thedrifter
12-03-05, 07:11 AM
Wounded in Iraq, Coventry man fights to stay a Marine
By: Kyn Tolson,
The Day of New London
December 02, 2005
For a couple of seconds, Sgt. Jared Luce is trapped.
He's caught between the couch he's sitting on and a coffee table pushed hard against the lengths of metal and carbon fiber that serve as his legs.
But Luce is quick to find a way out. Rocking back and forth, he heaves himself up with the help of a cane.
"Sergeant," he says, turning to another Marine in the office, "you gotta make this place handicapped-accessible."
The man, not a bit off guard, fires back his riposte: "But Sergeant Luce, you're not handicapped."
So it goes for Jared Adam Luce, 28, of Coventry, a husband, father of three, former seven-year active duty Marine, and, currently, activated reservist.
Striding out of the casualties liaison office at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., he keeps a steady pace. His slight list to the right is a problem he hopes will be remedied later in the day, at nearby Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
For now, though, he's intent on getting to the elevator and a second-floor reception area outside the hospital commander's office.
There he'll be awarded college bonds for his three young sons.
But ceremony is far from evident this morning as Luce makes his way through the hospital. He's wearing dark gym shorts and a gray T-shirt with the small black initials "USMC" positioned over the heart.
What is obvious about Sgt. Luce comes in a simple glance: double leg amputee.
With a closer look, there is more to be seen: gnarled left hand.
And a face-to-face encounter reveals tiny bits of shrapnel sprinkled under the skin around his chin, forehead, and below an eye.
"I don't mind when kids stare," he says of his legs, "'cause kids are just honest about things. But when adults keep looking like something's weird, that stinks."
Those stares irk Luce because he considers himself anything but unusual. Forget that much of his legs were mangled or shattered back on Feb. 9, on the road to the city of Hit, just about two weeks after he arrived in Iraq.
Vision still impaired
The nine months since that roadside explosion have been marked by operations to his legs and his left eye, where his vision remains a bit off. After three surgeries to his left hand, he still can't bend two fingers, and another operation is scheduled for January to create a knuckle in one of them.
But Luce rarely talks about the surgeries, and when he does, they sound merely like unpleasantries. Early in his rehabilitation, he pushed himself so hard he confounded a physical therapist at Walter Reed by walking alone up a grassy slope on the hospital grounds instead of sticking to the smooth sidewalk. He considers the shrapnel in his face, which eventually will be lasered away, an incidental. The blurry vision, he says, is not a problem.
What looms foremost in Luce's mind is the urge to get on the path of "what comes next." Luce wasn't trained for waiting, even though it's become both his pastime and his occupation.
Waiting, he admits and his mother will tell you, just isn't his game.
As Ethel Luce puts it, "He's like me. He's not patient, and never has been."
"There's a lot of kid in him," she says. "When they tell him he's going to walk in three weeks, he believes them. He did it faster than that, actually. But he thought he'd be walking like normal, and it takes longer than that."
Maybe, just maybe, the kid in Jared Luce is the reason why all his impatience hasn't boiled over, turned into bitterness, and scalded his life. He's kept his wit, his chiding ways and his sometimes-brazen gallows humor. For a few nurses who've asked him about his legs, he's answered, "I don't know how they feel. They're back in Iraq."
Or perhaps this Marine has already learned one of the toughest lessons of survival: Living through a horror of war might be the easy part when it comes to figuring out how to spend the thousands of days ahead.
"Right now," he says, "I just figure I'm on vacation."
Early calling
The first stirrings to take a stab at military life came late in high school - near the end of senior year, the time when, if you don't have a plan for the future, you start looking around for opportunities at hand. It was the spring of 1995, and Luce decided to talk to a Navy recruiter who'd come to Tolland High School.
But Luce, whose casual style often masks his earnestness, tends toward the blunt and straightforward. Back in high school, he didn't find much appealing about the recruiter's spiel.
"He just didn't do it for me," says Luce, who wears his hair buzz-cut and still has the unlined face and care-free look of a boy. "And I knew I didn't want to join the Air Force. So it was Army or Marines. A buddy of mine was a year ahead of me and came back. He was a tank crewman. And I decided to go talk to the Marine recruiter. I knew he was filling me full of crap, because he's a recruiter and he's got a quota. But it was still pretty cool."
At home, there wasn't pressure on him to sign up. His father, now divorced from his mother, drives a truck for Tilcon, a supplier of stone, asphalt, and concrete throughout the state.
"My dad was in the Air Force during Vietnam," Luce says, "so I was raised with that. And I was always proud of the fact that he'd been in Vietnam. He wasn't a military parent, though."
After graduation, Luce and his twin brother, James, worked and lived at home for a while. James later went to Central Connecticut State University for a year. Their younger sister was still in high school, and an older brother and sister, who are his mother's children from a first marriage, had long been out of the house. Ethel Luce, a registered nurse, works with Aetna as an organ transplant case manager.
Worked in Vernon
Luce kept a job at Jiffy Lube in Vernon until signing up with the Marines, along with two friends, in the spring of 1996. By that September he was headed to Parris Island and 13 weeks of boot camp. From there he went on for more training before an assignment to Camp Lejeune. He stayed in Lejeune, in the heart of North Carolina's pine forests and one of the Marines' busiest stations, for almost four years. His work - what the Marines call MOS, or military occupational specialty - was as an organizational mechanic.
