An eye for detail helps maimed GIs

By Sean D. Hamill Special to the TribuneWed Jun 8, 9:40 AM ET

The plastic bottles of color that Vince Przybyla uses to change injured soldiers' lives are clustered like an artist's palette at the side of his small work table at Walter Reed Army Medical Center.

"It looks like an artist's palette because that's what he is--an artist," said Army Sgt. Brian Doyne, one of Przybyla's many patients and fans.

Doyne, 25, should know. He was in Przybyla's small office not long ago so Przybyla could touch up one of his most recent canvases: Doyne's new prosthetic eye.

A month earlier, like a modern-day Geppetto, Przybyla, the only ocularist working for the Army, had taken soulless plastic and conjured vibrant life from it--or at least the appearance of life, if not a window to the soul. With the help of paint and red thread he made Doyne a blue left eye.

The first time Doyne put it in was two months after he was nearly killed when a roadside bomb exploded in front of him Feb. 24 near Tikrit, Iraq.

"I was able to look at myself, where there had just been a socket before, and say, `Now I look more like myself,"' said Doyne, of Fayetteville, Ga., whose face is still heavily scarred from shrapnel wounds.