thedrifter
04-09-06, 09:09 AM
Newly retired Gunnery Sgt. John Collins moves on after suffering serious war injuries
By: TERI FIGUEROA - Staff Writer
Twelve hours. Spent two decades training for this, and that's all he got this time around. Twelve hours.
That's how long Gunnery Sgt. John Collins spent inside Iraq before his tour ended.
What happened to Collins robbed him of some eyesight. Of pieces of his face. Of living through the war stories he and his friends would forever tell.
There were no warning sirens that morning. No telltale whistles of an impending rocket. No enemy in sight as the sun rose over the flat, barren vista that March dawn.
Collins was just another Marine in a large convoy heading into war, just a guy taking a minute to grab breakfast.
From out of nowhere ... BOOM.
Collins stepped on a land mine near an Iraqi town about two miles north of the Kuwaiti border.
It was the second day of the war.
The March 22, 2003, blast left the Canyon Lake resident, then 37 years old, with permanent damage, mostly to his face and legs, and he knows he is lucky to be alive, thank God. But part of his body was shredded.
Collins, now 40, says a doctor explained the damage to his face like this: Take a bag of cornflakes. Stomp on it. Jump up and down. Now look at it. The dust that was once cornflakes is how Collins' left cheekbone looked. Nothing left.
Doctors placed a titanium plate in his cheek. Later, a surgeon used one of Collins' ribs to replace his cheekbone ---- but infection set in.
Finally, a year after the blast, a different surgeon cut into Collins' head and carved out a piece of his skull to flop down into his face.
The tall, tattooed man has a dent in his head where the surgeon removed the layer of skull. Tissue from the heart of an organ donor now sits under Collins' left eye, used to rebuild the skin.
Scar tissue and gravity tug at the war wound. After Collins retired from the Marines last summer, the thin skin, way too stretched out under his eye, ripped slightly, leaving a hole in his cheek about the size of a pencil eraser. The white material implanted under the skin of his cheek was clearly visible. Another operation ensued.
Every operation brought with it overwhelmingly painful recoveries. A dozen surgeries, and Collins kept at it.
"The more positive you are about getting through it, the recovery is a lot faster," Collins said. "You can **** and moan, but that makes the situation worse."
Often, a tear streaks his face. He's not crying. The blast and all the surgeries have shifted his left tear duct, and now, unless he remembers to tilt his head to the right every so often to allow his eye to drain, a salty drop dribbles down his left cheek.
Collins was a career Marine. He had served nearly 22 years when he officially retired July 1 ---- two years and three months after he came close to dying on an Iraqi roadside.
Rather than leave the service, the Marines allowed him to stay on active duty, he says, to ensure that the lion's share of the medical treatments he needed came before he retired.
Collins keeps thick stacks of stickers with the Marine Corps symbol in his black quarter-ton Dodge truck ---- itself covered with yellow ribbons and POW/MIA stickers ---- and hands them out to strangers. He wears hats, a watch and a fat ring with that Marine Corps symbol.
His cell phone plays the "Marine Corps Hymn" when it rings.
He glued his Purple Heart to the cane he used for about a year. "If I gotta use a cane, I might as well decorate it," the gunnery sergeant said.
The career in communications that Collins once envisioned when he retired from the Corps ---- climbing utility poles, maybe laying cable ---- is out of the question. He can't stand for long periods of time, and he's partially blind in his left eye.
The morning it happened, Collins was part of a convoy making the push across the Kuwaiti border into Iraq. After stopping on the side of the road for a four-hour nap near the Iraqi town of Safwan, the troops stood near a Humvee at 6 a.m. for a briefing ---- one that included a heads-up to the crew to eat.
Collins headed over to the next Humvee to grab a Meals Ready to Eat, commonly known as an MRE. He approached the rig, which was towing large drums of fuel.
The bomb exploded under his left foot.
One of Collins' friends would later tell the gunny he watched him fly 20 feet up and back.
Marines swarmed Collins, sliced off his boot laces and cut off the suit that he was wearing as protection against biological and chemical weapons.
