Mother’s book puts war injuries into terms kids can understand

Grace Verardo, 3, returned home one day from preschool and told her mother, “Someone said Daddy is gross.”

Sarah Verardo spun into action.

Her husband’s war injuries were affecting her children more than she had realized. Mike Verardo is a double amputee, but Grace had known him simply as a “handsome hero.”

“I realized I needed to give them the tools to deal with what I’ve already been dealing with for years — the stares, the questions,” Sarah Verardo, 33, said of her three daughters, ages 3, 2 and 9 months.

So she wrote and selfpublished a children’s book, “Hero at Home,” about a veteran who has a prosthetic leg, a wounded arm and a brain injury that sometimes causes him to put his “keys in the fridge and milk in the closet.”

Her audience, she said, is her children, their classmates and people around the The self-published “Hero at Home,” by Sarah Verardo

world who want to better understand veterans with severe war injuries.

“I’m his caregiver and case manager, but the most important thing I do is keep his dignity and my children’s dignity,” she said. “That was being challenged.”

Mike Verardo, 33, was an Army infantryman with the 82nd Airborne Division when he was hit by an improvised explosive device in 2010 in southern Afghanistan. He was knocked unconscious and badly bruised, but his injuries were mostly to his head.

A few days later, feeling fit for duty, he decided to return to his unit rather than go home to recuperate.

Two weeks after that, he was struck by another explosive device. This time, the blast blew off his left leg and arm and burned 30 percent of his body. The injuries to his body and brain were so extensive that he was not expected to live.

The attack happened on April 24, 2010, which made Tuesday his eighth “Alive Day,” a day that some veterans celebrate to mark surviving an attack that almost killed them.

The Verardos, who live in North Carolina, were in Washington, D.C., this week for a celebration at the U.S. Capitol.

At the time of the 2010 attack, Sarah and Mike Verardo were dating. They married three years later.

Proceeds from the book benefit the Independence Fund, a nonprofit that helps severely wounded veterans and their families. Sarah Verardo is the group’s executive director.

At the beginning of her book, illustrated by Inna Eckman, readers are introduced to Grace, her father and the war that left him wounded.

“This is Grace’s dad,” it reads. “He was sent to Afghanistan to protect America and was wounded in action while fighting for our country ... He wears a special leg that looks like it belongs on a robot. His arms were rebuilt with lots of tools.”

Then it shows a drawing of Grace on her dad’s shoulders walking with a prosthetic leg and a red cape. There’s also a scene of him on an all-terrain wheelchair at the beach with Grace’s sisters on his lap.

The next page is crucial because it says something that Sarah Verardo said many people don’t understand: “Grace’s dad is still working hard to get better.”

Mike Verardo has had 100-plus surgeries, with more in his future. Although the Verardos’ lives aren’t easy, they feel lucky that he returned from the war alive.

“Grace’s daddy tells her that sometimes people get hurt and their bodies change,” the book says.

“But they still have the same heart.”