"It's basically a diesel mechanic," he says, and that meant he worked on Humvees of all sorts, from 5 to 7 tons, and on "waterbowls," the trailers that carry water.
The mechanic's skill came to Luce almost naturally. Even as a child he had a fondness for vehicles. When he and his brother were in middle school, they started working at an uncle's dairy farm in Tolland.
"Literally, from the time I was 6, I can remember driving tractors through the field, standing up so I can step on the brake and not run people over while they're picking rocks out of the field. And later on, I was bailing hay and picking rocks and milking cows. I did all that. I worked there every day from the time I was 12 'til 17 or 18. I like to think I have a fairly good work ethic from that."
At home, family cars were considered almost members of the household. Luce's father, Jim, gave them names signifying to whom they belonged. "My dad has this thing that all the kids have J's in their name. So for every car we had, it was named jluce with a number. My brother's was jluce6. I was 7."
Today, Luce has concocted a computer e-mail address for himself with a nod to at least two of his great loves.
Jluce7devil1775 is a tribute to that car - a silver 1986 Dodge Lancer with a red pinstripe - and a salute to the Marines.
"Devil is for the Marines. Devil Dogs," he explains. "And 1775, it's the Marine Corps birthday. Tun Tavern, in Philadelphia, Pa. It was started in a bar, in 1775."
Deep interest in Marines
The e-mail address reveals only the surface of Luce's deep interest in the Marines' history. If he hasn't read all the books, he's read many of them, and one of his favorites is "History of the Marine Corps," the third revised edition.
At 0500 on Feb. 9, Luce's watch alarm went off, signaling he had an hour before reporting to motor pool.
He shaved, brushed his teeth and otherwise cleaned up before putting on his gear and tidying up his area. His barracks was a plywood construction, shaped like a long tent, and one of several in a small tent city at Al Asad military base in northern Iraq, about 112 miles west of Baghdad.
The base was in transition. As the supervising security force there, the Marines were leaving, and the Army was moving in.
But fresh Marines, with other duties, were coming in nonetheless. Luce and a handful of other reservists from the 6th Motor Transport Battalion had been in Al Asad for about two weeks as front-runners for a larger group from their battalion that would arrive shortly. Luce was with the 6th Motor out of New Haven. Others would come from there and similar units based in Providence; Red Bank, N.J.; Orlando, Fla.; Lubbock, Texas; and Las Vegas.
The temperature that day was around 40. Luce put on a sweatshirt underneath his cammies - the standard-issue, desert-colored camouflage fatigues that matched the tan of his boots. He also put on his glove liners, made of thin cotton and more appropriate for the chill than heavy gloves.
The rest of his attire was standard, too: a helmet made of Kevlar, and a flak jacket with SAPI plates, inserted in both the front and back to protect against gunfire. Those ceramic tiles brought the weight of his protective vest up to about 50 pounds.
Luce carried his M-16A2, the semiautomatic, shoulder-fired rifle that's another standard-issue.
Before setting out at 0700 in a convoy to resupply troops at Hit, less than two hours away, the Marines checked out their Humvees and trucks, which had been loaded the night before.
No work was needed, so they got their briefing - a sort of hybrid lecture that's part strategy, part cautionary tale, and part brusque farewell.
Aware of danger
Their route would be a long drive on dirt that was more path than roadway before they reached pavement for a short sprint to their destination. The Marines knew, too, that Hit, not far from Fallujah, wasn't safe.
Along with resupplying the troops, the mission for the convoy of about 20 vehicles had another purpose: to train the new arrivals, who would be paired with Marines soon leaving.
Luce and his partner were in the maintenance vehicle, a Humvee.
"Every convoy has a maintenance vehicle in case something goes down on the road, so you can try and fix it real quick, or tow it, or whatever. ... It's usually in the back, so if something goes bad, you can just shoot straight up instead of turning back to help."
Luce wasn't driving the regular maintenance Humvee that day, the one that Marines before him had reinforced by welding steel to the bottom. That one was in the shop for repairs.
"Mine that day," he says, "didn't have a damn thing on it."
The mission was well more than an hour under way, and they were out in the middle of nowhere, when a truck in the line broke down. Nothing was in sight. Later, some of the Marines would tell Luce that two Iraqis on a donkey were riding off in the distance.
Under procedure, when a breakdown occurs, all the vehicles behind it move over so that the maintenance man can drive up easily to assist.
That didn't happen.
"None of my guys were pulling over. They weren't the experienced guys. There should've been some drills done before, but there weren't."
The Marine with Luce decided to jump out to direct them.
"I got blown up"
"Then he takes off running," Luce says. "So I pulled forward. And about a second or two after I pulled forward, I got blown up."
The IED (military jargon for "improvised explosive device") went off under the driver's side of the hood. The left front wheel exploded, and the engine was torn apart, reduced to charred, crumpled tubes. In the cabin, the steering wheel and the console blasted out. Shreds of stuffing hung in the air where the driver's floor and foot pedals had been.
Luce figures that all the vehicles ahead of him drove over the same device.
"It just wasn't detonated until the men on the donkey saw the guy get out. It's done by remote control. ... One of the things they like to use over there is Motorola Talkabouts, 'cause a lot of the guys use those in their convoys. (The Iraqis) find one, or procure one somehow, and hook it up and set it to 'roam.' Then whenever you're in range and you click the button to talk to your next truck, you detonate it yourself."
