What with all the damage Dear Leader and his cohorts are doing to our country, we sometimes forget about the really heart warming stories out there. Case in point
A 13-year-old Iraqi boy brought to Michigan a year ago by a National Guardsman so he could get plastic surgery to repair scars from a house fire no longer is shy about pulling off his beloved Detroit Tigers baseball cap.
Black, glossy hair now grows where only scar tissue was before. And Mohammed’s left hand and wrist — deformed in the fire when he was 2 — now can adeptly field baseballs.
Mohammed first approached Howell at an entry control point in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in November 2008. Mohammed asked Howell — a Michigan Army National Guard physician assistant who was serving his second deployment in Iraq — to save him and take him to America.
Howell spent a frantic six months getting identification and a visa for Mohammed and lining up plastic surgeon Dr. Edward Lanigan at Michigan State University to perform the five surgeries for free. He also lined up a Muslim host family in East Lansing.
Once Mohammed got to Michigan, his life changed.
The teen has gained 26 pounds and grown 3.5 inches during his year in Michigan. He now has a capped tooth, eight filled cavities and glasses to improve the vision in his damaged left eye from 20/400 to 20/40.
He also has dressed up as Batman for Halloween, got pitching tips from the Detroit Tigers’ Justin Verlander and been the ball boy for a high school soccer team.
Heroes come in camouflage.