Collins is a stepgrandfather, and he had been showing his buddies photos of his preschool grandsons on little Harley motorcycles, just like grandpa has. The pictures had come in the mail two days earlier; they were sitting on the dashboard of his nearby Humvee.
"When I got blown up, they couldn't keep me awake, so they ran and grabbed the pictures," Collins recalled. "They said, 'John, look, here's your grandsons. Talk to us. Stay with us. Look at your grandsons.' It kept me awake."
Collins felt no pain. Morphine. In the seconds after the blast, the battalion surgeon and the chief medic, both of whom happened to be in his convoy, jumped in to render medical aid.
One of the guys in the convoy shot video of Collins' rescue. Collins keeps a copy of it on his computer.
On the footage, a helicopter creeps in through gray skies and stirs up brown dust as it settles onto the flat, unbelievably barren landscape. The only bright color comes from the orange smoke of the flare set to guide the chopper.
Pan to six guys carrying Collins on a stretcher to the helicopter. They rush, then stop to set him down for medics to work on him again, only 30 feet from the chopper.
In the background, the convoy, which had been parked, begins to roll past, pushing north into Iraq, without Collins.
Seconds later, troops heft Collins' stretcher and load it into the helicopter. The bird lifts off, bound for a field hospital in Kuwait.
His buddies would later tell him they thought he was dead.
About 24 hours later, halfway around the world in the posh Riverside community of Canyon Lake, the phone rang.
Debbie Collins knew something was coming, had that can't-shake-it, clairvoyant feeling as soon as her husband left for this war.
The deployment marked Collins' second tour in the Middle East. He had been in Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s for Operation Desert Storm, also as a Marine based at Camp Pendleton. Came home just fine that time.
But this tour would be different, bad different, and spitfire Debbie Collins "knew it in my stomach."
On this particular Saturday, three years ago, she kept the phone nearby as she and daughter B.J. Harris skipped a trip to the grocery store and instead cleaned the garage. Wanted to be home, just in case. Why they knew the bad thing would be that day, they can't say.
Ri-i-i-ing.
The caller ID read "U.S. Government."
The women looked at each other. You get it. No, you get it. No, you.
Ri-i-i-ing.
Ri-i-i-ing.
Harris relented, picking up the phone. The man on the other end asked for "Barbara."
"There's no Barbara here," Harris replied.
"Oh, maybe it says Debra," came the response.
Adrenaline. Debbie Collins took the phone from her daughter.
The next words she heard were, "Your husband is alive, but ..." and "critical but stable condition."
Then came words such as crushed legs, fractured skull.
The blast shredded the left side of Collins' face, tore shrapnel into his legs and gut, sheared off some of his big toe and crushed the bones of his feet.
Debbie Collins, somehow, with the help of her husband's stateside buddies, was able to get through on the phone to the field hospital in Kuwait. She couldn't speak directly with her husband, but a nurse told her that he was coherent ---- enough so that he told the hospital staff where his wife lived, where his parents lived.
Exhale.
"We knew that he was alert enough that he remembered all of us," Debbie Collins said.
After two days in Kuwait to stabilize him, Collins flew to a hospital in Germany, where he stayed for six days.
That stopover brought with it surgeries on his feet. His face would have to wait ---- too swollen.
His worried wife racked up a $500 phone bill in overseas calls.
"It was 18 hours before we got ahold of him," Debbie Collins said. "He kept saying they are taking me into surgery. I kept saying, 'For what?' and he'd say, 'I don't know. My eye is swollen; I can't see out of it.' He couldn't see his feet. And they (officials) couldn't talk to me because of security. They couldn't prove it was me and not a reporter, so they wouldn't tell me his injuries.
"He'd be out of it (on medication). But he kept little notes so that he would remember to tell me, so that I would know what they were doing. When we (finally saw him), he didn't even remember me calling him."
More than a week after the blast, Collins was flown to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
Debbie Collins and her daughter flew back East and took a deep breath. God, what would John look like?
