A soldier named Lucky, Part 1: Woman comes to America with big dreams, but they end in a VA hospital bed

The snow wouldn't stop. Washington, D.C., was in the throes of a crippling blizzard that would dump nearly three feet of heavy, wet mess on much of the region, shutting down the city and the nation's political business. The national press billed it "snowpocalypse."

In a hospital bed at the Washington, D.C., Veterans Affairs Medical Center, a soldier named Lucky lay dying. There wasn't anything else she could do.

She was far from her Cape Girardeau home, far from her homeland of Sri Lanka, so far from everything.

She was little more than a skeleton with skin and a heartbeat, so weak she could no longer walk the few feet to the bathroom. Oxygen hissed through her breathing tube, in sync to the lights and higher tones of the attached monitors. Outside her window, snow fell sideways, blurring the lights of the city, burying tree limbs, cars and streets in a still scene.

Lucky slept.

By Friday, Feb. 5, 2010, when the blizzard hit, she was constantly sedated. The dream of life weaved all around her in the intensive care unit, shadows passing through -- nurses, loved ones, a good friend. Voices. Without the morphine, the pain was too much.

It was all too much for Lucky's mother, Cynthia Herath. She grieved, wailed. Her husband, Jawaharlal, or simply Lal, prayed, cried out to God, to help his daughter. Why? Why was this happening?

The days were fading, blurring, like snow into snow. When Lucky was awake, Cynthia would read passages from the Bible. She and Lal would each take a turn massaging their daughter's emaciated legs until their wrists and fingers hurt. Lal found it impossible to believe those two sticks were the same legs that once ran so fast in the 100-meter dash. In a matter of months, Lal would be dead, at 72, the victim, Cynthia says, of a broken heart.

On Tuesday, Feb. 16, Lucky, described by so many who knew her as a fighter, a soldier's soldier, lost her fight. She was 45.

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Nearly a year later, the memories are fresh and raw. As Cynthia recounts her daughter's painful story, each harrowing moment seems trapped in her dark eyes as she details her daughter's long battle with a disease, Cynthia says, not adequately diagnosed until nearly three years after she began complaining of symptoms and was poorly treated. She wants to know why a soldier, once a physical instructor at the peak of fitness, could die by painful degrees before her eyes without any medical answers.

She sits on the love seat of her Woodland Hills Drive home where she is raising her 13-year-old granddaughter, Ceylon, the great love of Lucky's life. At times Cynthia is so overcome with grief her whole body shakes.

What hurts most, Cynthia says, is how long Lucky languished and how badly she believes her daughter was treated by physicians in the Veterans Affairs health care system and at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. The grieving mother believes her daughter, a decorated veteran of the war in Iraq, was the victim of medical neglect and incompetence. Cynthia expected better medical care from the government of the country Lucky fought for.

VA health officials refute the charges, asserting physicians diagnosed the soldier with lupus -- at least they were fairly certain she had lupus -- in early 2008. One VA executive said Lucky had access to the best medical care in the world through the VA system, a point Lucky's family and friends take umbrage at.

Lucky's family, friends and fellow soldiers claim she was sent from doctor to doctor, each with a different diagnosis, often no diagnosis at all. She muddled through much of the last few years of her life in a haze, fed a steady diet of prescribed pills in a volume that shocked those closest to her. Meanwhile, she lived on food stamps and depleted her daughter's college fund while she waited for disability compensation from the VA. After fighting in Operation Iraqi Freedom, Lucky fought for years through VA red tape, those who knew her say.

A Southeast Missourian review of more that 550 pages of VA and Walter Reed medical documents obtained by the newspaper early Saturday afternoon shows a soldier concerned about her care as her condition deteriorated. At several points, she questions diagnoses, some later found to be incorrect, and seeks outside consultation, even as she is sent to a cast of constantly changing VA health care providers for test after test.

"I believe my daughter should not have died this death," Cynthia says in her thick Sinhalese accent. "That's why I cannot get out of this pain."

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As the anniversary of Lucky's death approaches, Cynthia Herath is just now getting the answers she has sought for so long. She had repeatedly asked VA officials for her daughter's medical records. Until a Southeast Missourian investigation into Lucky's story, Cynthia said VA officials would not return her phone calls. After weeks of filing more than a dozen Freedom of Information Act requests -- with the help of family members -- the Southeast Missourian obtained Lucky's medical records with the VA system and Walter Reed. VA officials mailed all requested medical information to Cynthia, including the copy of an autopsy that the Herath family first sought and paid for nearly a year ago. A VA official acknowledged it is highly unusual that it would take a year for autopsy information to be released.

