Man of steel: Tan turned down computerized legs in favor of mechanical ones because, he says, he didn't want the computer thinking for him.
Three decades after his mother's near-death ordeal in Cambodia's killing fields, Pisey Tan lost his legs in Iraq. He has no regrets.
By Cassidy Hartmann
The Philadelphia Weekly
Posted Jan. 17, 2007
To understand Pisey Tan (pictured) you'd have to know his mother. And to understand her you'd have to know something about cost.
You'd have to know the cost of war, and what can happen when a country turns upon itself in limitless bloodthirsty hatred. You'd have to know the cost of life, of your own pounding heart and that of the unborn child inside of you. And you'd have to know the cost of freedom, what it means to fight and die for it, and especially what it means to survive.
For these things Bo Mao and Pisey Tan have paid what to most would be an unthinkable price. To them, it's a matter of honor.
"I can't tell you everything about my mother because her life has been worse than mine," says 26-year-old Pisey, sitting on the couch in the Olney row home where he's lived since his family moved from South Philadelphia when he was 11. "She's done a lot more in life than a lot of people here can ever do or see."
Pisey's mother Bo is a Cambodian immigrant. She arrived in this country in 1980, a refugee of the Vietnam War and of the Khmer Rouge, the rebel organization that tore through Cambodia in the late '70s, murdering about 17 percent of the population. Bo was able to escape to the U.S. when she was 20 years old and four months pregnant with Pisey, the first of her two sons.
Now relaxing in her modest, dimly lit living room after a long day of supervising industrial battery manufacturing at Philadelphia Scientific, she's telling the story of her life.
Bo is petite and quiet--the latter a result of her tentative English, not for lack of something to say. She pauses frequently when talking, searching for words to describe the horrors she's experienced.
Occasionally Pisey, who speaks Cambodian, fills in the gaps or helps with translations.
"My mother spends so much time thinking of the words, she forgets parts of the story," he says. He's heard the stories before, but with each telling Bo mentions something new.
She speaks of days without food, of being separated from her family, of working in child labor camps and of seeing other children shot or starved to death. But it's not until she gets to Pisey's story that she starts to cry.
A year and a half ago Pisey Tan, a powerful bear of a man, was at the wheel of an M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle in Iraq when it was ambushed by gunfire and hit by an improvised explosive device.
Though severely injured, Pisey remained conscious until doctors at a medical checkpoint put him under anesthesia. He woke up in the ICU at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., three days later, and looked down to discover he was missing both his legs.
"I didn't realize where I was, but I did see my legs wrapped up in bandages," he remembers. "That was when I just broke down. I just couldn't believe what had happened to me."
When he first woke up on Aug. 9, 2005, he was alone in the ICU. "I thought it was all a dream, but it was there. And I just lost it. I lost my sanity right then and there. Just thinking, 'What am I gonna do now? I don't want to be a burden for people to take care of me. I don't like that. What are my finances going to be?' During the Vietnam era, some of these people were out on the street. I was terrified."
A day earlier, when Pisey lay unconscious at a military base in Landstuhl, Germany, an Army general called his home in Olney. Pisey's 21-year-old brother Dara answered the phone, and the general asked for Pisey's next of kin. Dara explained his mother was at work and spoke poor English, but the man refused to provide information until she could be reached.
"At that point," Dara says, "I thought we'd lost him."
The general called Bo at work.
I said, 'I don't speak no English,'" Bo recalls, dabbing tears from the corners of her eyes. "So they called Dara, and Dara translate for me. They said they had to cut off the legs. And I almost fell down. I felt like I lost everything in my mind. And I just screamed, cried. If I lost my body, it's better than losing my son's, you know?"
Dara and Bo drove down to Washington, where they'd stay for the next three months. Pisey would remain there just shy of a year.
Man of steel: Tan turned down computerized legs in favor of mechanical ones because, he says, he didn't want the computer thinking for him.
Both Pisey's and Bo's lives have been propelled by war. Wars that left scars--both physical and mental--that will never heal. But Pisey and Bo feel no bitterness.
