Abdul-Razik is walking on his newly created prosthesis for the very first time. Feeling the motion of his new knee and foot with every step is something he never thought he would do again.
Abdul-Razik was a soldier in the Afghan Army when he was injured in battle in 2019. But, two American surgeons came to his rescue. One of them was Commander Edwin Ladd Jones, “I am 100-percent sure that I have not operated on one patient more than I have operated on Abdul-Razik… You just develop a bond, you see him everyday day few times a day.”
Abdul-Razik talked about his experience with the help of a translator saying, “When I was shot I was feeling upset and Dr. Jones and Dr. Nick helped me out. When I was shot in the leg, it was impossible for them to fix the leg.”
While the pair operated on his leg, they couldn’t save it. Abdul saying, “I felt that I was missing half my life and I couldn’t do work, and I was missing too much.”
Abdul-Razik and his family arrived at Camp Randall in Wisconsin after the U.S. pulled out of Afghanistan, and even though he never saw his doctors again he said he never forgot them.
“I was feeling great about it, they reached their hand to me in a difficult situation,” said Abdul.
Jones adding, “Our whole experience on the deployment was just an unbelievably gratifying experience.”
The greatest heroes are those who do their duty in the daily grind of domestic affairs whilst the world whirls as a maddening dreidel.