Content area
Full text
Welcome home, Col. Hale. It's good to have you back, sir.
Sorry there was no one there to meet you when you stepped off the plane at Burbank Airport Tuesday morning after your flight from San Antonio. You slipped under the radar.
There should have been marching bands, and a 21-gun salute, a flyover by the Air Force Thunderbirds, while the mayor handed you the keys to the city. But all you got were the keys to a rental car.
It's a shame more people don't know about this incredible 10-year journey you've been on for combat veterans who sustained severe facial injuries. If they did, they'd be on their feet applauding.
It didn't get much attention back in 2004 when you walked away from a successful oral surgery practice in Woodland Hills in the prime of your career to join the Army at age 47.
You'd spent a year in Afghanistan with an Army Reserve MASH unit in 2003 at an old Soviet air base just outside Kabul - working 18-hour days digging out pieces of shrapnel and reconstructing shattered jaws.
There were 25,000 special forces troops, United Nations workers and coalition forces stationed in the area. But only one oral surgeon. Dr. Bob Hale from Woodland Hills.
"It took a couple of weeks after I got there to become numb," you told me at the time. "You're so busy rebuilding hundreds of faces that you just keep...