John Collins himself didn't know. His glasses were blown up in the explosion, and the best the immobilized man could do was squint at himself in the reflection of the TV screen at the hospital.
"When we got to Bethesda, they said, 'You've got to prepare for what he looks like,' " Debbie Collins said. "I walked in and I was like, 'Whew. Good.' "
Much of his head was wrapped in a bandage, but his face didn't look so bad, considering the damage done. No shredded skin hanging from his skull, no Frankenstein stitches on his face ---- although there were plenty on his legs.
In late April 2003, after about a two-week stay in Bethesda ---- and a visit from President Bush ---- Collins finally landed in California.
Bruised and sore, he eased into his La-Z-Boy chair, threw a blanket over scabbed legs and locked his family's big-screen TV onto CNN, hoping for a glimpse of fellow Camp Pendleton Marines with the 3rd Assault Amphibious Battalion.
Not long after John Collins came home, his stepdaughter, B.J. Harris, and her little ones moved in. Debbie Collins' granddaughter ---- also named Debbie, in honor of her grandma ---- was 6 years old.
"When Papa came home, I didn't want to get by him because I was so scared," little Debbie recalled. "He said it was OK, so I hugged him."
"Papa" couldn't get on the floor and wrastle around with her anymore. Instead, the child helped with his crutches and rubbed his knees after surgeries to combat the scar tissue.
During that first few weeks home, reporters knocked on the door. Buddies called from Iraq. Letters came in from strangers all over the county. Schoolchildren drew pictures for him. Hundreds in Canyon Lake signed a huge welcome-home banner.
The couple kept it all.
During that first month back, Collins' mornings often began with flowers and cards on his doorstep, left by strangers.
And Canyon Lake folks stopped by with dinner for the family. Big dinners, service for eight or 10 people. The Collinses ended up freezing a lot of it, noshing on the rest through the day.
"It's been great, unbelievable, the support we got," Collins said last spring.
It is in Canyon Lake that Collins found the Tuesday Work Group. More accurately, it found him. The leader of the group ---- made up mostly of retired guys in the private community ---- asked him to take part in the grimy labor that they do in building bridges, widening walkways and installing ponds on the golf course that snakes throughout the housing development.
The injured Marine jumped at the offer ---- even though at first he was limited to riding in a golf cart and handing out drinks to retirees sweating over power tools.
Collins spent many Tuesday mornings with the group. For the volunteer work, absolutely, but also for the coffee, the doughnuts, the camaraderie.
On one particular Tuesday last June, before the work began, the crew gathered at 6:30 a.m. to hear their assignment for the day. The leader of the group took a second to let everyone know that Collins' retirement party was only a few weeks away.
"John who?" one of the guys called out, evoking a laugh.
Everybody knows John.
As Collins drove a cart around the course later that morning, he offered a smile and a hearty "Go-oo-od morning," to every person, friend or stranger.
To a person, they all waved back.
On occasion, John Collins limps a bit. Can't ride his beloved Harley unless he's got a half-helmet and wraparound glasses ---- forget a full helmet, not his style ---- because the wind dries out his left eye, since it won't close.
Oh, yeah. The eye that won't close. Used to creep Debbie out. One night, not long after her wounded husband first got home, she awoke to find John staring at her. Sleeping, actually, with that eye open.
The couple laughed as they told the story. Apparently his eyeball, which would normally roll back during sleep, refused to do so that night.
"I woke up and she's smacking me," John said. "She goes, 'I can't believe you were doing that. You were staring at me.' My eyeball just stopped rolling back. For a year and a half, when I went to sleep, it looked like I was staring at everything."
"I have pictures of him sleeping with his eye open," Debbie Collins jumped in. Moments later, she dug the photo out. Sure enough, it looked like a sleeping John was staring at the camera. * * *
With his retirement last year came the red tape, plowing through paperwork to get his benefits and to find out his disability rating. A rating of 100 percent disabled, he said, would mean he could get about $4,000 a month, combining pay for both his retirement and his disability.