The Southeast Missourian FOIA requests sought all medical records relating to Lucky's treatment and care. The documents asked for in the FOIA requests, which began Jan. 12, have been repeatedly delayed. One VA official said the agency had difficulty locating Cynthia's correct address.

Some soldiers who served with Lucky say the U.S. military health system is overmatched, that the Veterans Health Administration in particular doesn't have the resources to properly take care of the 5 million-plus patients it serves through a vast network of hospitals, outpatient clinics, nursing homes and other health care facilities. Others say the government is covering up, trying to hide from the liability of a flood of service members returning damaged from two wars. VA health officials say the system did all it could for a seriously ill soldier.

Medical records make it clear that Lucky had access to an army of health care providers through the VA system. The question is, was that care adequate in the soldier's case? And did Lucky's documented exposure to dangerous chemicals during her tour of duty in Iraq have anything to do with her rapidly deteriorating health -- a decline that, as documented, began soon after she returned from the war?

Cynthia Herath says she isn't looking for compensation or sympathy from the U.S. government. She says she doesn't want to see other soldiers go through what her daughter did. It appears many are.

The Southeast Missourian investigation into Lucky's case found that several soldiers who served in Army Reserve units out of Cape Girardeau have, like Lucky, had to fight the VA for disability coverage and care, and others are critical of staffing and treatment.

"I fought for my country. I can honestly say the Iraq war took my life away," said Chris Amacker, a veteran who served more than a dozen years in the Missouri Army National Guard and the Army Reserve.

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Her christened name was Sulochana Lakmini Herath. But everyone knew her as Lucky.

In her native Sinhala, the predominant language of Sri Lanka, Lakmini means "jewel of Lanka or Sri Lanka." Sulochana means "beautiful eyes" -- perhaps fitting for a woman whose eyes were big and dark like obsidian.

She was born Aug. 2, 1964, in the port city of Colombo, the industrial hub of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, a nation about the size of New Jersey off the southern tip of India.

Her father was a well-paid, respected engineer, a pioneer in Sri Lankan television broadcasting. Her mother was a teacher for 50 years, a career that began when she was 18. Education was very important to the Heraths, and Lucky and her younger brother, Roshan, would receive the best education money could buy.

Lucky attended Ladies College in Colombo, and Visakha Vidyalaya, private Christian schools for girls. She was, her mother said, a gifted student and a talented athlete. She was exceptionally fast, boasting shelves of trophies and medals in track and field events. And Lucky was a solid bowler on Sri Lanka's first national cricket team.

Roshan Herath, 44, said his sister was a unique person who didn't conform to the normal expectations for Sri Lankan girls and women.

"She always wanted to do something different," said Roshan in a phone interview from his home in Buckinghamshire, England. "She wanted to do sports, sports which were normally for boys."

She had a taste for spicy food, and no matter how far away she would travel from her homeland, Lucky never lost her appetite for Sri Lankan cuisine -- kiri kos, or white jackfruit curry, crab and her mother's special caramel pudding.

But she was drawn to America, for its freedoms, for its possibilities, for all that it represented.

"As a little girl, she loved America," Cynthia said.

Roshan said the wide open spaces of the United States appealed to his sister's sense of adventure, her natural resistance to the ordinary.

Lucky knew she wanted to pursue her higher education in the United States, it was just a question of where. She considered a school in California, but her father worried about earthquakes. Boston was too big, and the Heraths didn't want their daughter in a big American city.

At the American Center in Colombo, Lucky and her parents had read about Southeast Missouri State University. They liked its history and academic standing. A Herath relative, a cousin, also lived relatively close in Farmington, Mo. So, at 21, Lucky moved to Cape Girardeau and enrolled at Southeast, where she would earn degrees in economics and business administration.

Her parents believed their daughter would finish her education and come back home to Sri Lanka. They would be disappointed; Lucky was in America to stay. She had every intention of becoming a citizen of her adopted country.

She took a job in the university library. In 1989, Lucky married fellow student Mark Johnson. She was a half a world and a generation removed from the old Sri Lankan culture in which marriages were arranged, as was the case for her parents. Lucky, the independent girl with big American dreams, was making her own way.

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2007-2009

The Mologne House is a waiting station for broken soldiers. Men and women, many of them not far removed from childhood, with torn bodies, missing limbs, shrapnel-bitten faces, deep wounds -- physical, mental and spiritual. Despite so much misery within its walls, the four-story hotel -- built in the late 1990s as a short-term convalescence house for military personnel -- is a palace compared to the living conditions of many of the other rehabilitation apartments on the sprawling Walter Reed Army Medical Center compound in Washington, D.C.

