A Wounded Soldier Strives to Return

I can drink beer out of my leg. How many people can do that?" Specialist Matthew Braddock takes a breather from the pound of pork ribs he's packing away to show off his prosthetic leg. The 25-year-old National Guardsman props his mechanical limb on the picnic table so everybody at Rudy's Country Store and Bar-B-Q can see. Then he rolls up the sleeve of his battle-dress uniform and points to the long, wide, nasty scar left by the explosion that took his leg in northern Iraq a year ago. People come by afterward to slap him on the back and thank him for serving his country. No pity party here. "I live by the theory of suck it up. Why be negative?" he says. "I can run faster now, and the chicks dig it."

After a year of rehabilitation at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, Braddock is driving his Jeep Wrangler home this week to Vancouver, Wash., to see his mom, play tabletop war games with his buddies and try to get out of the Guard--not to leave the military but to join the Army. He wants to go back to Iraq, never mind the missing leg. After all, with its high-tech Renegade foot, his new one has made him faster and funnier. Why test fate a second time? Because he loves the military, loves guns and loved his job as a scout. "I'm going back to be a trigger puller, not a bullet catcher," he says, reasoning that the odds of being blown up twice are pretty low. His mom, Rhetta Drennan, is worried but resigned, especially since her daughter is in the Army, in South Korea. "He's happier. He's found his direction in life," she says.

When TIME printed Braddock's picture last year, letters poured in from readers asking what had become of the young man photographed on a doctor's examining table calmly inspecting the remains of his severed limb. It's a scene being played out daily as soldiers and Guardsmen come home from Iraq seeking treatment at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, Brooke in San Antonio and veterans' hospitals nationwide. Three years since the start of the war, the toll of seriously wounded from Iraq exceeds 7,600--men and women without limbs, with horrid burns, with brain damage, all of them dealing with the psychological scars of war. Braddock is just one of at least 345 who have had amputations--a higher rate per injury than in any other modern U.S. war. Most survivors, like Braddock, are left to pick up the pieces of their lives out of public view. But last month's roadside bomb attack on ABC News co-anchor Bob Woodruff and his cameraman Doug Vogt put the war and the fate of the wounded back in the headlines--and more important, in our thoughts.

Braddock has had a year to live with his injuries and his new leg, which now sports a huge State of Washington seal. He calls the ugly seam where doctors sewed up his arm "my favorite scar." His right ankle, the one he was born with, gives him more problems than his prosthetic ankle. "I could take my shoe off to show you," he offers, "but it takes an act of God to get it back on." Then, while people around us are getting barbecue sauce all over their faces, he relives Jan. 13, 2005, the night he was on a scouting mission, driving a humvee near a railroad yard in Kirkuk, the oil capital of northern Iraq.