The Shadow
DUBLIN, Ohio (AP) – Exercising in a hallway, Sean Clifton lets go.
Every step requires laser-like focus. His smile has faded, and his jokes are gone. The Army sergeant who calls Taliban forces “gangster dudes” has disappeared.
Clifton doesn’t have to be a husband here, a father or a soldier. At the Dublin Health Center, only his physical therapist is watching. He is simply a man trying not to fall.
He is weak, off balance. His therapist, David Singer, calls it “asymmetrical.”
“Walking can be a difficult task when one side of the body won’t work with the other,” Singer said. “Sean’s muscles are so weak that just to raise his leg and keep his foot from slamming right back down requires incredible work and will.”
At age 36, Clifton has come miles since bullets shattered his arm and shredded his insides, ripping through his sciatic nerve, damaging nearly all of his abdominal organs and rendering his right leg painful and nearly useless. But the journey to recover from a May 31 firefight in an Afghanistan village hasn’t been a solitary one.
Help has come in the form of Sarah, his devoted wife of seven years, and from his family and friends. It has come from the Ohio National Guard, doctors, nurses, neighbors and comrades.
And, most recently, it came from a stranger – a modest widower who had no idea how his woodworking hobby could affect people’s lives.
Jake Jacobsen lives alone in a house in Troy, near Dayton, that is full of furniture he has made. Curio cabinets he built are stuffed with knickknacks, the fruits of more than five decades of labor since he took his first shop class at an Iowa high school.
Bluebirds, cardinals, Santa Clauses – all become gifts. He has never sold a single item he has made.
Someone once offered him money for a Halloween decoration. Jacobsen gave it to the woman and asked her to donate whatever she thought it was worth to breast-cancer research. She surely had no idea that the disease had stolen the love of his life, Arlene, in 2002, after 36 years of marriage.
Jacobsen is 69, long retired from his job as a quality-assurance inspector at a defense supply center in Dayton. His fishing poles sit unused in a corner of his garage, and he rarely visits the local gun range anymore.
Those things have taken a back seat to what has become an obsession of sorts. Inspired by a story in a woodworking magazine, Jacobsen handcrafts canes for veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He has carved 28 as part of the Eagle Cane Project, a national effort that has put about 2,500 custom canes in the hands of wounded troops since Jack Nitz, a carver in Oklahoma, began recruiting volunteers in 2004.
Woodcarving groups participate in 29 states, including two groups in Ohio – Jacobsen’s, which meets in Huber Heights, and the other in Cincinnati.
Each cane features insignia and emblems that mean something to the soldier; and each has an elaborate eagle head.
Jacobsen spends 20 to 30 hours making just one cane. It keeps him off the streets, he says. But his voice breaks as he finishes the sentence: “…and I want the soldiers to know someone cares.”
Clifton, an Army intelligence officer with Company B, 2nd Battalion, 19th Special Forces Group of the Ohio National Guard, had completed one tour in Iraq when word came last year that he would ship out again, this time to Afghanistan.
With two sons at home – Stone, a newborn, and Seth, 2 – he and his wife prepared for his departure as best they could.
His wife was devastated when he left last November.
“I’d been the good military wife, and I’d always supported his missions,” she said. “But you go overseas once and you’re lucky to come home. You go twice? You’re just tempting fate.”
Her niece’s birthday party was in full swing at her parents’ home on May 31 when Sarah Clifton’s cell phone rang. It was just after 2 p.m. She didn’t recognize the number. She hesitated but answered anyway. She caught only snippets.
Mrs. Clifton? … your husband … don’t know much ….
She stepped into a quiet room where she could hear better. Her husband had been shot, a colonel told her. He was being flown to an air base in Germany. She should wait for another call.
Her sister heard her screams and saw her crumple to the laundry-room floor.
Jacobsen prefers to work without noise or distraction. Just the buzz of his band saw, the whir of his lathe.
More than a dozen cherry and ash cane shafts cover the spare bed in his home. An equal number of eagle heads in various stages of construction line the kitchen counter. The kitchen table holds paint brushes, empty pudding cups (great for cleaning brushes between colors) and a couple of those tools dentists use to scrape your teeth.
A “support the troops” magnet clings to the freezer door.
Jacobsen carves quickly, and mistakes become “modifications.” He’s an unlikely candidate for a woodcarver, in some respects. Fastidious to the nth degree, he carves the eagle heads under a homemade dust collector. At almost every work station in his home and garage, he has rigged some kind of vacuum to collect dust before it hits the floor.