"My culture deals a lot with pride and honor and giving back," says Pisey, who now walks on two titanium and steel prosthetic legs, one extending above the knee and one just below. "One of the biggest reasons why I joined the military was I wanted to bring pride and honor to my family."
Pisey says he doesn't regret joining the Army or his two tours serving in the most dangerous parts of Iraq.
"This country's given so much to my mother," he says. "When I hear about what she's done, where she's been, it helps me realize it's time for me to give back. I'm just trying to make my mother proud and be happy of who she is and what she's done."
When Bo Mao was 16, the Khmer Rouge forced her to work as a slave. She distilled salt, worked as a seamstress and eventually wound up on a coconut farm. She was allowed to visit her family, who were farmers, two or three days a year.
Bo was working on the coconut farm in 1978 when neighboring Vietnam invaded Cambodia. When the fighting started, she was rounded up with hundreds of other children her age and forced to make a grueling journey that would continue for two years.
Bo was herded onto a boat and taken to a small island where she and the other children were without food for two days. "Everybody was sick because we had no food and seasickness. [The Vietnamese] wanted to sink the boat with like 500 kids in there," says Bo, who was taken back to the mainland, where she walked, day and night, in a line with hundreds of children. They didn't know their destination.
"You just go because the Vietnamese [were coming]," she says. "You keep moving. If you don't go, they kill you. We went back to the mountains. I stayed long in the mountains, and too many people died there. There was no food. We just ate grass, nuts, picked some leaves from trees."
She remained in the mountains--working during the day and sleeping on a towel in the bushes--for four or five months under the watch of several armed adult leaders.
"We had rice, but like 100 people stand in line for a can of rice. You put the bowl out and you see only water. So you get some leaves to cook it with, and just eat. And after, you'd get diarrhea. You got sick. That's why most kids died. Some kids ate poisonous mushrooms because they were so hungry. They died too," she says, running her finger over the back of her hand. "Blood comes from their hairs."
Bo tried to escape, once making it across the river to Thailand before the Thai military started capturing Cambodians and sending them back across the border. At one point she and another teenage girl were stealing corn from a Thai field when a soldier opened fire on them. The girl behind her fell, and Bo kept running.
Life went on like this until 1980, when Bo finally found her way across the border for good, this time to a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand. There she met her first husband and became pregnant with Pisey. Four months later she was on a plane to the United States.
Mother country: Bo Mao says she's proud her son Pisey loves his country, and that she'd serve in the U.S. military if she could.
I went back to high school not just because the schools were better [in New Jersey], but my mother asked me to," says Pisey, explaining why he graduated from another school after dropping out of Lincoln High in 1998. "She really wanted me not to be a statistic around here. A lot of people in my cultural neighborhood, they don't finish high school. I would say me, my brother and my cousin are probably the only ones that graduated."
Pisey, who often wears a white cut-off shirt and jeans, his tattoos and chains on full display, spent most of his early years on the streets of South Philadelphia. His father had abandoned the family by the time he was born, and his mother found a house at Fifth and Pierce streets, in the heart of a burgeoning Cambodian community. It was a close-knit neighborhood, and Pisey still refers to some of his former neighbors as "uncle" and "cousin."
It was also a rough neighborhood, and by the time Pisey started high school, he was headed for trouble.
"I did drugs and alcohol--a lot of bad stuff," he says. "I was a terrible person back then."
He had a hard time getting motivated at Lincoln. No one seemed to care whether he even showed up. He made friends with the school's security guards, and they often let him leave campus in the middle of the day. Then at 15, he dropped out.
He started working at ASK Plastics in the Northeast, sometimes working 16-hour days.
"That's how I was raised and how I saw workin' ain't easy," he says, smiling. At his mother's urging, he eventually went to live with a family friend so he could finish high school in New Jersey. He graduated from Williamstown High School in Gloucester County in 2000, and started looking for bigger challenges.
"While I was in high school I said I'd never, ever join the military--never," he says. "But talking to my uncle, he convinced me. People always thought I was a big failure. But I wanted to give back for everything that's been given to my mother, so I didn't mind just walking into the recruitment office and talking about it."
