“DO YOU MIND if I sit here?”

The voice was deep, and the words, in their unusually slow cadence, hung in the air. Cherie looked up at the lean young man holding a cafeteria tray. He was handsome, with rugged chiseled features, but it wasn’t really his appearance that caused her to stare at him for a long moment before speaking.

“There was just something about him,” she would say later. “A connection. It was like I always knew him.” 

“No, go right ahead,” she finally said, amused.

“There were a thousand other places to sit,” she would later recall. Before he spoke again she knew she would marry him. 

It was the first week of October 1967. Steve Rodgers and Cherie Barlow were beginning their freshmen year at the University of Montana at Missoula. 

Already Cherie felt overwhelmed by the teeming metropolis of thirty thousand.

“Where are you from?” Cherie asked Steve.

“Sunnyvale.” 

“Sunnyvale?” she said. “How many people are in Sunnyvale?”

“Oh, fifty thousand.”

“Fifty thousand? I don’t know of any town in Montana that has fifty thousand people in it,” she protested.

He chuckled. “No, it’s California!” 

Cherie didn’t think she had ever met anybody from out of state before. They shared a belly laugh. 

After they married, two years later, Cherie gave up her scholarship and dropped out of school. She took a job at a SuperAmerica convenience store to support Steve while he finished college on an ROTC scholarship. They dined on C-rations, purchased for fifty cents a can at Ranger Joe’s, a Missoula surplus store. 

Upon graduation, Steve was commissioned as a shiny new infantry second lieutenant. The couple moved to Fort Benning, Georgia, where Steve went through the Army’s Airborne Ranger School. 

There, in a recreational program offered to spouses, Cherie took a jump class. She packed her own chute, a Dash One model with steering vents. And one summer morning she and Nettie McPherson, the wife of a Green Beret captain, boarded a Huey helicopter. The machine climbed to ten thousand feet over the St. Mere-Eglise jump area, named after the first Normandy town liberated by Airborne Rangers on D Day. Five HALO—High Altitude, Low Opening—Green Berets leaped out for a freefall. Then the aircraft peeled away and smartly descended to five thousand feet for Cherie and her partner to make their static line jumps. 

Nettie was having second thoughts. “I don’t know if I can do this!” she yelled in her Arkansas accent over the roar of the engine. 

“I’ll go first!” Cherie shouted back. “Wait and see if my chute opens!” She rolled backward out of the aircraft into the rotor wash and plummeted. The last thing she saw before tumbling into the abyss was Nettie’s long pink fingernails trembling in fear. 

A memory arose of an old Indian, “Curly Walt,” who once asked Cherie what she wanted to be when she grew up. When she answered, “a bird,” he seemed to approve. “I wish you could see this,” thought Cherie.

Just before impact, she yanked on her toggles and made an effortless stand-up landing in a soft puff of red dust. She immediately repacked her chute and jumped again. 

Steve nicknamed her Bird Woman


.
Proud family, spring 1983: in Germany Steve was promoted to major.


STEVE RODGERS was a fitness fanatic. On Saturday mornings he would hike fifty miles, packing eighty pounds of rocks, in order to stay in shape. At five feet ten inches tall and a hundred and sixty pounds, he had the classic commando’s build, without an ounce of excess fat. He easily passed the Army’s rigorous Delta Force physical, and he waited to begin training with the elite antiterrorist unit. It was 1984, the height of the Cold War, and he was working on a NATO exercise called “Operation Re-Forager.”

One morning in late summer, Cherie and her husband were seated at their breakfast table in Goeppingen, Germany, where they were stationed, when he told her of a strange experience he’d been having. While standing in the field, listening to a briefing, he found suddenly that he couldn’t walk or talk. For about twenty seconds the voices around him were scrambled. That happened five days in a row.

A CAT scan revealed an egg-sized brain tumor in his left temporal lobe. 
A cloud of sadness and fear settled over Steve and Cherie. Until now, they thought they had their whole lives, and their children’s lives, ahead of them.

They took the children to their favorite playground, a fairytale-themed park. There, sitting amid wooden cutouts of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the kids learned that Daddy had to go to the hospital for a few days so the doctor could fix a hurt in his head. Only the oldest, 8-year-old Nicole, had a general appreciation of the announcement, which was tempered with good news. Grandma Arlene was coming to watch them while Mommy and Daddy went away. Grandma was a big kid herself, and she cooked good food, and she told good stories. All three kids were excited.