Luce didn't detonate himself, but he was blown up. For reasons he can't explain, he wasn't wearing his seat belt that day, an omission he thinks saved his life.
He sailed out of the Humvee.
"I was awake the whole time. I was a little numb, but I wasn't in shock.
"It didn't blow my legs off. I actually stood up after it happened. I stood up kinda like to tell myself, 'I'm OK. I hope you're watching. I'm fine.'
"Then I fell over. And I found out later that my big bones were pretty much shattered, and the same with the bones in my ankle. On my right leg, my ankle was shattered and dislocated. And on the left one, multiple fractures poking through the skin, stuff like that.
"But I had my cammies on, so I didn't see any of that. I didn't even see any of the blood, and I guess I was bleeding pretty good cause it severed the arteries.
"As soon as I fell down, all I could think of was seeing 'Private Ryan' when you see the guy stand up and fall over because he has no leg. And I was thinking, 'Oh, crap.'"
Kept his mind
Right away he decided to do a "systems check." He looked at his two legs again, and he counted the five fingers on each hand, still covered by glove liners. "I even double-checked, just to make sure I wasn't just seeing five and didn't have them."
Then he did math problems in his head, and he thought about his family. "That," he says, "kept my mind off everything else.
"They say there are no atheists in a fighting hole. Honestly, I wasn't praying when I got blown up. I was thinking."
Immediately, Luce's aide driver ran back to him and put tourniquets on his legs.
"He said later that he got out and saw the bomb and that was why he was running. And I thought he was running up to tell them to move over."
As it turned out, the convoy was close to Hit, and minutes before the explosion Luce had seen two helicopters flying toward that base.
"They were just touching down when it happened. So they just popped them back up, and they came and got me, flew me back to Al Asad, 'cause Al Asad has a surgical company.
"And I remember ... they were running with the stretcher to put me on the helicopter, and one of the guys dropped me. I remember everybody else cussing him out. That was kinda funny."
Luce can chronicle almost to the minute what he was thinking on that copter flight, and he recalls landing in Al Asad and being wheeled in.
"They asked me what happened. Asked me my name. Rank. Social. Allergies. Blood type. I told 'em everything. And then they said, 'All right, you'll be all right.' Then they gave me something that knocked me out. Then I woke up here, after being in Germany for, I think, 12 hours, or a day and a half, or something like that. I was asleep the whole time.
"So I went from Al Asad, to Germany, where they cut my legs off, and then flew me here, where I recovered for a month and a half."
Long road to Coventry
On Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2003, Luce had ended his active duty, his first, seven-year stint with the Marines. He and his wife, Melanie, had moved back to the United States from Okinawa, Japan, with their three boys, now ages 3 to 7.
The Luces decided they wanted to raise their children in one place, give them the chance to stay at any one school for several years, and the opportunity to have history in a community. They chose Coventry, in part, because Melanie's mother bought a small ranch-style house there and she was headed out West. Also, the Luces like the rural feel of the town. They think Tolland, where they were raised, has lost too many farms and is overdeveloped.
Jared and Melanie had been good friends in high school, but there'd never been any romance between them until after he left for boot camp. They later eloped while he was in Lejeune.
Melanie has provided unflagging support for Jared through his recovery. When he needed prodding to keep up with physical therapy, she provided it, Luce says. She was by his bedside when he was brought back to consciousness at Bethesda and was the one to tell him his legs had been amputated. During the winter and spring, she stayed in Bethesda with him for as much time as possible without feeling neglectful of her children back at home, where her mother had returned to help out. Melanie remains supportive of her husband's attachment to the Marines but wants to keep herself and their sons out of any media coverage.
"She's trying to keep things as normal as possible, for the boys," Luce says.
In late 2003, back in the United States and ready to start their new civilian life, the couple renewed their wedding vows in a formal ceremony with family in Tolland. Shortly before that Luce got a tattoo. It runs up the inside of his right lower arm - the initials USMC in Old English lettering.
For work, Luce first took a job at a car dealership. He applied to be a mechanic, but they hired him as a salesman. Starting out in the winter, he found sales and commissions were lean. He met another former Marine there who persuaded him to try a job with a home security systems business.
"I did that for a while," Luce says, "but I really couldn't stand it, because they're kind of shady in some of their dealings, not explaining the contracts. Once I realized that, I left. I didn't want to be any part of that."
Missing the Marines
He went on to Federal Express, first as a package handler, then as a driver. He missed the Marines.
"I couldn't stand being away," he says.
In May 2004, a half-year after leaving the military, Luce signed on again, this time with the Reserves. His wife, he says, wasn't happy about it. Although he reported to his New Haven unit only once a month, both of them knew it was simply a matter of time before he'd be called up for Iraq.
"When I enlisted they said, 'We've been twice as a unit. We might be going back again.' So we got kind of an early warning on that."
Indeed, the word came fast. In November they were notified, and by January the unit was activated. Luce was headed to Iraq a couple of weeks later.
Years before, when he enlisted with the Marines and was sent to boot camp, his mother felt a deep dread.
"I was terrified, really," Ethel Luce says. "Jared wasn't a particularly big, tough guy. He played sports, but he wasn't one of those big athletes."