Collins decided to get the paperwork into the Veterans Administration before he retired, although he knew the VA folks couldn't look at his application until his official retirement date, July 1.
So last June, John and Debbie Collins headed down to Vista to meet with a county worker to guide them through the application process. He answered their questions, handed the couple stacks of papers and gave generic information about what government assistance might be available to them.
John Collins brought his medical file with him. Debbie Collins smiled and leaned over with an mischievous, "Oooooh, honey, show it to him."
Her husband looked at the county worker, grinned and flipped the file open to one of the forms. The paperwork had been filled out by medical personnel when Collins was at the field hospital in Kuwait.
Smears of blood on the paper. Probably his.
With John's retirement, the Collins family eyed a move to the East Coast ---- Debbie and John both hail from upstate New York ---- but decided to remain in California into the fall of 2005, with the hope that John would get his disability rating, so crucial to their future, secured before they left.
The prospect of staying that long in California was a tough decision ---- "Financially, I don't know if we can," Debbie said last spring.
By early September, even with no word on the disability rating, the Collins family decided it was time to go. They would leave by mid-October.
Five days before the moving vans came, John Collins got the call. He had won a 100 percent disability rating.
He also had a final appointment with his doctor at Naval Medical Center San Diego, commonly known as Balboa Hospital.
"I did good," an excited Collins said on the phone Oct. 7. "They said you are almost legally blind (in his left eye), but have great peripheral vision. Medically, I am done and released from the doctor.
"Everything worked out perfectly," he continued. "Just in time. We said all along, put your trust in the Lord. It was frustrating waiting this long, but you just have to have faith. The day finally arrived."
His good health, his secured financial future. It was the closure, he said, that he needed.
Days later, John Collins said goodbye to their second tour of duty at Pendleton, goodbye to the Canyon Lake community that had rallied behind him and his family, goodbye to buddies who affectionately call him "Land Mine," goodbye to weekly dinners with the best friends who spent Memorial Day riding Harleys with him in Fallbrook and who "ooohed" and "aaaahed" while looking at the broken glasses and the blood-encrusted helmet John had worn on the day his life forever changed.
With the moving van stuffed and his family at his side, John Collins headed to North Carolina to begin his new life.
His wife's daughter, B.J. Harris, and Harris' two young children, went with them.
The constantly smiling John Collins has a beard now. He also has a new home. Last week, John and Debbie Collins closed escrow on their new place in Flat Rock, N.C., a village tucked into apple country in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the western end of the state.
They bought a four-bedroom farm house on an acre of land, a lot that also comes with a second home ---- three bedrooms ---- built over the garage.
Wednesday marks the third anniversary of the blast.
Collins is sure that his explosion and his injuries, coming so early in the war, saved the lives of the younger Marines with him, virgin warriors.
"It really made them pay more attention," Collins said. "It was a wake-up call for them."
Contact staff writer Teri Figueroa at (760) 631-6624 or tfigueroa@nctimes.com.
Ellie
By: TERI FIGUEROA - Staff Writer
Twelve hours. Spent two decades training for this, and that's all he got this time around. Twelve hours.
That's how long Gunnery Sgt. John Collins spent inside Iraq before his tour ended.
What happened to Collins robbed him of some eyesight. Of pieces of his face. Of living through the war stories he and his friends would forever tell.
There were no warning sirens that morning. No telltale whistles of an impending rocket. No enemy in sight as the sun rose over the flat, barren vista that March dawn.
Collins was just another Marine in a large convoy heading into war, just a guy taking a minute to grab breakfast.
From out of nowhere ... BOOM.
Collins stepped on a land mine near an Iraqi town about two miles north of the Kuwaiti border.
It was the second day of the war.
The March 22, 2003, blast left the Canyon Lake resident, then 37 years old, with permanent damage, mostly to his face and legs, and he knows he is lucky to be alive, thank God. But part of his body was shredded.
Collins, now 40, says a doctor explained the damage to his face like this: Take a bag of cornflakes. Stomp on it. Jump up and down. Now look at it. The dust that was once cornflakes is how Collins' left cheekbone looked. Nothing left.
