On Oct. 5, 1992, at 5:30 p.m., Louise Ashby was driving in Los Angeles. Newly arrived in Hollywood from Great Britain, the young actress was ready to seek her chance at stardom.
On April 5, 2003, at about 1 p.m., JR Martinez had been in Iraq for just a month when he was asked to drive the next stretch of road in his Army unit’s Humvee.
And on March 7, Doug Surowiec was bicycling home to Beaver County, Pa., at 6:30 p.m. from a long Sunday trip into Ohio, enjoying the weather and the feeling of well-being from his strenuous exercise.
Within seconds of those moments, Ashby would go from a young beauty to a woman with a shattered face; Martinez would run over a land mine and be trapped in his burning vehicle; Surowiec would fly off his bicycle into a metal guardrail that would slice off his nose and lips.
In those horrible instants, the faces they had known disappeared forever.
Their new faces would be shaped by surgery. But only they would be able to shape how they faced the world.
Ashby was 21 on that warm fall day 18 years ago in Los Angeles. She was driving a convertible when a driver coming the opposite direction crossed the center line and slammed into her.
The impact destroyed part of the left frontal lobe of her brain. It severed her optic nerve, leaving her blind in her left eye. From scalp to cheek, the left side of her face was shattered.
She underwent 11 hours of brain surgery and 22 hours of reconstructive facial surgery.
And while surgeons at Cedars-Sinai Hospital put her face back together as well as they could, the left eye bone and cheekbone were slightly misaligned, said her eventual plastic surgeon, Dr. Henry Kawamoto.
“When they put her together at Cedars,” Kawamoto said in an interview in his Santa Monica, Calif., office, “she was pretty bruised and bloody and they did the best they could. But they were off a little bit, and with the face when you’re off a little bit, it dominoes down.”
Today, Martinez is a soap-opera actor, portraying police officer Brot Monroe on ABC’s All My Children.
But on that broiling day in 2003 near Karbala, Iraq, he was a 19-year-old infantryman in the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division.
He had enlisted straight out of high school in Dalton, Ga., where he had played strong safety on a football team that went to the state championship.
He had been in Iraq about a month when he was asked to drive his Humvee as the lead vehicle in a protective escort.
“I still had that 19-year-old mentality,” he said. “I was driving along with one hand on the wheel like I was in Southern California, and someone in the vehicle brought up the Purple Heart and everyone started talking about how neat it would be to have a Purple Heart and how if you went to a restaurant you’d get to go to the front of the line — I mean, joking was how we kept our spirits up — and I remembered looking back to the dirt road, and about three seconds later, I ran over a land mine.”
The other three soldiers in the Humvee were thrown out of the vehicle, but he was trapped inside as it caught fire and began to set off the ammunition and fuel it was carrying.
Eventually, his sergeant pulled him free and threw him onto the sand, where another soldier cradled Martinez’s head in his lap.
“I remember trying to touch my face and he kept knocking my hands down and telling me I was going to be fine, but there was something in his voice that told me I wasn’t going to be fine.”
Surowiec had just started to chart a new direction for his life.
After graduating from high school in 1984, he had taken classes at Penn State’s Beaver Campus with hopes of one day going to a photography institute in California. Those plans were derailed, though, when the Armco Steel plant in Ambridge, Pa., where his father worked, was shut down.
He went to work in retail sales for several years, and had been unemployed for a time when he began taking classes last fall at the Community College of Beaver County, hoping to become a probation officer. He also had become a dedicated recreational bicyclist.
On that first Sunday in March, he was heading home when either a vehicle hit him from behind or he lost control of the bicycle. Passers-by found him sitting against the guardrail, his face mangled and bleeding, his crumpled bike nearby. When paramedics arrived, they found his nose and lips lying on the ground, looking like a Hollywood makeup artist’s gruesome prosthetic.
He has no conscious recollection of the accident. In those early days after the accident, Ashby’s top priority was to recapture her face.
“Originally my doctors said it’s going to take two years to make you socially acceptable, and I said, ‘Two years? You’ve got to be kidding me’.”
It would take much longer than that. She didn’t find out how daunting her case was until her father took her to see a well-known Hollywood plastic surgeon several weeks after the accident. “The unimaginable had happened — I’d lost my identity and my face, and I thought, ‘He’ll fix it. That’s just what he’ll do.’ He felt around, and he said, ‘Louise, I’m really sorry. This is the most severe thing I’ve seen and I just can’t do this’.”
The first time he saw Ashby, said Kawamoto, a renowned reconstructive surgeon based at UCLA, she was disfigured and very depressed.
“I told her what needed to be done. The problem was, Louise is a very good-looking woman and was here like many good-looking women to get going in show business, and this just wiped her out,” he said. “She thought she looked like a monster.”
Over the next decade, she would undergo more than 15 operations. Kawamoto said he put at least 10 metal plates and 40 screws on the left side of her face to rejoin all the broken pieces. She also had several surgeries to position her left eye properly. The unseeing eye looks normal, except that it doesn’t move when she shifts her gaze.
Today, her likeness is remarkably similar to the face she had before her accident. In the long process of rebuilding her appearance, though, Ashby lost many of the prime years of an actress’s career.
After the explosion, Martinez was flown to Germany for abdominal surgery, and then on to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, where many badly injured veterans are sent for care.
He was burned over 40 percent of his body, including his face, scalp and neck, his hands, upper arms and parts of his back and thighs. Martinez was told at Brooke that he would still get his Army pay, but “your job from now on is to recover.”
“I said to myself, ‘I’ve got it made. I can watch SportsCenter from when I wake up until noon.’ But as you know, there’s only so much SportsCenter you can watch, and there’s only so much Jerry Springer and Oprah you can watch, and eventually I thought, ‘There’s got to be something else I can do’.”
He began to hang out in the burn ward, the place he knew best, and soon the nurses were sending him on errands. Then a nurse asked him to look in on a veteran who had just come in for burn treatment.
“As soon as I walked into this guy’s room, it had a negative setting. The lights were off and the blinds were closed. All I did was sit down and start to talk to this guy, just simple talk, saying, ‘I’m doing it and you can, too’.”
When Surowiec arrived at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, plastic surgeon Steven Bonawitz faced a big challenge.
The good news, Dr. Bonawitz was that paramedics had recovered Surowiec’s nose and lips. The bad news was that if he couldn’t reattach them successfully, Surowiec would be left with a devastating injury. “Had we failed, he would have been on the face-transplant list,” Bonawitz said. “That’s how severe his injuries were.”
The procedure worked, but Surowiec knows there is still much work to be done. Scar tissue is pulling up one corner of his mouth, and much of his upper lip is still numb. More scar tissue is pulling down the inner corner of his left eye. Most important, his nose is collapsing and needs to be rebuilt, probably by using some of his rib cartilage.
Bonawitz told Surowiec the corrective work could start this fall, but that it might take a year and at least three surgeries to rebuild his nose and correct the scarring.
“It’s probably the central structural work that’s going to be the toughest part,” the surgeon said. “We need to rebuild the scaffolding on which the tip of the nose sits, and then lay the skin back over it.”
Ashby kept working as an actor over the years, and also set up a charity with Kawamoto to help children who needed reconstructive surgery.
She is now writing an autobiography, due to come out next year, and she is trying to use all her experiences to establish a life-coaching business.
Martinez is enjoying life as an actor, a job he got two years ago after friends sent him e-mails saying that All My Children wanted to audition injured war veterans for a role on the program.
And recently, Surowiec started riding his bicycle again: “I realized if I didn’t start again soon, I’d never do it.”