She didn't hear from him at all during his 13 weeks in South Carolina, not until he passed "the crucible," the final test of boot camp. When she saw him for the graduation ceremony that marked his passage from recruit to private, "he was a different person," she says. "I saw it right away. He was buff. ... And, yeah, confident. Strong looking."
Luce says he used to be a notch over 5-feet-7. His prostheses, however, make him a bit taller.
His left leg was cut off above the knee. His right leg was amputated at the ankle in Germany, but doctors at Bethesda determined more needed to be removed and they cut to mid-shin. A bone growth on his left stump, much like a big spur that keeps enlarging, will likely be removed in an operation in January.
Humor helps
Both leg prostheses have decoration. One has an indelible ink drawing of a heart and "I (love) NAVY NURSES!!" Lower down he's applied the official Marine emblem - a design that intertwines an eagle, globe and anchor.
After his last visit to the Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals in early November - Luce goes to one hospital for operations and certain therapies and to the other for prosthetic care and other therapies - he brought home to Coventry a new left leg, one that's meant to make jogging possible. He's thinking about getting a treadmill.
In mid-summer, during a stretch at home, he tried swimming in Coventry Lake, less than a half-mile from his house. He had to take off his prostheses because the left leg, what's called a C-leg, is computerized for bending where his knee should be.
"It didn't work out too well," he says of the swim.
Despite all the paraphernalia and attention his legs will always require, Luce seems more concerned these days with his left hand. He's mulling going back to school for computers. He'd get free tuition, and so will his children if they attend a public university in Connecticut.
Also, Luce would like to work as a mechanic, back in the Reserves in New Haven.
"We'll see on that," he says. "I'm not sure my wife would want that to happen."
But it could. Injured Marines who have recovered and want to remain in the Corps, either on active duty or in the Reserves, must go before a medical board to show their fitness. Luce aims to have his "med boards" in February or March.
In the meantime, the Luces plan to buy about 4 acres in Coventry and build a larger house of their own. While the federal government will pay for some of the construction - to make the house suitable for Luce's handicaps - his older brother might pull together a group of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and handymen to help.
Luce hasn't spent enough time back in Connecticut to develop a community of friends here, other than those in his New Haven Reserves unit.
"I don't have any real civilian friends," he says. "I have a lot of acquaintances, but I wouldn't call them friends. I was just talking to a buddy of mine I was in Lejeune with. He was in Michigan. We talk at least a couple of times a month. We bump into each other online, or call each other.
"But the people I consider my actual friends, they're all Marines, basically."
Help for sons
On the last Tuesday in August, outside the commander's office at the Bethesda hospital, Luce was presented with three bonds - $10,000 for each of his boys.
The money came from the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, a nonprofit group that helps families of deceased military and others who served the United States. The foundation has given its annual awards to the families of a crewman on the space shuttle Challenger and people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. In all other cases except Luce's, the servicemen are deceased.
"When we heard his story, we were amazed," said Michael DiFrancesco, the foundation's co-chairman, who drove down from New Jersey for the brief ceremony. "Eight of us on the executive board of the foundation voted unanimously to do this. He's such an inspiration to the Marines. He's got real determination, from therapy and on out.
"This man is a real, true Marine, in the sense that he cares for his other Marines. Do you know what his first response was after all this happened, when he was back here? It was, 'How are they over in Iraq?' That's what mattered to him."
In late February, when Luce was bedridden at Bethesda, the commandant of the Marines and the sergeant major - the Corps' highest ranking officer and its highest enlisted Marine - came to his hospital room to award him the Purple Heart.
Coming to terms
Today, nothing about that explosion on the road to Hit seems to haunt Luce. If it's possible to be at peace with events of Feb. 9, he appears to be.
What has bothered Luce over the months, he says, is leaving behind the Marines he knew in Iraq.
"I would've liked to stay over there, " he says. "I feel like I kind of screwed up. I want to be there with the guys I trained with ..., but I'm glad it happened to me, not one of the young Marines. That would've sucked."
The August day after receiving the foundation's $30,000, Luce drove his silver Ford Escape from Maryland to Camp Lejeune to meet up with three of his buddies, the first of his unit to return from their seven months' tour in Al Asad. He'd already driven alone down from Coventry, figuring to refuel on the New Jersey Turnpike because motorists can't pump their gas at stations there. That meant he wouldn't have to get out of his car.
In Iraq, First Sgt. Todd M. Parisi was the senior enlisted Marine of Luce's company. He was in Al Asad when the helicopter landed with Luce aboard. In a recent e-mail communication with The Day, he wrote how the medical evacuation to Germany that day was delayed a few hours because of bad weather. Luce had already been put under by medication.
"We stayed by his side in the hospital until the moment he was loaded on the aircraft," Parisi writes, "and as I looked at my young Marine, my heart just broke as I saw how severely he was injured.
"Not long after, Jared came up on e-mail and started communicating. One of the first statements he made to me was, 'Just give me the damn legs! I already know how to walk!' Can you imagine that?
"The spirit he reflected has indeed been an inspiration to all of us here daily. Not one day goes by here in Iraq when he is not thought of. The Marines even stenciled his name on the door of their platoon sergeant's vehicle as a proclamation of support and constant reminder of his sacrifice.
"The amazing thing is, from that point on after every convoy brief, they would file past his vehicle door ... and touch his name. Such a small gesture, but filled with powerful meaning."
