Currahee! Gen. Petraeus Helps Lt. Brennan Come Out of a Coma

(Left) Lt. Brennan with Gen. Petraeus

Lt. Brian Brennan, who lost both legs to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan and suffered acute brain injury, a collapsed lung, internal bleeding, a ruptured spleen, multiple compound fractures of his left arm, and a shattered femur bone, was in a coma when Gen. David Petraeus visited him at Walter Reed Army Medical Center last June. The only way the general could get him to respond was to utter the battle cry "Currahee!" (Cherokee for "We stand alone."), motto of the famed "Band of Brothers" Regiment.

“That’s when he kind of sat up in the bed as best he could,” said Jim Brennan, Brian’s father.

"Like he was saying, ‘I’m in here, I’m in here.”’ Said his mother Joanne Brennan.

“All of a sudden, the lieutenant, his stumps are banging up and down on the sheets. His head is moving around and very clearly responding to his unit’s nickname,” said Petraeus. “For three weeks, he had not responded to the voices of his family, but that Band of Brothers motto brought him back from the living dead.”

His hometown, Howell, NJ, has pitched in to help his family by building a 1,000-square-foot handicapped accessible addition to his parents' home, and a Brian Brennan Stands Alone trust fund has more than enough money for the Brennan family's needs and will undertake to help the families of other wounded warriors.

See Hot Air for the video.