Doctors placed a titanium plate in his cheek. Later, a surgeon used one of Collins' ribs to replace his cheekbone ---- but infection set in.
Finally, a year after the blast, a different surgeon cut into Collins' head and carved out a piece of his skull to flop down into his face.
The tall, tattooed man has a dent in his head where the surgeon removed the layer of skull. Tissue from the heart of an organ donor now sits under Collins' left eye, used to rebuild the skin.
Scar tissue and gravity tug at the war wound. After Collins retired from the Marines last summer, the thin skin, way too stretched out under his eye, ripped slightly, leaving a hole in his cheek about the size of a pencil eraser. The white material implanted under the skin of his cheek was clearly visible. Another operation ensued.
Every operation brought with it overwhelmingly painful recoveries. A dozen surgeries, and Collins kept at it.
"The more positive you are about getting through it, the recovery is a lot faster," Collins said. "You can **** and moan, but that makes the situation worse."
Often, a tear streaks his face. He's not crying. The blast and all the surgeries have shifted his left tear duct, and now, unless he remembers to tilt his head to the right every so often to allow his eye to drain, a salty drop dribbles down his left cheek.
Collins was a career Marine. He had served nearly 22 years when he officially retired July 1 ---- two years and three months after he came close to dying on an Iraqi roadside.
Rather than leave the service, the Marines allowed him to stay on active duty, he says, to ensure that the lion's share of the medical treatments he needed came before he retired.
Collins keeps thick stacks of stickers with the Marine Corps symbol in his black quarter-ton Dodge truck ---- itself covered with yellow ribbons and POW/MIA stickers ---- and hands them out to strangers. He wears hats, a watch and a fat ring with that Marine Corps symbol.
His cell phone plays the "Marine Corps Hymn" when it rings.
He glued his Purple Heart to the cane he used for about a year. "If I gotta use a cane, I might as well decorate it," the gunnery sergeant said.
The career in communications that Collins once envisioned when he retired from the Corps ---- climbing utility poles, maybe laying cable ---- is out of the question. He can't stand for long periods of time, and he's partially blind in his left eye.
The morning it happened, Collins was part of a convoy making the push across the Kuwaiti border into Iraq. After stopping on the side of the road for a four-hour nap near the Iraqi town of Safwan, the troops stood near a Humvee at 6 a.m. for a briefing ---- one that included a heads-up to the crew to eat.
Collins headed over to the next Humvee to grab a Meals Ready to Eat, commonly known as an MRE. He approached the rig, which was towing large drums of fuel.
The bomb exploded under his left foot.
One of Collins' friends would later tell the gunny he watched him fly 20 feet up and back.
Marines swarmed Collins, sliced off his boot laces and cut off the suit that he was wearing as protection against biological and chemical weapons.
Collins is a stepgrandfather, and he had been showing his buddies photos of his preschool grandsons on little Harley motorcycles, just like grandpa has. The pictures had come in the mail two days earlier; they were sitting on the dashboard of his nearby Humvee.
"When I got blown up, they couldn't keep me awake, so they ran and grabbed the pictures," Collins recalled. "They said, 'John, look, here's your grandsons. Talk to us. Stay with us. Look at your grandsons.' It kept me awake."
Collins felt no pain. Morphine. In the seconds after the blast, the battalion surgeon and the chief medic, both of whom happened to be in his convoy, jumped in to render medical aid.
One of the guys in the convoy shot video of Collins' rescue. Collins keeps a copy of it on his computer.
On the footage, a helicopter creeps in through gray skies and stirs up brown dust as it settles onto the flat, unbelievably barren landscape. The only bright color comes from the orange smoke of the flare set to guide the chopper.
Pan to six guys carrying Collins on a stretcher to the helicopter. They rush, then stop to set him down for medics to work on him again, only 30 feet from the chopper.
In the background, the convoy, which had been parked, begins to roll past, pushing north into Iraq, without Collins.
Seconds later, troops heft Collins' stretcher and load it into the helicopter. The bird lifts off, bound for a field hospital in Kuwait.
