From staff reports

Therese Winschel said Friday from Bethesda, Md., that she had never been so happy to see a load of dirty laundry.

“We walked in the room and Bert asked, ‘Hey, Mom, you want to do me a favor?’” Therese Winschel said after visiting with her son, wounded Marine Sgt. Albert “Bert” Winschel. “It was very normalizing,” she said.

Therese Winschel, a respiratory therapist, and her husband, Terry Winschel, the historian for Vicksburg National Military Park, saw their son late Wednesday night for the first time since he was wounded by enemy fire in combat in southern Afghanistan on March 2.

The 23-year-old father of one had been flown earlier that day to Bethesda Naval Hospital from a military hospital in Germany, where he had undergone “several surgeries” for wounds to his pelvis and lower right leg. On Thursday, he underwent another, to reconstruct his right hand, a surgery his father said doctors are saying should be his last.

“He’s finally all sealed up and doing very, very well,” Terry Winschel said.

Using a walker Thursday night, Therese Winschel said, her son was able to walk. “It wasn’t pretty, but it was a walk,” she said.

She said her son should begin rehabilitation at Bethesda within days, “and we’re hoping we’ll be able to bring him back to Vicksburg soon to continue his rehabilitation there.”

“I told the doctors I just want to have him where I can keep my eyes on him,” she said.

Bert Winschel, a 2004 graduate of St. Aloysius High School, joined the U.S. Marine Corps in October 2004. His deployment to Afghanistan began on Nov. 7. He earlier had served a tour of duty in Iraq.

And the laundry? “I don’t like to deal with laundry, but when he asked me to take care of his big sack of dirty clothes, it was the best laundry I had ever seen.”