Ellie
By: Kyn Tolson,
The Day of New London
December 02, 2005
For a couple of seconds, Sgt. Jared Luce is trapped.
He's caught between the couch he's sitting on and a coffee table pushed hard against the lengths of metal and carbon fiber that serve as his legs.
But Luce is quick to find a way out. Rocking back and forth, he heaves himself up with the help of a cane.
"Sergeant," he says, turning to another Marine in the office, "you gotta make this place handicapped-accessible."
The man, not a bit off guard, fires back his riposte: "But Sergeant Luce, you're not handicapped."
So it goes for Jared Adam Luce, 28, of Coventry, a husband, father of three, former seven-year active duty Marine, and, currently, activated reservist.
Striding out of the casualties liaison office at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., he keeps a steady pace. His slight list to the right is a problem he hopes will be remedied later in the day, at nearby Walter Reed Army Medical Center.
For now, though, he's intent on getting to the elevator and a second-floor reception area outside the hospital commander's office.
There he'll be awarded college bonds for his three young sons.
But ceremony is far from evident this morning as Luce makes his way through the hospital. He's wearing dark gym shorts and a gray T-shirt with the small black initials "USMC" positioned over the heart.
What is obvious about Sgt. Luce comes in a simple glance: double leg amputee.
With a closer look, there is more to be seen: gnarled left hand.
And a face-to-face encounter reveals tiny bits of shrapnel sprinkled under the skin around his chin, forehead, and below an eye.
"I don't mind when kids stare," he says of his legs, "'cause kids are just honest about things. But when adults keep looking like something's weird, that stinks."
Those stares irk Luce because he considers himself anything but unusual. Forget that much of his legs were mangled or shattered back on Feb. 9, on the road to the city of Hit, just about two weeks after he arrived in Iraq.
Vision still impaired
The nine months since that roadside explosion have been marked by operations to his legs and his left eye, where his vision remains a bit off. After three surgeries to his left hand, he still can't bend two fingers, and another operation is scheduled for January to create a knuckle in one of them.
But Luce rarely talks about the surgeries, and when he does, they sound merely like unpleasantries. Early in his rehabilitation, he pushed himself so hard he confounded a physical therapist at Walter Reed by walking alone up a grassy slope on the hospital grounds instead of sticking to the smooth sidewalk. He considers the shrapnel in his face, which eventually will be lasered away, an incidental. The blurry vision, he says, is not a problem.
What looms foremost in Luce's mind is the urge to get on the path of "what comes next." Luce wasn't trained for waiting, even though it's become both his pastime and his occupation.
Waiting, he admits and his mother will tell you, just isn't his game.
As Ethel Luce puts it, "He's like me. He's not patient, and never has been."
"There's a lot of kid in him," she says. "When they tell him he's going to walk in three weeks, he believes them. He did it faster than that, actually. But he thought he'd be walking like normal, and it takes longer than that."
Maybe, just maybe, the kid in Jared Luce is the reason why all his impatience hasn't boiled over, turned into bitterness, and scalded his life. He's kept his wit, his chiding ways and his sometimes-brazen gallows humor. For a few nurses who've asked him about his legs, he's answered, "I don't know how they feel. They're back in Iraq."
Or perhaps this Marine has already learned one of the toughest lessons of survival: Living through a horror of war might be the easy part when it comes to figuring out how to spend the thousands of days ahead.
"Right now," he says, "I just figure I'm on vacation."
Early calling
The first stirrings to take a stab at military life came late in high school - near the end of senior year, the time when, if you don't have a plan for the future, you start looking around for opportunities at hand. It was the spring of 1995, and Luce decided to talk to a Navy recruiter who'd come to Tolland High School.
But Luce, whose casual style often masks his earnestness, tends toward the blunt and straightforward. Back in high school, he didn't find much appealing about the recruiter's spiel.
"He just didn't do it for me," says Luce, who wears his hair buzz-cut and still has the unlined face and care-free look of a boy. "And I knew I didn't want to join the Air Force. So it was Army or Marines. A buddy of mine was a year ahead of me and came back. He was a tank crewman. And I decided to go talk to the Marine recruiter. I knew he was filling me full of crap, because he's a recruiter and he's got a quota. But it was still pretty cool."
At home, there wasn't pressure on him to sign up. His father, now divorced from his mother, drives a truck for Tilcon, a supplier of stone, asphalt, and concrete throughout the state.
"My dad was in the Air Force during Vietnam," Luce says, "so I was raised with that. And I was always proud of the fact that he'd been in Vietnam. He wasn't a military parent, though."
After graduation, Luce and his twin brother, James, worked and lived at home for a while. James later went to Central Connecticut State University for a year. Their younger sister was still in high school, and an older brother and sister, who are his mother's children from a first marriage, had long been out of the house. Ethel Luce, a registered nurse, works with Aetna as an organ transplant case manager.
Worked in Vernon
Luce kept a job at Jiffy Lube in Vernon until signing up with the Marines, along with two friends, in the spring of 1996. By that September he was headed to Parris Island and 13 weeks of boot camp. From there he went on for more training before an assignment to Camp Lejeune. He stayed in Lejeune, in the heart of North Carolina's pine forests and one of the Marines' busiest stations, for almost four years. His work - what the Marines call MOS, or military occupational specialty - was as an organizational mechanic.