His buddies would later tell him they thought he was dead.
About 24 hours later, halfway around the world in the posh Riverside community of Canyon Lake, the phone rang.
Debbie Collins knew something was coming, had that can't-shake-it, clairvoyant feeling as soon as her husband left for this war.
The deployment marked Collins' second tour in the Middle East. He had been in Saudi Arabia in the early 1990s for Operation Desert Storm, also as a Marine based at Camp Pendleton. Came home just fine that time.
But this tour would be different, bad different, and spitfire Debbie Collins "knew it in my stomach."
On this particular Saturday, three years ago, she kept the phone nearby as she and daughter B.J. Harris skipped a trip to the grocery store and instead cleaned the garage. Wanted to be home, just in case. Why they knew the bad thing would be that day, they can't say.
Ri-i-i-ing.
The caller ID read "U.S. Government."
The women looked at each other. You get it. No, you get it. No, you.
Ri-i-i-ing.
Ri-i-i-ing.
Harris relented, picking up the phone. The man on the other end asked for "Barbara."
"There's no Barbara here," Harris replied.
"Oh, maybe it says Debra," came the response.
Adrenaline. Debbie Collins took the phone from her daughter.
The next words she heard were, "Your husband is alive, but ..." and "critical but stable condition."
Then came words such as crushed legs, fractured skull.
The blast shredded the left side of Collins' face, tore shrapnel into his legs and gut, sheared off some of his big toe and crushed the bones of his feet.
Debbie Collins, somehow, with the help of her husband's stateside buddies, was able to get through on the phone to the field hospital in Kuwait. She couldn't speak directly with her husband, but a nurse told her that he was coherent ---- enough so that he told the hospital staff where his wife lived, where his parents lived.
Exhale.
"We knew that he was alert enough that he remembered all of us," Debbie Collins said.
After two days in Kuwait to stabilize him, Collins flew to a hospital in Germany, where he stayed for six days.
That stopover brought with it surgeries on his feet. His face would have to wait ---- too swollen.
His worried wife racked up a $500 phone bill in overseas calls.
"It was 18 hours before we got ahold of him," Debbie Collins said. "He kept saying they are taking me into surgery. I kept saying, 'For what?' and he'd say, 'I don't know. My eye is swollen; I can't see out of it.' He couldn't see his feet. And they (officials) couldn't talk to me because of security. They couldn't prove it was me and not a reporter, so they wouldn't tell me his injuries.
"He'd be out of it (on medication). But he kept little notes so that he would remember to tell me, so that I would know what they were doing. When we (finally saw him), he didn't even remember me calling him."
More than a week after the blast, Collins was flown to the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
Debbie Collins and her daughter flew back East and took a deep breath. God, what would John look like?
John Collins himself didn't know. His glasses were blown up in the explosion, and the best the immobilized man could do was squint at himself in the reflection of the TV screen at the hospital.
"When we got to Bethesda, they said, 'You've got to prepare for what he looks like,' " Debbie Collins said. "I walked in and I was like, 'Whew. Good.' "
Much of his head was wrapped in a bandage, but his face didn't look so bad, considering the damage done. No shredded skin hanging from his skull, no Frankenstein stitches on his face ---- although there were plenty on his legs.
In late April 2003, after about a two-week stay in Bethesda ---- and a visit from President Bush ---- Collins finally landed in California.
Bruised and sore, he eased into his La-Z-Boy chair, threw a blanket over scabbed legs and locked his family's big-screen TV onto CNN, hoping for a glimpse of fellow Camp Pendleton Marines with the 3rd Assault Amphibious Battalion.
Not long after John Collins came home, his stepdaughter, B.J. Harris, and her little ones moved in. Debbie Collins' granddaughter ---- also named Debbie, in honor of her grandma ---- was 6 years old.
"When Papa came home, I didn't want to get by him because I was so scared," little Debbie recalled. "He said it was OK, so I hugged him."
