Phoenix Clinic Provides Free Vision Correction For Military Personnel

A group of Vietnam veterans is providing free vision correction surgeries to members of the Arizona National Guard who are headed to Iraq and Afghanistan.
by Michael Kiefer, The Arizona Republic

PHOENIX, AZ — On his first day in Iraq in 2003, Staff Sgt. Andrew Locke clearly saw that wearing eyeglasses was a handicap in a war zone.

"I had volunteered for a mission the following morning," said Locke, a military policeman with the Arizona National Guard. "We were getting up at 5, and I thought I'd be wise to keep my glasses on in case something happened."

Something did happen: in the middle of the night: Locke rolled over on the glasses, twisting the wire frames. When morning came, he had to bend them back to the best shape he could before going on his mission.

"Losing your glasses at any time is a major concern," he said. "I'm an ineffective soldier without my glasses."

But that was then, and this is now.

Locke, 37, now sees clearly without glasses because of Operation Safe Soldier, a Fourth of July project of the Barnet Dulaney Perkins Eye Center in Phoenix.

By the time the project is done, the clinic will have performed free vision-correction surgeries on 100 members of the Arizona National Guard who are scheduled to be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

About half of the surgeries will be performed during an all-day surgical marathon Wednesday. Many have already been done, especially for soldiers who may ship out in the next few months.

"Combat is not a good environment for contact lenses; you have to have glasses," the clinic's Dr. Ronald Barnet said.

"But you can lose your glasses," he continued. "And secondly, if you're in your barracks area at night and there's an attack with mortars or rockets, you can't fumble around for your glasses just to get to the shelter. The person who stops to put on his boots or stops to put on glasses is probably not going to make it. At least that was my experience in Vietnam."

Barnet was a Navy eye surgeon in DaNang during that war; his co-founder, Dr. David Dulaney, now retired, was an Air Force flight surgeon, also in Vietnam. Another of the clinic's doctors and a company executive also are military veterans. So the idea of donating their skills to today's warriors came naturally.

'Support the troops'
"There was a lot of criticism of the Vietnam War, and the troops bore the brunt of that criticism," Barnet said. "Something that everybody should have learned from Vietnam is that no matter how anybody feels about the war, you support the troops. We feel very strongly about that."

And so do the soldiers.

Jeremiah Thude, 23, of Phoenix, has been in the Guard for five years but is shipping out to Iraq for the first time later this year.

And on a recent morning, as he sat in a recliner at the eye clinic awaiting his surgery, he admitted that he was both excited and nervous – the same anticipation he has of going to war.

Thude is a mechanic in a unit that specializes in disabling improvised explosive devices.

"Now I won't have to worry about putting lens inserts in my gas mask. I'll be able to wear sun glasses and goggles," he said.

Within minutes he was laying on his back on the operating table as Barnet, a specialist in LASIK surgery, put him at ease with soothing small talk.

Working through a microscope (the action recorded on a video screen above) Barnet deftly peeled back a flap on Thude's cornea, then moved on to the other eye. Moments later, at another table, he used an instrument that looked like a tiny trowel to reshape the cornea before placing the flap back in position.

It looked worse than it felt – Thude said that for the rest of the day it felt as if he had sand in his eye. And the next day, all he could say was, "Awesome."

Locke had a slightly longer recovery time because he needed a different type of corrective surgery.

New sun glasses
"It takes about three weeks," he said.

But he was as excited as Thude.

"In basic training, I got those big brown ugly glasses that no one likes to wear," he said.

Recently, in anticipation of his surgery, he went out and bought a pair of non-prescription sun glasses.

"It'll be nice to wake up and see what's going on around me," Locke said. "I won't have to take off my regular glasses to put on prescription sun glasses. I can wear the (military-issue) sand-and-dust goggles. They don't fit over regular glasses; they don't even fit over the military glasses. You kind of get the short end of the stick if you're a soldier wearing glasses."

Locke especially appreciates the fact that his new vision is a gift from veterans.

"It means a lot knowing that there are other service members out there supporting what we do today," he said. "I hope when I'm done with the military, I can give something back to the young soldiers who follow me."

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