He signed the contract to enlist, and began his first tour in January 2003. He was among the first wave of troops to enter Iraq two months later.
"We waited for President Bush's word," he says. "When we got the word the whole entire sky lit up like the Fourth of July, but it was all rockets and missiles."
The earth shook under the weight of tanks plowing across the desert.
"We all had our heads down, and we said our words and went into action that night. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time," he says.
Pisey fought for a month in the desert, where temperatures reached up to 140 degrees during the day and plummeted at night. He didn't shower for a month. He took his first bath in Iraq in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.
"People would come up; they'd cheer. As soon as they see us coming through the city, everybody's jumping for joy because we helped out a lot of people," he says of Baghdad in the days immediately following the overthrow. "We didn't ever think about the bad stuff because that's what's going to eat you and kill you inside. We don't think about the deaths, the accidents and stuff like that."
During that first tour of duty, Pisey's gunner Timothy Brophy saved Pisey's life by protecting his side of the vehicle with gunfire when they were ambushed on a Baghdad road. Neither of them imagined that a year later Brophy would have to save him again.
Bo and Pisey were overwhelmed with emotion upon seeing their new house.
"The day of my accident was Aug. 6, 2005. We went out on patrol to show people we were still there," Pisey says coolly, as if talking about the most routine of events. "Some of the people, they really didn't want us there."
By the time Pisey's unit was sent back to Iraq for a second tour in January 2005, the mood in the country had changed dramatically. He was sent to Samarra, the heart of the Sunni Triangle, where he again drove a Bradley vehicle on patrols. But he rarely interacted with the Iraqi people as he had during his first tour.
"We were always getting attacked, every day," he says.
Around 11 one morning, after a few hours on patrol, Pisey's sergeant radioed to him that he and some others were ready to be picked up. Only he and Brophy were still in the vehicle.
"As soon as we heard 'come pick us up' we were all happy because we wanted to get out of that heat so bad," he says. "So I floor it, and as soon as I floor it, I hear and see a big explosion in front of me."
Brophy immediately began screaming to step on the gas. Pisey didn't understand why he couldn't get the Bradley to move.
"I saw all this smoke coming up from under me, and I smelled it," he says. "And I look down and I see blood. I told my gunner, 'Brophy, dude. We ain't going nowhere, dude. We ain't going nowhere. I'm done, man.'"
He couldn't stand up or lift the 200-pound hatch to climb out of the seat. Still, he wasn't sure what had happened to him.
"I felt my legs shaking very violently. I remember my gunner was pulling me out and shooting at the same time."
Brophy dragged Pisey to as safe a place as he could find on the side of the road. "I remember I tried to get up and he said, 'Don't.' He said, 'What are you doing?' and kept trying to hold my head down because he didn't want me to see."
"I felt him putting the tourniquets on my legs," Pisey says. "A tourniquet, in our training, that's the last resort to anything. Then and there I knew I was going to lose something, but I didn't realize how bad it was."
Sgt. Pisey Tan is driving aggressively down Chestnut Street in a dark blue Durango, changing lanes through heavy midafternoon traffic, accelerating with his left hand.
"I just have those feelings, like, 'How could I have let this happen to me?' Or when I'm sad or happy, sometimes I'll cry because of what my gunner did for me that day," he says.
Pisey says he sometimes gets angry. But not for the reasons one might expect.
"I come out here to the civilian world, it drives me crazy. People out here got all this freedom, but they abuse their freedom. It just burns me in my head to think about these people, all these murders in Philadelphia, all these bad acts that are going on around here," he says. "I don't like watching the news sometimes because it's full of bad news. I curse up a storm every night.
"Like I told my boys at [Ft. Stewart, Ga.], 'You guys really want to shoot something? Go shoot something over there overseas. Don't come here to this land and shoot that shit."
He says he's never felt anger toward the Army.
"Before everyone joins the military, you have at least three chances to change your mind and not join," he says. "And I signed a contract. I took a vow. I'm not gonna go back on my word."
Pisey doesn't have flashbacks or panic attacks while driving, as many returning vets do. He says it took a while to master the adaptive equipment that allows him to drive a car by pushing and pulling a lever with his hand.