"It's basically a diesel mechanic," he says, and that meant he worked on Humvees of all sorts, from 5 to 7 tons, and on "waterbowls," the trailers that carry water.
The mechanic's skill came to Luce almost naturally. Even as a child he had a fondness for vehicles. When he and his brother were in middle school, they started working at an uncle's dairy farm in Tolland.
"Literally, from the time I was 6, I can remember driving tractors through the field, standing up so I can step on the brake and not run people over while they're picking rocks out of the field. And later on, I was bailing hay and picking rocks and milking cows. I did all that. I worked there every day from the time I was 12 'til 17 or 18. I like to think I have a fairly good work ethic from that."
At home, family cars were considered almost members of the household. Luce's father, Jim, gave them names signifying to whom they belonged. "My dad has this thing that all the kids have J's in their name. So for every car we had, it was named jluce with a number. My brother's was jluce6. I was 7."
Today, Luce has concocted a computer e-mail address for himself with a nod to at least two of his great loves.
Jluce7devil1775 is a tribute to that car - a silver 1986 Dodge Lancer with a red pinstripe - and a salute to the Marines.
"Devil is for the Marines. Devil Dogs," he explains. "And 1775, it's the Marine Corps birthday. Tun Tavern, in Philadelphia, Pa. It was started in a bar, in 1775."
Deep interest in Marines
The e-mail address reveals only the surface of Luce's deep interest in the Marines' history. If he hasn't read all the books, he's read many of them, and one of his favorites is "History of the Marine Corps," the third revised edition.
At 0500 on Feb. 9, Luce's watch alarm went off, signaling he had an hour before reporting to motor pool.
He shaved, brushed his teeth and otherwise cleaned up before putting on his gear and tidying up his area. His barracks was a plywood construction, shaped like a long tent, and one of several in a small tent city at Al Asad military base in northern Iraq, about 112 miles west of Baghdad.
The base was in transition. As the supervising security force there, the Marines were leaving, and the Army was moving in.
But fresh Marines, with other duties, were coming in nonetheless. Luce and a handful of other reservists from the 6th Motor Transport Battalion had been in Al Asad for about two weeks as front-runners for a larger group from their battalion that would arrive shortly. Luce was with the 6th Motor out of New Haven. Others would come from there and similar units based in Providence; Red Bank, N.J.; Orlando, Fla.; Lubbock, Texas; and Las Vegas.
The temperature that day was around 40. Luce put on a sweatshirt underneath his cammies - the standard-issue, desert-colored camouflage fatigues that matched the tan of his boots. He also put on his glove liners, made of thin cotton and more appropriate for the chill than heavy gloves.
The rest of his attire was standard, too: a helmet made of Kevlar, and a flak jacket with SAPI plates, inserted in both the front and back to protect against gunfire. Those ceramic tiles brought the weight of his protective vest up to about 50 pounds.
Luce carried his M-16A2, the semiautomatic, shoulder-fired rifle that's another standard-issue.
Before setting out at 0700 in a convoy to resupply troops at Hit, less than two hours away, the Marines checked out their Humvees and trucks, which had been loaded the night before.
No work was needed, so they got their briefing - a sort of hybrid lecture that's part strategy, part cautionary tale, and part brusque farewell.
Aware of danger
Their route would be a long drive on dirt that was more path than roadway before they reached pavement for a short sprint to their destination. The Marines knew, too, that Hit, not far from Fallujah, wasn't safe.
Along with resupplying the troops, the mission for the convoy of about 20 vehicles had another purpose: to train the new arrivals, who would be paired with Marines soon leaving.
Luce and his partner were in the maintenance vehicle, a Humvee.
"Every convoy has a maintenance vehicle in case something goes down on the road, so you can try and fix it real quick, or tow it, or whatever. ... It's usually in the back, so if something goes bad, you can just shoot straight up instead of turning back to help."
Luce wasn't driving the regular maintenance Humvee that day, the one that Marines before him had reinforced by welding steel to the bottom. That one was in the shop for repairs.
"Mine that day," he says, "didn't have a damn thing on it."
The mission was well more than an hour under way, and they were out in the middle of nowhere, when a truck in the line broke down. Nothing was in sight. Later, some of the Marines would tell Luce that two Iraqis on a donkey were riding off in the distance.
Under procedure, when a breakdown occurs, all the vehicles behind it move over so that the maintenance man can drive up easily to assist.
That didn't happen.
"None of my guys were pulling over. They weren't the experienced guys. There should've been some drills done before, but there weren't."
The Marine with Luce decided to jump out to direct them.
"I got blown up"
"Then he takes off running," Luce says. "So I pulled forward. And about a second or two after I pulled forward, I got blown up."
The IED (military jargon for "improvised explosive device") went off under the driver's side of the hood. The left front wheel exploded, and the engine was torn apart, reduced to charred, crumpled tubes. In the cabin, the steering wheel and the console blasted out. Shreds of stuffing hung in the air where the driver's floor and foot pedals had been.
Luce figures that all the vehicles ahead of him drove over the same device.
"It just wasn't detonated until the men on the donkey saw the guy get out. It's done by remote control. ... One of the things they like to use over there is Motorola Talkabouts, 'cause a lot of the guys use those in their convoys. (The Iraqis) find one, or procure one somehow, and hook it up and set it to 'roam.' Then whenever you're in range and you click the button to talk to your next truck, you detonate it yourself."
