By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
Mico Morin of Turner was severely injured in a 2004 car crash.

AUGUSTA – Against the white of the nursing home walls, the pictures of bikini-clad “Hooters” girls stand out like neon signs in a church window.

Mico Morin, 24, likes the contrast.

No more than a dozen feet away, two elderly men lie in their beds. One can’t speak. The other can’t walk. Both are old enough to be Morin’s grandfather.

“People are nice here, but they’re old,” Morin says of his new home, the residential ward of the veterans’ hospital at Togus.

He wants out.

In slow, labored speech – the result of a catastrophic car crash in 2004 – the Iraq war veteran says he wants to be somewhere with younger people. His family says he needs more intensive care to help him overcome his injuries.

However, that may not be possible here in Maine, where his Turner family can regularly visit.

The VA won’t pay long term for private care, the family said. And the costs for full-time nursing or care at a New Hampshire brain-injury hospital are too high for his family.

“You’d have to be a Kennedy,” said Johanne Morin, Mico’s older sister. One estimate calculated the cost at $17,000 per month.

“It’s very frustrating,” Johanne said. “Something needs to happen. I just don’t know what it will be.”

The crash

Morin’s accident happened shortly after returning to the United States from Iraq. He had spent a year there, working as a mechanic until the Army brought him stateside to Fort Carson, Colo.

The day before Thanksgiving, he caught a ride to the Denver airport, where he planned to board a plane to Maine. He never made it.

On the highway outside Castle Rock, the car swerved and rolled. Morin and two other solders were thrown. One died.

Morin suffered horribly. A lung collapsed. His neck broke in three places and his back in 12. To keep him still, doctors paralyzed his body, which had swollen from the injuries.

Then, he got worse.

Sometime during his early care, his respirator stopped for 30 or 40 minutes, his family said. It left him with severe brain damage.

In the 16 months since the crash, many of the wounds have healed. But the scars, particularly from those long minutes without oxygen, remain.

He needs help in the kitchen and in the bathroom. He can’t walk but a few steps.

In his wheelchair, he roams the halls of the Togus nursing home by shuffling his feet along the floor, adeptly turning corners like a NASCAR driver.

The rest of his body is wobbly. He has tremors. His fingers scrunch up. And his speech takes a while.

“You have to give him time, but he says things you’d never expect,” twin sister Nancy said. “It’s him.”

In a sun-filled Togus room, Mico talked about his aspirations. He wants a girlfriend. He hopes to be a writer.

But first, he wants a phone, like the one he had at a previous hospital.

For the first three months after his accident, Mico recuperated at a hospital in Denver. He came home in early 2005 for a nine-month stay at Togus.

But in November of last year, the VA sent him to its hospital in Richmond, Va. At the Hunter Holmes McGuire VA Medical Center, which specializes in helping people with brain injuries, he learned to walk with a cane. He relearned to feed himself, to brush his teeth and bathe with a little help.

He had a private room. He had his own phone, on which he called home every night. He had access to a computer room, day or night.

And he had young people nearby, the result of the war in Iraq.

He hoped to find the same care at Togus when he returned in February. Instead, he found himself missing Virginia.

More brain injuries

Though a car crash hurt Mico, the war has been sending home lots of veterans with brain injuries.

Last May, the New England Journal of the American Medical Association released a study finding that 22 percent of injuries in Iraq and Afghanistan affected the head, face or neck, almost double the number from Vietnam.

The reason is that better armor is helping soldiers live through injuries that would have killed them before, the publication said.

With the number of wounded U.S. soldiers recently hitting 17,000, hospitals like Togus are expected to see more people with similar wounds.

More families like the Morins will be faced with helping a young person with brain trauma find their way.

“You fall in all these loopholes,” said Nancy Morin. The care she assumed the military would provide has been slow to come, she said.

She and Johanne want more intensive care for their brother.

Ronald Brodeur, adjutant for the Maine office of Disabled American Veterans, declined to talk about Mico’s case. The VA is trying to care for everyone, he said.

“It’s all about money,” Brodeur said. “The VA is not budgeted to take someone outside of the system.”

The costs, stretched across every injury and expanded for the life span of each soldier, would be too great, he said.

Though he wants to leave, Mico believes the doctors and nurses at Togus are doing what they can.

Therapists help him stretch and work on his walking several days a week. Workers run bowling and bingo games.

On Monday, he even went skiing at Sunday River, where he was strapped into a specially adapted chair.

Not a sport for the old folks, he skied the slopes five times.

“I went very fast,” he said.