The couple checked into a small room near the Landstuhl hospital — nothing more than a bed and a bathroom — reserved for patients’ relatives. Cherie would be able to stay there until Steve was discharged in a week. 

“I want you to know something,” Steve told her three days before the surgery. “If something happens and I don’t make it through this, if there’s any way possible, I’ll come back to you.”

Cherie brushed off the uncharacteristic comment. “Oh, you’re just nervous because you’ve never had surgery before. Everybody has thoughts like that. Everything’s going to be fine.”

She was waiting in the hall next morning when a nurse wheeled Steve’s bed toward the operating room. Even flat on his back in a hospital gown, he was the handsome, square-jawed recruiting poster image of a U.S. Army Ranger. It was impossible to believe he was sick. 

A nurse handed Cherie a small green plastic bowl with Steve’s wallet, keys, and black horn-rimmed glasses. 

“I love you,” he told her. She could tell he was sedated. 

“I love the kids. Tell them that… Hang onto my watch. I’ll want it as soon as I come out.”

Major Rodgers was never late anywhere, and the watch was like an extension of his body. It was shockproof, waterproof, and it glowed in the dark like a green ingot. 

“This is the only time I’ve ever seen you without it,” Cherie quipped. They both laughed. 

They kissed, and Steve disappeared through the swinging doors. 

In three hours it’ll be over, Cherie reassured herself as she took a chair in the waiting room. Then she would make the four-hour drive home to Goeppingen to tell her mother and the children how the surgery went.

After four hours, at 11:00 a.m., a nurse reported that the operation had been delayed because of a surgical backlog. Everything was fine.

Noon came and went with no news. Cherie’s attention was glued to the clock on the wall, an irony, because all her life she had refused to let timepieces rule her. The minutes and the hours made their solemn rounds. One o’clock, two o’clock, three o’clock, four o’clock, five o’clock. 

At six o’clock the surgeon, Dr. Swengel, appeared. 

His expression was dark.

“I am so sorry,” he blurted.

Cherie steeled herself.

“The surgery was going fine,” he began, then detailed the nightmare that was to engulf Cherie’s life. He had found stage-two astrocytoma. “I scraped it out. In my book, I got it all.”

But then, just as Swengel was completing the operation, the patient started coming out of the anesthetic. It was too soon. Steve choked on the tracheotomy tube. That caused him to cough violently, which triggered a massive stroke. 

In the space of a few moments, the drama of Major Rodgers’s life had plunged from a serious but manageable threat of cancer to a deep coma. 

The brain damage was irreversible.

When she was finally allowed to see her husband three hours later, at 9 p.m., Cherie found him curled in a fetal position. Two tubes snaked into his mouth, two into his nose. Electrodes were plastered all over his torso. Steve’s face, chest, and arms were crimson and splotchy, as though he had been scalded. Most of his skull was shaved, revealing an ugly eight-inch gash and large black stitches. The only part of Steve’s face Cherie recognized was his chin. The rest was bruised and distended. His eyes were swollen shut. 

Just the day before, Steve and Cherie had enjoyed a normal lunch together at a German café. The picture of vibrant health, Steve had devoured a breaded pork cutlet as though he hadn’t a care in the world.

Cherie felt herself go numb. 
Beside her the muffled voice of Dr. Swengel kept repeating, “I am so sorry.

I am so sorry.”
“What’s that?” asked Cherie, pointing to the lurid rash on her husband’s body.

“He had an allergic reaction to the Dilantin.” 

Cherie stared at the doctor incredulously. “He told you he was allergic to Dilantin.” 

“I know, but it is so rare,” Swengel responded. “You’ll have to excuse me. I have another surgery in the morning, and I have to rest up.” 

With that he disappeared, leaving Cherie alone with the battered form on the bed. The words “chronic vegetative state” were written on Steve’s chart.  

A surgical nurse appeared at her elbow. “You’ll have to go now,” she said. “You can come back in the morning, but you’ll only be able to see him five minutes a day. We have to minimize the risk of infection.” 

Cherie didn’t remember returning to her room. The next thing she knew she was sprawled on the bed, her head buried in a pillow to muffle her cries.

Continued in Part 2