As her condition continued to slip in late summer 2009, Lucky was back at the Mologne House. Waiting. Waiting for appointments to the medical center, for more tests, more questions and few answers, family and friends say. Her hair was falling out in clumps, lesions covered her fingers and her face. She was vomiting and urinating blood. Her lungs hurt. She had just turned 44, but her illness added years to her appearance. Fellow soldier Amacker said it appeared as if Lucky were "rotting from the inside out." She was weak, constantly out of breath. Cynthia was shocked to find her daughter in a wheelchair while lugging behind her a heavy, oversized oxygen cylinder to and from her physician visits, despite pleas to Walter Reed and the VA for a smaller portable unit. The tank at times would tumble to the floor, making a terrible noise, Cynthia said.

"Two years ago the patient was able to run her two-mile physical fitness test in 15:16 min., but one month ago she could barely walk a block without becoming dyspneic [extremely short of breath]," according to a Walter Reed medical status report.

And in between the appointments, sometimes weeks in between, was the pain. When it became too much, she would go to the emergency room and the attendants would give her a shot of morphine and send her on her way.

Citing patient privacy issues that extend to deceased soldiers, Walter Reed denied the Southeast Missourian's medical information request and declined to comment on questions concerning Lucky's care and the medical center. But some of the medical information was included in the VA medical documents.

Maureen Williams, of Germantown, Md., a government employee and veterans advocate, visited the Mologne House frequently. Williams had met Lucky at a community picnic for wounded soldiers. They immediately struck up a friendship.

In late spring 2008, Lucky was fatigued and at times would struggle to catch her breath, but Williams said she seemed in good spirits. She was healthy enough to walk, and her appetite was all right. That summer, Williams served as tour guide for Lucky and her daughter. They saw the monuments, the Capitol, many of the downtown D.C. haunts. Lucky loved it. That was her America.

Lucky returned to Missouri but was back at Walter Reed in early 2009. Only two seasons had passed since their last meeting, but Williams barely recognized her. One fellow soldier described her as a shell of what she was. Still, doctors couldn't or wouldn't explain precisely what was wrong, Lucky's family and friends said.

"When we approached the doctors to get information about our daughter's condition, they simply said they are not supposed to discuss and if they do they would lose the license to practice in the United States," Cynthia said.

Lucky's medical history, up until late 2007, indicates doctors believed she was suffering from multiple probable health disorders, including vasculitis hypersensitivity, early degenerative arthritis, malaise, fatigue, thyroid cancer and an "autoimmune reaction of unknown" cause. While lupus and lupuslike symptoms were alluded to, it wasn't confirmed until January 2008, according to a VA physician who treated her.

Lucky was so frustrated that she spent hours researching her symptoms online in an effort to diagnose herself.

"She expressed frustration that her illness and symptoms have gone two years without being explained and treated," noted an entry in a VA medical progress report, dated March 28, 2008.

By the summer of 2009, Lucky was prescribed so many pills she could barely keep up.

"I remember she had a bag of pills sitting next to her, it was like a gallon bucket filled with pills," Williams said.

Lucky had long believed that her medical problems were directly related to her time in Iraq. She told Williams what her fellow soldiers understood, that she was exposed to constant smoke, often as thick as fog, from the burning pits, the chronic fires set from mortar attacks, individual explosive devices, the charred remains of animal and human bodies en masse. Above all, Lucky was concerned about the deadly chemicals believed to be in some of that enemy fire, conceivably weapons of long-term destruction.

"She had repeated exposure to smoke from burning jeeps, trucks IED [improvised explosive devices] explosions and mortar explosions," according to several VA medical reports. "She also had exposure to blowing sand and sand fleas.

"She feels those exposures were bad for her lungs."

The medical reports indicate Lucky had complained of nasal drainage, irritation and a frequent dry cough since her return from Iraq in February 2005.

Janice Marbrabe, administrator at Eagle Ridge Christian School in Cape Girardeau, where Ceylon spent much of her early childhood and elementary years, said Lucky confided in her in August 2009 that she didn't think she was going to make it. She wanted to be sure her daughter was taken care of, so she asked Marbrabe if she would serve as the girl's legal guardian. The educator said yes; she had taken Ceylon before, when Lucky was first deployed to Iraq.

"Her health had really declined over the summer. I was blown away," Marbrabe said. "I said, 'Yes, you're going to make it.' I really thought she would."