He was able to buy the Durango with a vehicle grant from the Department of Veteran Affairs, along with some of his own money.
Pisey's brother Dara--who at a sturdy 6-foot-5 towers over Pisey--sits in the backseat. The two have just paid a visit to the VA hospital, where Pisey received test results on the head injuries he suffered in the blast.
"The [doctors] say since my accident I got a little head trauma somewhere in there, so they're trying to help me organize better," he explains. "They say that's why I always forget, and get angry and stuff all the time."
A doctor told Pisey his minor memory and concentration problems should improve when he goes back to school, which he plans to do in the fall. He's not sure yet where he'd like to go, but he has some offers. If everything goes well, he'll be the first in his family to graduate from college.
Until then Tan's days are filled with visits to the VA for life counseling, tests and checkups, and trips to the prosthetics doctor, who makes sure his legs are working right.
"He's been making me new sockets because my right leg continually shrinks. The left one is already shrunk because it's up here," he says, pulling up the leg of his shorts to reveal the black metal top of his prosthesis, which reaches nearly to his hip. "This is the bone. Everything's been tightened around it already. [The right] one still has the meat in it, so we're still trying to shrink it down."
He says things would've been a lot easier if his left leg had been amputated below the knee, as his right leg had.
"That'd be great because I wouldn't have to deal with a mechanical knee. Sometimes these things give way, and you'll bust your ass. Trust me, I've busted my ass plenty of times. Sometimes I still fall."
Because nerves are still exposed, just a tap to the stumps of Pisey's legs can cause excruciating pain. Pisey also had chronic pain in his left shoulder and nerve damage to his right hand. For months before he mastered his prosthetics, Dara carried Pisey on his back when he needed to go up stairs or couldn't walk on his hands.
When he walks too much on his prosthetics, the stumps of his legs callous and bleed.
"That will never go away," he explains. "When those [calluses] arrive it's going to hurt, and you can't walk. You just rest for a few days."
Though Pisey's rehabilitation at Walter Reed lasted nearly a year, he was up and walking on the prosthetics three months after the accident--an incredibly quick recovery, say his doctors.
"I guess I was just driven by my guys in Iraq," he says. "They were still there and kept on calling me during that time. It kept me motivated."
Just this month Pisey's unit was sent back to Iraq for a third time.
Asked whether it was more difficult to endure Pisey's accident or the years of terror in Cambodia, Bo has a hard time choosing.
"My mother was feeling the same thing for me that I did for Pisey," she explains.
Bo's mother didn't know she'd survived and escaped to America until 1995, when Bo took a trip back to Cambodia for the first time. Bo's father had passed away 10 years earlier, never knowing she was still alive.
Next month Bo will return to Cambodia with her two sons. Pisey and Dara will finally meet their grandmother--only the third blood relative they will have ever known.
"I bought plane tickets for the family, and we're going," Pisey says. "I've got to see my grandmother. My grandmother gave my mother life, and if she didn't give life to my mother, I wouldn't be here."
These days things are looking up for Pisey and his family. An organization called Homes for Our Troops, along with the McKee Group, a local developer, built them a home in Ridley Park. The house came complete with furniture, a stocked refrigerator, and a handicapped-accessible shower and hot tub. The family is now transitioning between the two houses, and Bo is looking for a job closer to her new home.
The two-story house was presented to the family on a gray afternoon two months ago, nearly four years after Pisey first rolled into the Iraqi desert with the initial wave of American troops. On that day, like this one, Pisey had no idea what lay ahead.
Walking shakily into his new home with his mother right behind him, Pisey was immediately flooded with flashbulbs--and tears.
Wiping his eyes, Pisey had difficulty explaining how he felt, uttering just one word: "overwhelmed." When a reporter asked him why he'd joined the military and went to Iraq, he had no trouble with a response.
"For my mother," he says. "She was a refugee during the Vietnam War. This country took her in. I went there to return the favor."
To read the original article and view more pictures, click here.
