Jacob Knospler: 'I'm a Marine. I Had to Go In and Help Them.'
Cpl. Jacob Knospler, his jaw mostly blown away by a grenade, did not wake up for a month. His first clear memory is of President George W. Bush standing over his bed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. "How the hell you doin'?" asked the president. Knospler couldn't really answer, but he liked Bush. "I felt bad for him 'cuz he comes down to the hospital, sees all the wounded people there and knows he put them there," he said.
Knospler's brain was so swollen, his face so disfigured, that his mother later told him that she had been able to identify him only by the tattoos on his arm. A 175-pounder when he arrived in Iraq, he had ballooned to 239 pounds from the water pumped into him. But then a case of meningitis sent his weight plummeting down to 125 pounds. "A good-looking girl weighs 125 pounds," said Knospler, who stands six feet tall. "Not me." Sent home to East Stroudsburg, Pa., in January 2005, he has had to return every month to Bethesda. There was little that doctors could do for his partially blind right eye, but they put a plate in his skull and tried to rebuild his face. In November 2004, surgeons extracted flesh from his shoulder to close a large --open wound in his cheek. But thick, ropelike knots disfigured him and made it difficult to talk. Sometimes, painful surgery seemed to make little or no difference. Slowly, he has learned to lower his expectations. He hates the hospital and appreciates only the doctors, he says bitterly, "who are honest with me."
Knospler thinks his personality has changed. He can be testy with his wife, who has the burden of raising an infant daughter as well as caring for him. "I think the part of my brain they removed was the part with my inhibitions," he says. "If I think something, I just say it. Sometimes my wife will say to me, 'You're being an a--hole,' and I'll think, 'Huh? Am I being an a--hole?' "
As a boy dreaming of becoming a warrior, Knospler had hunted deer with his father. He has begun hunting in the Pennsylvania woods again, though he has changed shooting arms because of his blind eye. His shooting skill, he says, has come back more easily than he might have thought. He feels a jumble of emotions about his wound, including bitterness, though never regret. "I'm a Marine," he says. "Marines were going down and I had to go in and help them."
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Jonathan Darman was named Senior Writer and Political Correspondent in October of 2006. He travels the country profiling candidates for elected office and covering breaking news in national politics.
Prior to his current assignment, Darman was a General Editor in Newsweek's New York headquarters. In that role, he authored or co-authored major profiles of newsmakers in politics and media ranging from former Vice Presidential candidate John Edwards to controversial New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin to 2008 presidential hopeful Gov. Mark Warner. His May 2006 cover story, "The Mystery of Mary Magdalene," separated fact from fiction in the life of Christianity's most fascinating woman. In September of 2005, he spent three weeks covering the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Darman contributed to three Newsweek cover packages on the storm, reporting from the decimated coastline of Biloxi, from an Air Force helicopter hovering over New Orleans and from the private office of Mississippi Governor Hailey Barbour.
Previously, Darman had been an associate editor. In May, 2004 he joined the Campaign 2004 Special Project team as a correspondent. In that position he followed the Kerry/Edwards campaign, reporting from behind-the-scenes for the special issue that Newsweek published two days after Election Day. The special issue won the 2005 National Magazine Award for Single Topic Issue. Public Affairs published "Election 2004: How Bush Won and What You Can Expect in the Future," an expanded version of the campaign narrative, in January 2005. It was a national bestseller.
From February to May 2004, Darman was an associate editor for Newsweek.com where he covered everything from the real estate bubble to reality TV. He also helped conceive and edit GenNext, Newsweek's coverage of youth voters in the 2004 election. Newsweek asked five college journalists to write essays during the campaign and polled voters 18-29 years old each month on campaign issues. Before joining Newsweek as a full-time staffer, Darman held internships in the magazine's Washington and Los Angeles Bureaus and at Newsweek.com.
Darman graduated magna cum laude from Harvard with an A.B. in history and literature. A native of McLean, Virginia, he lives in New York City.
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