Luce didn't detonate himself, but he was blown up. For reasons he can't explain, he wasn't wearing his seat belt that day, an omission he thinks saved his life.
He sailed out of the Humvee.
"I was awake the whole time. I was a little numb, but I wasn't in shock.
"It didn't blow my legs off. I actually stood up after it happened. I stood up kinda like to tell myself, 'I'm OK. I hope you're watching. I'm fine.'
"Then I fell over. And I found out later that my big bones were pretty much shattered, and the same with the bones in my ankle. On my right leg, my ankle was shattered and dislocated. And on the left one, multiple fractures poking through the skin, stuff like that.
"But I had my cammies on, so I didn't see any of that. I didn't even see any of the blood, and I guess I was bleeding pretty good cause it severed the arteries.
"As soon as I fell down, all I could think of was seeing 'Private Ryan' when you see the guy stand up and fall over because he has no leg. And I was thinking, 'Oh, crap.'"
Kept his mind
Right away he decided to do a "systems check." He looked at his two legs again, and he counted the five fingers on each hand, still covered by glove liners. "I even double-checked, just to make sure I wasn't just seeing five and didn't have them."
Then he did math problems in his head, and he thought about his family. "That," he says, "kept my mind off everything else.
"They say there are no atheists in a fighting hole. Honestly, I wasn't praying when I got blown up. I was thinking."
Immediately, Luce's aide driver ran back to him and put tourniquets on his legs.
"He said later that he got out and saw the bomb and that was why he was running. And I thought he was running up to tell them to move over."
As it turned out, the convoy was close to Hit, and minutes before the explosion Luce had seen two helicopters flying toward that base.
"They were just touching down when it happened. So they just popped them back up, and they came and got me, flew me back to Al Asad, 'cause Al Asad has a surgical company.
"And I remember ... they were running with the stretcher to put me on the helicopter, and one of the guys dropped me. I remember everybody else cussing him out. That was kinda funny."
Luce can chronicle almost to the minute what he was thinking on that copter flight, and he recalls landing in Al Asad and being wheeled in.
"They asked me what happened. Asked me my name. Rank. Social. Allergies. Blood type. I told 'em everything. And then they said, 'All right, you'll be all right.' Then they gave me something that knocked me out. Then I woke up here, after being in Germany for, I think, 12 hours, or a day and a half, or something like that. I was asleep the whole time.
"So I went from Al Asad, to Germany, where they cut my legs off, and then flew me here, where I recovered for a month and a half."
Long road to Coventry
On Veterans Day, Nov. 11, 2003, Luce had ended his active duty, his first, seven-year stint with the Marines. He and his wife, Melanie, had moved back to the United States from Okinawa, Japan, with their three boys, now ages 3 to 7.
The Luces decided they wanted to raise their children in one place, give them the chance to stay at any one school for several years, and the opportunity to have history in a community. They chose Coventry, in part, because Melanie's mother bought a small ranch-style house there and she was headed out West. Also, the Luces like the rural feel of the town. They think Tolland, where they were raised, has lost too many farms and is overdeveloped.
Jared and Melanie had been good friends in high school, but there'd never been any romance between them until after he left for boot camp. They later eloped while he was in Lejeune.
Melanie has provided unflagging support for Jared through his recovery. When he needed prodding to keep up with physical therapy, she provided it, Luce says. She was by his bedside when he was brought back to consciousness at Bethesda and was the one to tell him his legs had been amputated. During the winter and spring, she stayed in Bethesda with him for as much time as possible without feeling neglectful of her children back at home, where her mother had returned to help out. Melanie remains supportive of her husband's attachment to the Marines but wants to keep herself and their sons out of any media coverage.
"She's trying to keep things as normal as possible, for the boys," Luce says.
In late 2003, back in the United States and ready to start their new civilian life, the couple renewed their wedding vows in a formal ceremony with family in Tolland. Shortly before that Luce got a tattoo. It runs up the inside of his right lower arm - the initials USMC in Old English lettering.
For work, Luce first took a job at a car dealership. He applied to be a mechanic, but they hired him as a salesman. Starting out in the winter, he found sales and commissions were lean. He met another former Marine there who persuaded him to try a job with a home security systems business.
"I did that for a while," Luce says, "but I really couldn't stand it, because they're kind of shady in some of their dealings, not explaining the contracts. Once I realized that, I left. I didn't want to be any part of that."
Missing the Marines
He went on to Federal Express, first as a package handler, then as a driver. He missed the Marines.
"I couldn't stand being away," he says.
In May 2004, a half-year after leaving the military, Luce signed on again, this time with the Reserves. His wife, he says, wasn't happy about it. Although he reported to his New Haven unit only once a month, both of them knew it was simply a matter of time before he'd be called up for Iraq.
"When I enlisted they said, 'We've been twice as a unit. We might be going back again.' So we got kind of an early warning on that."
Indeed, the word came fast. In November they were notified, and by January the unit was activated. Luce was headed to Iraq a couple of weeks later.
Years before, when he enlisted with the Marines and was sent to boot camp, his mother felt a deep dread.
"I was terrified, really," Ethel Luce says. "Jared wasn't a particularly big, tough guy. He played sports, but he wasn't one of those big athletes."
She didn't hear from him at all during his 13 weeks in South Carolina, not until he passed "the crucible," the final test of boot camp. When she saw him for the graduation ceremony that marked his passage from recruit to private, "he was a different person," she says. "I saw it right away. He was buff. ... And, yeah, confident. Strong looking."
