark Litynski’s wife was more understanding. Litynski, 23, was a rifleman with Lima Company. While walking behind an engineer sweeping for IEDs, one nevertheless went off and cost him his legs, left arm, penis, and testicles.

  

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“I’m so sorry,” he gasped over the phone to his wife, Heather.

“I love you,” she replied. “We will pull through this together, as a team.”

Walter Reed, the nation’s leading military hospital, wasn’t prepared for this unique injury. In previous wars, the head and chest were the targets of most wounds. But with the IEDs buried in the ground, torso armor is not protecting soldiers from being mutilated.

James Byler, 26, when he suffered an IED blast, recalls wondering first and foremost about his genitals.

“Its the male instinct,” he said. “The first thing you care about. In past wards, guys didn’t live if they got injured as badly as me, but we’ve gotten so good at the medevac process now that guys who are catastrophically wounded are surviving. Now you have all these further complications — like, you know, what’s going to happen with my genital wounds?'”