Cassidy Hartmann (chartmann@philadelphiaweekly.com) has written frequently about various aspects of the Iraq War.
By Cassidy Hartmann
The Philadelphia Weekly
Posted Jan. 17, 2007
To understand Pisey Tan (pictured) you'd have to know his mother. And to understand her you'd have to know something about cost.
You'd have to know the cost of war, and what can happen when a country turns upon itself in limitless bloodthirsty hatred. You'd have to know the cost of life, of your own pounding heart and that of the unborn child inside of you. And you'd have to know the cost of freedom, what it means to fight and die for it, and especially what it means to survive.
For these things Bo Mao and Pisey Tan have paid what to most would be an unthinkable price. To them, it's a matter of honor.
"I can't tell you everything about my mother because her life has been worse than mine," says 26-year-old Pisey, sitting on the couch in the Olney row home where he's lived since his family moved from South Philadelphia when he was 11. "She's done a lot more in life than a lot of people here can ever do or see."
Pisey's mother Bo is a Cambodian immigrant. She arrived in this country in 1980, a refugee of the Vietnam War and of the Khmer Rouge, the rebel organization that tore through Cambodia in the late '70s, murdering about 17 percent of the population. Bo was able to escape to the U.S. when she was 20 years old and four months pregnant with Pisey, the first of her two sons.
Now relaxing in her modest, dimly lit living room after a long day of supervising industrial battery manufacturing at Philadelphia Scientific, she's telling the story of her life.
Bo is petite and quiet--the latter a result of her tentative English, not for lack of something to say. She pauses frequently when talking, searching for words to describe the horrors she's experienced.
Occasionally Pisey, who speaks Cambodian, fills in the gaps or helps with translations.
"My mother spends so much time thinking of the words, she forgets parts of the story," he says. He's heard the stories before, but with each telling Bo mentions something new.
She speaks of days without food, of being separated from her family, of working in child labor camps and of seeing other children shot or starved to death. But it's not until she gets to Pisey's story that she starts to cry.
A year and a half ago Pisey Tan, a powerful bear of a man, was at the wheel of an M2 Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicle in Iraq when it was ambushed by gunfire and hit by an improvised explosive device.
Though severely injured, Pisey remained conscious until doctors at a medical checkpoint put him under anesthesia. He woke up in the ICU at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., three days later, and looked down to discover he was missing both his legs.
"I didn't realize where I was, but I did see my legs wrapped up in bandages," he remembers. "That was when I just broke down. I just couldn't believe what had happened to me."
When he first woke up on Aug. 9, 2005, he was alone in the ICU. "I thought it was all a dream, but it was there. And I just lost it. I lost my sanity right then and there. Just thinking, 'What am I gonna do now? I don't want to be a burden for people to take care of me. I don't like that. What are my finances going to be?' During the Vietnam era, some of these people were out on the street. I was terrified."
A day earlier, when Pisey lay unconscious at a military base in Landstuhl, Germany, an Army general called his home in Olney. Pisey's 21-year-old brother Dara answered the phone, and the general asked for Pisey's next of kin. Dara explained his mother was at work and spoke poor English, but the man refused to provide information until she could be reached.
"At that point," Dara says, "I thought we'd lost him."
The general called Bo at work.
I said, 'I don't speak no English,'" Bo recalls, dabbing tears from the corners of her eyes. "So they called Dara, and Dara translate for me. They said they had to cut off the legs. And I almost fell down. I felt like I lost everything in my mind. And I just screamed, cried. If I lost my body, it's better than losing my son's, you know?"
Dara and Bo drove down to Washington, where they'd stay for the next three months. Pisey would remain there just shy of a year.
Man of steel: Tan turned down computerized legs in favor of mechanical ones because, he says, he didn't want the computer thinking for him.
Both Pisey's and Bo's lives have been propelled by war. Wars that left scars--both physical and mental--that will never heal. But Pisey and Bo feel no bitterness.
"My culture deals a lot with pride and honor and giving back," says Pisey, who now walks on two titanium and steel prosthetic legs, one extending above the knee and one just below. "One of the biggest reasons why I joined the military was I wanted to bring pride and honor to my family."