Luce says he used to be a notch over 5-feet-7. His prostheses, however, make him a bit taller.
His left leg was cut off above the knee. His right leg was amputated at the ankle in Germany, but doctors at Bethesda determined more needed to be removed and they cut to mid-shin. A bone growth on his left stump, much like a big spur that keeps enlarging, will likely be removed in an operation in January.
Humor helps
Both leg prostheses have decoration. One has an indelible ink drawing of a heart and "I (love) NAVY NURSES!!" Lower down he's applied the official Marine emblem - a design that intertwines an eagle, globe and anchor.
After his last visit to the Bethesda and Walter Reed hospitals in early November - Luce goes to one hospital for operations and certain therapies and to the other for prosthetic care and other therapies - he brought home to Coventry a new left leg, one that's meant to make jogging possible. He's thinking about getting a treadmill.
In mid-summer, during a stretch at home, he tried swimming in Coventry Lake, less than a half-mile from his house. He had to take off his prostheses because the left leg, what's called a C-leg, is computerized for bending where his knee should be.
"It didn't work out too well," he says of the swim.
Despite all the paraphernalia and attention his legs will always require, Luce seems more concerned these days with his left hand. He's mulling going back to school for computers. He'd get free tuition, and so will his children if they attend a public university in Connecticut.
Also, Luce would like to work as a mechanic, back in the Reserves in New Haven.
"We'll see on that," he says. "I'm not sure my wife would want that to happen."
But it could. Injured Marines who have recovered and want to remain in the Corps, either on active duty or in the Reserves, must go before a medical board to show their fitness. Luce aims to have his "med boards" in February or March.
In the meantime, the Luces plan to buy about 4 acres in Coventry and build a larger house of their own. While the federal government will pay for some of the construction - to make the house suitable for Luce's handicaps - his older brother might pull together a group of carpenters, plumbers, electricians, and handymen to help.
Luce hasn't spent enough time back in Connecticut to develop a community of friends here, other than those in his New Haven Reserves unit.
"I don't have any real civilian friends," he says. "I have a lot of acquaintances, but I wouldn't call them friends. I was just talking to a buddy of mine I was in Lejeune with. He was in Michigan. We talk at least a couple of times a month. We bump into each other online, or call each other.
"But the people I consider my actual friends, they're all Marines, basically."
Help for sons
On the last Tuesday in August, outside the commander's office at the Bethesda hospital, Luce was presented with three bonds - $10,000 for each of his boys.
The money came from the Marine Corps Law Enforcement Foundation, a nonprofit group that helps families of deceased military and others who served the United States. The foundation has given its annual awards to the families of a crewman on the space shuttle Challenger and people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. In all other cases except Luce's, the servicemen are deceased.
"When we heard his story, we were amazed," said Michael DiFrancesco, the foundation's co-chairman, who drove down from New Jersey for the brief ceremony. "Eight of us on the executive board of the foundation voted unanimously to do this. He's such an inspiration to the Marines. He's got real determination, from therapy and on out.
"This man is a real, true Marine, in the sense that he cares for his other Marines. Do you know what his first response was after all this happened, when he was back here? It was, 'How are they over in Iraq?' That's what mattered to him."
In late February, when Luce was bedridden at Bethesda, the commandant of the Marines and the sergeant major - the Corps' highest ranking officer and its highest enlisted Marine - came to his hospital room to award him the Purple Heart.
Coming to terms
Today, nothing about that explosion on the road to Hit seems to haunt Luce. If it's possible to be at peace with events of Feb. 9, he appears to be.
What has bothered Luce over the months, he says, is leaving behind the Marines he knew in Iraq.
"I would've liked to stay over there, " he says. "I feel like I kind of screwed up. I want to be there with the guys I trained with ..., but I'm glad it happened to me, not one of the young Marines. That would've sucked."
The August day after receiving the foundation's $30,000, Luce drove his silver Ford Escape from Maryland to Camp Lejeune to meet up with three of his buddies, the first of his unit to return from their seven months' tour in Al Asad. He'd already driven alone down from Coventry, figuring to refuel on the New Jersey Turnpike because motorists can't pump their gas at stations there. That meant he wouldn't have to get out of his car.
In Iraq, First Sgt. Todd M. Parisi was the senior enlisted Marine of Luce's company. He was in Al Asad when the helicopter landed with Luce aboard. In a recent e-mail communication with The Day, he wrote how the medical evacuation to Germany that day was delayed a few hours because of bad weather. Luce had already been put under by medication.
"We stayed by his side in the hospital until the moment he was loaded on the aircraft," Parisi writes, "and as I looked at my young Marine, my heart just broke as I saw how severely he was injured.
"Not long after, Jared came up on e-mail and started communicating. One of the first statements he made to me was, 'Just give me the damn legs! I already know how to walk!' Can you imagine that?
"The spirit he reflected has indeed been an inspiration to all of us here daily. Not one day goes by here in Iraq when he is not thought of. The Marines even stenciled his name on the door of their platoon sergeant's vehicle as a proclamation of support and constant reminder of his sacrifice.
"The amazing thing is, from that point on after every convoy brief, they would file past his vehicle door ... and touch his name. Such a small gesture, but filled with powerful meaning."
Ellie