"The U.S. military is studying the woman who received a federally funded face transplant after she was attacked by a rampaging chimpanzee..."

"... hoping the findings help seriously disfigured soldiers returning from war."

The Pentagon paid for Charla Nash�s full face transplant in 2011 � two years after she was horribly disfigured by a chimp attack � and is underwriting her follow-up treatment at a combined cost estimated in the hundreds of thousands of dollars....

Nash jokes about sometimes feeling like a science project. But the 61-year-old daughter of an Air Force veteran said she gets real satisfaction out of letting the doctors use her for research, and sees it as an opportunity to help wounded soldiers and "do something good out of all of this bad."

"They asked me, could they? I said, 'Yeah, I'd be thrilled to help out in any way I could,'" said Nash, a former Connecticut resident who now lives on her own in Boston with the help of part-time aides.

Good for her. I'm impressed by her spirit. She looks great in the first picture you see. Her face looks mobile and expressive. Be careful scrolling past the first screen, because there are pre-transplant pictures of Ms. Nash. The chimp attack blinded her, so she has never seen the damage or the vast improvement. Her fight to inhabit a new face is rewarded not by looking in a mirror but by how the face feels from the inside, her relationships with other people, and the knowledge that she is contributing to the treatment of others who are suffering and who will suffer.