Pisey says he doesn't regret joining the Army or his two tours serving in the most dangerous parts of Iraq.
"This country's given so much to my mother," he says. "When I hear about what she's done, where she's been, it helps me realize it's time for me to give back. I'm just trying to make my mother proud and be happy of who she is and what she's done."
When Bo Mao was 16, the Khmer Rouge forced her to work as a slave. She distilled salt, worked as a seamstress and eventually wound up on a coconut farm. She was allowed to visit her family, who were farmers, two or three days a year.
Bo was working on the coconut farm in 1978 when neighboring Vietnam invaded Cambodia. When the fighting started, she was rounded up with hundreds of other children her age and forced to make a grueling journey that would continue for two years.
Bo was herded onto a boat and taken to a small island where she and the other children were without food for two days. "Everybody was sick because we had no food and seasickness. [The Vietnamese] wanted to sink the boat with like 500 kids in there," says Bo, who was taken back to the mainland, where she walked, day and night, in a line with hundreds of children. They didn't know their destination.
"You just go because the Vietnamese [were coming]," she says. "You keep moving. If you don't go, they kill you. We went back to the mountains. I stayed long in the mountains, and too many people died there. There was no food. We just ate grass, nuts, picked some leaves from trees."
She remained in the mountains--working during the day and sleeping on a towel in the bushes--for four or five months under the watch of several armed adult leaders.
"We had rice, but like 100 people stand in line for a can of rice. You put the bowl out and you see only water. So you get some leaves to cook it with, and just eat. And after, you'd get diarrhea. You got sick. That's why most kids died. Some kids ate poisonous mushrooms because they were so hungry. They died too," she says, running her finger over the back of her hand. "Blood comes from their hairs."
Bo tried to escape, once making it across the river to Thailand before the Thai military started capturing Cambodians and sending them back across the border. At one point she and another teenage girl were stealing corn from a Thai field when a soldier opened fire on them. The girl behind her fell, and Bo kept running.
Life went on like this until 1980, when Bo finally found her way across the border for good, this time to a Cambodian refugee camp in Thailand. There she met her first husband and became pregnant with Pisey. Four months later she was on a plane to the United States.
Mother country: Bo Mao says she's proud her son Pisey loves his country, and that she'd serve in the U.S. military if she could.
I went back to high school not just because the schools were better [in New Jersey], but my mother asked me to," says Pisey, explaining why he graduated from another school after dropping out of Lincoln High in 1998. "She really wanted me not to be a statistic around here. A lot of people in my cultural neighborhood, they don't finish high school. I would say me, my brother and my cousin are probably the only ones that graduated."
Pisey, who often wears a white cut-off shirt and jeans, his tattoos and chains on full display, spent most of his early years on the streets of South Philadelphia. His father had abandoned the family by the time he was born, and his mother found a house at Fifth and Pierce streets, in the heart of a burgeoning Cambodian community. It was a close-knit neighborhood, and Pisey still refers to some of his former neighbors as "uncle" and "cousin."
It was also a rough neighborhood, and by the time Pisey started high school, he was headed for trouble.
"I did drugs and alcohol--a lot of bad stuff," he says. "I was a terrible person back then."
He had a hard time getting motivated at Lincoln. No one seemed to care whether he even showed up. He made friends with the school's security guards, and they often let him leave campus in the middle of the day. Then at 15, he dropped out.
He started working at ASK Plastics in the Northeast, sometimes working 16-hour days.
"That's how I was raised and how I saw workin' ain't easy," he says, smiling. At his mother's urging, he eventually went to live with a family friend so he could finish high school in New Jersey. He graduated from Williamstown High School in Gloucester County in 2000, and started looking for bigger challenges.
"While I was in high school I said I'd never, ever join the military--never," he says. "But talking to my uncle, he convinced me. People always thought I was a big failure. But I wanted to give back for everything that's been given to my mother, so I didn't mind just walking into the recruitment office and talking about it."
He signed the contract to enlist, and began his first tour in January 2003. He was among the first wave of troops to enter Iraq two months later.