Jacobsen supposes that this need for order comes from the four years he served in the Air Force “back in the Stone Age.” He monitored radios in a communication center in the basement of the Pentagon. He didn’t serve in a war, never had to fight. He never killed a man and didn’t take a bullet for his country.
“These guys in the military, they give so much,” he said. “They put themselves in harm’s way, and people don’t even stop them to shake their hands when they come home.
“I want these military guys to know someone supports them. Maybe my canes can help.”
It was about 3:30 p.m. on May 31 in Afghanistan when Clifton led a line of soldiers through a village. They snaked their way to a house where a suspected terrorist was having dinner.
Clifton tried to kick in the door. It didn’t open. He stepped back and kicked again.
The door gave way, and he hit a wall of gunfire.
“You know, it’s like, have you ever stood next to a big concert stereo speaker when it comes on full blast?” he said. “You can just feel this vibration, this energy pushing into you, moving you. That’s what it felt like to me. Blow after blow after blow.”
A 7.62-mm bullet from an AK-47 hit his chest – the body armor that stopped it still bears the mark – and another pinged off his helmet. A warm feeling oozing just under his waistband told him he’d been hit low, too.
“I wasn’t panicked. I thought I could make it out. I knew I could still back out, still live.”
Then, a round blew through his left wrist and forearm, the one that supported his M-4 rifle. The arm went limp; his weapon fell. And a soldier without a gun in a firefight is as good as dead.
“When I saw my arm drop, I thought of my boys. I’m going to leave them without a dad. And Sarah. My Sarah. How can I leave her?”
Then, his thoughts turned to himself: “What’s it going to be like to die? Was I good enough?”
When a veteran needs a cane, Jacobsen’s carving group gets an e-mail from the national program explaining how to personalize it, and that e-mail is forwarded to him. He makes the cane and ships it off. Most go to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.
This past summer, one e-mail caught his eye.
“I read about this soldier, a young father who was nearly killed, and he needed a cane,” Jacobsen said. “I saw he lived in Dublin, Ohio. That’s less than 100 miles from me. “For the first time since I started this, I wanted to meet him, to personally thank him for what he’s done.”
So, over the course of several days, Jacobsen worked. He carved more than 200 individual feathers on the eagle head, burned in each quill.
He put on all the things Sean Clifton had asked for – the Special Forces patches; the Combat Infantry Badge; a Purple Heart emblem; Clifton’s rank of staff sergeant; and “Lucky 13,” which is what his unit calls itself.
Jacobsen added the words Ghazni Province, where Clifton was wounded. Then he reread a second e-mail from Clifton that recounted his injuries and his multiple surgeries and his painful journey since coming home.
He hunted for something he could add, something meaningful to both of them. He found a passage from a poem, printed it out and glued it to the cane shaft:
To our men and women in uniform, past, present and future. God bless you and thank you.
Sean and Sarah Clifton returned home from Walter Reed in late August. Sarah Clifton had rarely left his side for three months and had done all she could to save her husband.
“I would show the nurses those pictures, and I’d say, ‘See, he’s a daddy. He has two boys.’ I thought maybe they’d work a little harder, maybe they’d try to save him just a little bit more.”
A few weeks after their return home, on a sunny September afternoon, Sean Clifton greeted Jacobsen on his front porch in Dublin. The meeting would be short; Clifton was tired after hours in therapy.
“How you doing, sir?” Clifton asked, extending his hand to the woodcarver. “It’s an honor.”
Jacobsen simply said hello.
Inside the house, Jacobsen was all business. He handed Clifton the cane and told him that he had been struck by Clifton’s positive attitude in his e-mails.
“I am so thankful for my life,” Clifton told him. “I didn’t lose my arms, so I can still hug my boys. Everything else? That’s just stuff. And the bad stuff? I’ll just beat it down with this cane.
“Yeah, I stay positive. This cane was made from the heart, and there’s no way to tell you how special it is.”
Clifton updated Jacobsen on his health. He has had 20 surgeries and will have at least six more. He will continue to heal and grow stronger. He hopes, in time, to return to his unit in the Guard.
The visit lasted less than 15 minutes. The men talked about getting together again, but both knew they wouldn’t. People get busy; life gets in the way.
Since the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Defense Department says, 31,483 U.S. service members have been wounded in hostile action.
Jacobsen bid Clifton goodbye. He had work to do.