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1990

The marriage didn't work out.

In 1990, Lucky and Mark Johnson traveled to Sri Lanka for a Thanksgiving service in honor of their union. The posh reception was held at a five-star hotel in Colombo, featuring a mix of Sri Lankan cuisine -- meat curry, lentils, noodles -- Chinese food and western fare. The feast was completed with a towering rich cake. Some 250 people attended.

Cynthia said she and her husband found their new son-in-law to be a good man, and he was lovingly introduced to the extended Herath family and friends in attendance.

It was a year of commitment for Lucky. Five years after coming to Cape Girardeau, Lucky took the Oath of Allegiance and became a U.S. citizen, Cynthia said. Lucky's dream of being a true American had come true. She was happy.

But her marriage began to fall apart.

After a few happy years together, Lucky and Mark began to grow apart, Cynthia said. She doesn't like to talk about it, only saying that after a time of separation the couple divorced.

Lucky met another man and conceived a child in late September 1996; she decided that she was going to raise the child as a single mother, Cynthia said.

On March 4, 1997, Ceylon was born. It was a rough start. The infant was three months premature. Lucky had to be airlifted to St. John's Mercy Medical Center in St. Louis. The new mother at 34 nearly died. That was the first the Heraths had heard of their daughter's pregnancy. Lal had been in Cape Girardeau in December but hadn't noticed that Lucky was pregnant, Cynthia said. Lucky didn't say anything about it.

"She probably didn't want to tell us because that's not the way we wanted to have our granddaughter," Cynthia said. It was an extreme example of how Lucky kept the more intimate details of her life hidden.

Lucky left her job at the university to work at a jewelry store in the mall, something that didn't sit well with her parents but provided a more flexible schedule for the single mother.

"I got to spend a lot of time with my daughter. It was so pleasant," Lucky said in an August 2005 interview in The Sunday Leader, a newspaper based in Colombo. "It made me realize that you do not have to have someone all the time."

Lucky found her life in her daughter, but she discovered her vocation as a soldier at the U.S. Army Reserve Center in Cape Girardeau. Her service and dedication to the Army began with a challenge, said her brother, Roshan. Mark Johnson had told Lucky she wouldn't make it in the military or at the very least she'd find it much more difficult than she believed it to be.

"She wanted to challenge that. It was like, 'Whatever you can do, I can do,'" Roshan said. "If anyone challenged her on anything, she would take it on."

At 35, she enlisted for a short stint in the Missouri Army National Guard in Cape Girardeau. Lucky moved over to the U.S. Army Reserve Center in 2001, fellow soldiers say, enlisting with the 348th Engineer Company. She served alongside veteran soldiers like Terry Dowdy.

Dowdy, of Tamms, Ill., first joined the regular Army in 1987, and served in the Gulf War in Operation Desert Storm, the original U.S.-led war in Iraq. He was part of the military drawdown in the early years of the Clinton administration and was out of action for about six years. Dowdy said he was one of the first few to join the Cape Army Reserve outfit.

He's a character, Dowdy. He says he met his wife of 25 years after breaking into her garage because he needed a place to stay. He said they were quite a pair, "the prom queen and the little guy going around smoking pot all the time."

Dowdy said Lucky fit right into Army life.

"She was funny and full of life," he said. "She was really nice, really caring, but really firm in her beliefs."

And picky, he added. She was a perfectionist about everything.

Paul Mingus joined the 348th at the beginning of 2001, but it was the newcomer, Lucky, who made everyone feel welcome later that year, Mingus said.

"She had a sparking personality. I guess she was an outsider to this country, but she made everyone feel more welcome probably than she ever felt," said Mingus, now a pharmaceutical representative in Southeast Missouri.

She was strong and fast, her comrades say. Lucky served as a physical fitness instructor in the Army Reserve, a perfect fit for a woman who loved to exercise.

Larry Smith was Lucky's mess sergeant, and she was like a daughter to him. Smith was the old-timer of the unit. His military service dated back to 1966, when he was drafted to serve in some the worst places Vietnam and this side of hell had to offer. He was a helicopter hopper, hopping on and off into jungle hot spots on search-and-destroy missions.

"The good Lord was with me," he said. "I got holes shot in my canteen, and we got mortared one time and I walked outside the tent in the morning and there was a mortar shell that didn't explode."

His combat experience would serve as a calming influence to Lucky and others in Iraq.

"She was so gung-ho," Smith said. "Whenever she walked into a room, she lit it up like a Christmas tree. She always had that big old smile on her face."

mkittle@semissourian.com

388-3627