A Wounded Soldier Strives to Return

By Cathy Booth Thomas / San Antonio

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.

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.

If he sounds like a kid at heart, he is. A science-fiction fan, he has all the tapes of the original Battlestar Galactica TV show from the '70s. In Iraq, he used his reputation as an auto mechanic to play practical jokes on the unsuspecting. "I'd tell 'em to go get a flux capacitor," he says, laughing that his Guard buddies didn't catch the Back to the Future reference. His favorite game remains Warhammer, a tabletop battlefield game in which real-world strategies are played out with miniature soldiers. He builds his own figures, mixing Warhammer components, like its Imperial Guard ("the National Guard of the future," he says) with the game's Space Orks. "It's a way of acting like a kid and getting away with it," he admits. But he is a serious history buff too and has visited every mission church near San Antonio, including the Alamo. "Just don't get him talking about World War II," warns his mother.

This is a guy who joined the Oregon National Guard in 2003, having found little else that engaged him--including his full-time job as a grain inspector. His grandfather served in the Air Force, and two of his uncles were Navy men. (His dad left home when he was young.) Because of his dyslexia, Braddock had trouble in school. But he thought to himself, Where else can you shoot a fully automatic weapon--legally--and get paid for it? A lengthy conversation ensues about guns (he owns an M1A and wants an AR-10 for hunting) and ends with this odd observation: Iraqis, he says, are more afraid of pistols, which they associate with executions, than automatic weapons.

Is Braddock avoiding bigger issues in his life? Probably. He went to see a military psychologist. Didn't like him. He has no time for pity, his own or others'. While fellow amputees were offering encouragement to other survivors at Brooke, his bedside talks were sometimes brutal. "I made it a point to bitch out people who are giving up on themselves," he says. "I told them, 'You know the difference between amputees and cripples? A cripple is someone who gives up.'" Last May, three months after his surgery, he hiked up Washington's Mount St. Helens with his prosthetic leg just to prove that he could do it. "You suck it up and drive on," he says. His mom says he is blessed in his positive attitude. "One of the things that always helped Matthew is he never looked back," she says.

What worries him now is the waiver he needs to get into the Army with a prosthetic leg. Failing that, he might return to Texas, learn some Spanish and try for a border-patrol job. There is no girlfriend in his life. "With this chubby Irish mug?" he asks, noting the 20 lbs. he has put on since his accident. But the ladies do take notice, he admits. "I tell girls I got blown up by an antitank mine in Iraq. It's cheesy, but it works." And he really has drunk out of his prosthetic leg--although he has learned to use a spare one so he doesn't have to walk around with a beer-soaked sock. "Made that mistake once," he says. How much beer does a leg hold, we ask, suspecting a trick. "More than a pitcher," he answers with a perfectly straight face.