"We waited for President Bush's word," he says. "When we got the word the whole entire sky lit up like the Fourth of July, but it was all rockets and missiles."
The earth shook under the weight of tanks plowing across the desert.
"We all had our heads down, and we said our words and went into action that night. It was exhilarating and terrifying at the same time," he says.
Pisey fought for a month in the desert, where temperatures reached up to 140 degrees during the day and plummeted at night. He didn't shower for a month. He took his first bath in Iraq in one of Saddam Hussein's former palaces.
"People would come up; they'd cheer. As soon as they see us coming through the city, everybody's jumping for joy because we helped out a lot of people," he says of Baghdad in the days immediately following the overthrow. "We didn't ever think about the bad stuff because that's what's going to eat you and kill you inside. We don't think about the deaths, the accidents and stuff like that."
During that first tour of duty, Pisey's gunner Timothy Brophy saved Pisey's life by protecting his side of the vehicle with gunfire when they were ambushed on a Baghdad road. Neither of them imagined that a year later Brophy would have to save him again.
Bo and Pisey were overwhelmed with emotion upon seeing their new house.
"The day of my accident was Aug. 6, 2005. We went out on patrol to show people we were still there," Pisey says coolly, as if talking about the most routine of events. "Some of the people, they really didn't want us there."
By the time Pisey's unit was sent back to Iraq for a second tour in January 2005, the mood in the country had changed dramatically. He was sent to Samarra, the heart of the Sunni Triangle, where he again drove a Bradley vehicle on patrols. But he rarely interacted with the Iraqi people as he had during his first tour.
"We were always getting attacked, every day," he says.
Around 11 one morning, after a few hours on patrol, Pisey's sergeant radioed to him that he and some others were ready to be picked up. Only he and Brophy were still in the vehicle.
"As soon as we heard 'come pick us up' we were all happy because we wanted to get out of that heat so bad," he says. "So I floor it, and as soon as I floor it, I hear and see a big explosion in front of me."
Brophy immediately began screaming to step on the gas. Pisey didn't understand why he couldn't get the Bradley to move.
"I saw all this smoke coming up from under me, and I smelled it," he says. "And I look down and I see blood. I told my gunner, 'Brophy, dude. We ain't going nowhere, dude. We ain't going nowhere. I'm done, man.'"
He couldn't stand up or lift the 200-pound hatch to climb out of the seat. Still, he wasn't sure what had happened to him.
"I felt my legs shaking very violently. I remember my gunner was pulling me out and shooting at the same time."
Brophy dragged Pisey to as safe a place as he could find on the side of the road. "I remember I tried to get up and he said, 'Don't.' He said, 'What are you doing?' and kept trying to hold my head down because he didn't want me to see."
"I felt him putting the tourniquets on my legs," Pisey says. "A tourniquet, in our training, that's the last resort to anything. Then and there I knew I was going to lose something, but I didn't realize how bad it was."
Sgt. Pisey Tan is driving aggressively down Chestnut Street in a dark blue Durango, changing lanes through heavy midafternoon traffic, accelerating with his left hand.
"I just have those feelings, like, 'How could I have let this happen to me?' Or when I'm sad or happy, sometimes I'll cry because of what my gunner did for me that day," he says.
Pisey says he sometimes gets angry. But not for the reasons one might expect.
"I come out here to the civilian world, it drives me crazy. People out here got all this freedom, but they abuse their freedom. It just burns me in my head to think about these people, all these murders in Philadelphia, all these bad acts that are going on around here," he says. "I don't like watching the news sometimes because it's full of bad news. I curse up a storm every night.
"Like I told my boys at [Ft. Stewart, Ga.], 'You guys really want to shoot something? Go shoot something over there overseas. Don't come here to this land and shoot that shit."
He says he's never felt anger toward the Army.
"Before everyone joins the military, you have at least three chances to change your mind and not join," he says. "And I signed a contract. I took a vow. I'm not gonna go back on my word."
Pisey doesn't have flashbacks or panic attacks while driving, as many returning vets do. He says it took a while to master the adaptive equipment that allows him to drive a car by pushing and pulling a lever with his hand.
