A Wounded Soldier Strives to Return

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His humvee, second in a convoy of five from the 3rd Battalion, 116th Cavalry, deviated ever so slightly from the tracks of the one in front, he says, setting off an antitank mine. The blast blew through the engine block with such force that the armor plating jury-rigged to the floor shattered his ankles instantly. Shrapnel sliced into his left arm, cutting an artery. He would have bled to death right there if three fellow soldiers hadn't rushed him to the field operating room in a record 13 minutes. Military doctors--astonished Braddock had survived--pulled a blood vessel out of his right thigh to repair his bleeding left arm and patched him up for a flight out, first to Tikrit, then to the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, and finally home.

Only later, when he woke up, did he learn that the armor plating he had been wearing on his chest had saved him from a large piece of shrapnel. "If I hadn't had body armor, I'd be dead," he says. Braddock got a Purple Heart, and he and his buddies--Specialist Josiah Jurich, Sergeant Charles Jordan and Staff Sergeant Marvin Albert II--were all awarded Bronze Stars. He was alive, with just one small regret. "They burned my helmet and Kevlar vest." O.K., two regrets. "I wanted a cool scar, like this," says Braddock, slashing his hand across his eye. He wears the tiniest of smiles as he dives into another pork rib.

Humor has been his armor throughout recovery. Sure, there was a lot of griping and yelling too, to hear him tell it. It started two weeks after the aborted scouting mission when a doctor at Madigan Army Medical Center at Fort Lewis, Wash., told him that both his legs would have to be amputated. "I wanted to throw a rock at him," says Braddock. He got a second opinion--an extra effort that saved one leg but not the other. Before he went into surgery, he painted a dotted line and scissors on the bad leg and wrote, "Cut here." On Valentine's Day last year, Dr. Roman Hayda from Brooke and Dr. Douglas Smith, an ankle surgeon at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, worked for 11 hours to repair his right ankle. Although he lost the foot and nine inches of his left leg, his right side was intact thanks to three pins holding the ankle together. Subsequent operations removed most of the shrapnel in his body, to Braddock's dismay. "I was hoping to put a magnet on it," he jokes.

Rehabilitation is painful, however, even for a guy who jokes. "At first, I couldn't move in my wheelchair, it hurt so much," he says. He was heavily drugged for a while but decided to quit methadone cold turkey without telling his doctors--not knowing that it could have been fatal. He weaned himself off Demerol too after it gave him twitches. Frustrated by his slow progress at Brooke, he started to run in secret with his new prosthesis. When his therapists insisted he work out in a pool instead, he got revenge. He showed up in shorts and ripped them off Chippendale-stripper style to reveal a camouflage-print Speedo that drew "ewwws" from the witnesses, he says with a chuckle.