He was able to buy the Durango with a vehicle grant from the Department of Veteran Affairs, along with some of his own money.
Pisey's brother Dara--who at a sturdy 6-foot-5 towers over Pisey--sits in the backseat. The two have just paid a visit to the VA hospital, where Pisey received test results on the head injuries he suffered in the blast.
"The [doctors] say since my accident I got a little head trauma somewhere in there, so they're trying to help me organize better," he explains. "They say that's why I always forget, and get angry and stuff all the time."
A doctor told Pisey his minor memory and concentration problems should improve when he goes back to school, which he plans to do in the fall. He's not sure yet where he'd like to go, but he has some offers. If everything goes well, he'll be the first in his family to graduate from college.
Until then Tan's days are filled with visits to the VA for life counseling, tests and checkups, and trips to the prosthetics doctor, who makes sure his legs are working right.
"He's been making me new sockets because my right leg continually shrinks. The left one is already shrunk because it's up here," he says, pulling up the leg of his shorts to reveal the black metal top of his prosthesis, which reaches nearly to his hip. "This is the bone. Everything's been tightened around it already. [The right] one still has the meat in it, so we're still trying to shrink it down."
He says things would've been a lot easier if his left leg had been amputated below the knee, as his right leg had.
"That'd be great because I wouldn't have to deal with a mechanical knee. Sometimes these things give way, and you'll bust your ass. Trust me, I've busted my ass plenty of times. Sometimes I still fall."
Because nerves are still exposed, just a tap to the stumps of Pisey's legs can cause excruciating pain. Pisey also had chronic pain in his left shoulder and nerve damage to his right hand. For months before he mastered his prosthetics, Dara carried Pisey on his back when he needed to go up stairs or couldn't walk on his hands.
When he walks too much on his prosthetics, the stumps of his legs callous and bleed.
"That will never go away," he explains. "When those [calluses] arrive it's going to hurt, and you can't walk. You just rest for a few days."
Though Pisey's rehabilitation at Walter Reed lasted nearly a year, he was up and walking on the prosthetics three months after the accident--an incredibly quick recovery, say his doctors.
"I guess I was just driven by my guys in Iraq," he says. "They were still there and kept on calling me during that time. It kept me motivated."
Just this month Pisey's unit was sent back to Iraq for a third time.
Asked whether it was more difficult to endure Pisey's accident or the years of terror in Cambodia, Bo has a hard time choosing.
"My mother was feeling the same thing for me that I did for Pisey," she explains.
Bo's mother didn't know she'd survived and escaped to America until 1995, when Bo took a trip back to Cambodia for the first time. Bo's father had passed away 10 years earlier, never knowing she was still alive.
Next month Bo will return to Cambodia with her two sons. Pisey and Dara will finally meet their grandmother--only the third blood relative they will have ever known.
"I bought plane tickets for the family, and we're going," Pisey says. "I've got to see my grandmother. My grandmother gave my mother life, and if she didn't give life to my mother, I wouldn't be here."
These days things are looking up for Pisey and his family. An organization called Homes for Our Troops, along with the McKee Group, a local developer, built them a home in Ridley Park. The house came complete with furniture, a stocked refrigerator, and a handicapped-accessible shower and hot tub. The family is now transitioning between the two houses, and Bo is looking for a job closer to her new home.
The two-story house was presented to the family on a gray afternoon two months ago, nearly four years after Pisey first rolled into the Iraqi desert with the initial wave of American troops. On that day, like this one, Pisey had no idea what lay ahead.
Walking shakily into his new home with his mother right behind him, Pisey was immediately flooded with flashbulbs--and tears.
Wiping his eyes, Pisey had difficulty explaining how he felt, uttering just one word: "overwhelmed." When a reporter asked him why he'd joined the military and went to Iraq, he had no trouble with a response.
"For my mother," he says. "She was a refugee during the Vietnam War. This country took her in. I went there to return the favor."
To read the original article and view more pictures, click here.
Cassidy Hartmann (chartmann@philadelphiaweekly.com) has written frequently about various aspects of the Iraq War.
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