"Papa" couldn't get on the floor and wrastle around with her anymore. Instead, the child helped with his crutches and rubbed his knees after surgeries to combat the scar tissue.
During that first few weeks home, reporters knocked on the door. Buddies called from Iraq. Letters came in from strangers all over the county. Schoolchildren drew pictures for him. Hundreds in Canyon Lake signed a huge welcome-home banner.
The couple kept it all.
During that first month back, Collins' mornings often began with flowers and cards on his doorstep, left by strangers.
And Canyon Lake folks stopped by with dinner for the family. Big dinners, service for eight or 10 people. The Collinses ended up freezing a lot of it, noshing on the rest through the day.
"It's been great, unbelievable, the support we got," Collins said last spring.
It is in Canyon Lake that Collins found the Tuesday Work Group. More accurately, it found him. The leader of the group ---- made up mostly of retired guys in the private community ---- asked him to take part in the grimy labor that they do in building bridges, widening walkways and installing ponds on the golf course that snakes throughout the housing development.
The injured Marine jumped at the offer ---- even though at first he was limited to riding in a golf cart and handing out drinks to retirees sweating over power tools.
Collins spent many Tuesday mornings with the group. For the volunteer work, absolutely, but also for the coffee, the doughnuts, the camaraderie.
On one particular Tuesday last June, before the work began, the crew gathered at 6:30 a.m. to hear their assignment for the day. The leader of the group took a second to let everyone know that Collins' retirement party was only a few weeks away.
"John who?" one of the guys called out, evoking a laugh.
Everybody knows John.
As Collins drove a cart around the course later that morning, he offered a smile and a hearty "Go-oo-od morning," to every person, friend or stranger.
To a person, they all waved back.
On occasion, John Collins limps a bit. Can't ride his beloved Harley unless he's got a half-helmet and wraparound glasses ---- forget a full helmet, not his style ---- because the wind dries out his left eye, since it won't close.
Oh, yeah. The eye that won't close. Used to creep Debbie out. One night, not long after her wounded husband first got home, she awoke to find John staring at her. Sleeping, actually, with that eye open.
The couple laughed as they told the story. Apparently his eyeball, which would normally roll back during sleep, refused to do so that night.
"I woke up and she's smacking me," John said. "She goes, 'I can't believe you were doing that. You were staring at me.' My eyeball just stopped rolling back. For a year and a half, when I went to sleep, it looked like I was staring at everything."
"I have pictures of him sleeping with his eye open," Debbie Collins jumped in. Moments later, she dug the photo out. Sure enough, it looked like a sleeping John was staring at the camera. * * *
With his retirement last year came the red tape, plowing through paperwork to get his benefits and to find out his disability rating. A rating of 100 percent disabled, he said, would mean he could get about $4,000 a month, combining pay for both his retirement and his disability.
Collins decided to get the paperwork into the Veterans Administration before he retired, although he knew the VA folks couldn't look at his application until his official retirement date, July 1.
So last June, John and Debbie Collins headed down to Vista to meet with a county worker to guide them through the application process. He answered their questions, handed the couple stacks of papers and gave generic information about what government assistance might be available to them.
John Collins brought his medical file with him. Debbie Collins smiled and leaned over with an mischievous, "Oooooh, honey, show it to him."
Her husband looked at the county worker, grinned and flipped the file open to one of the forms. The paperwork had been filled out by medical personnel when Collins was at the field hospital in Kuwait.
Smears of blood on the paper. Probably his.
With John's retirement, the Collins family eyed a move to the East Coast ---- Debbie and John both hail from upstate New York ---- but decided to remain in California into the fall of 2005, with the hope that John would get his disability rating, so crucial to their future, secured before they left.
The prospect of staying that long in California was a tough decision ---- "Financially, I don't know if we can," Debbie said last spring.
By early September, even with no word on the disability rating, the Collins family decided it was time to go. They would leave by mid-October.
Five days before the moving vans came, John Collins got the call. He had won a 100 percent disability rating.
He also had a final appointment with his doctor at Naval Medical Center San Diego, commonly known as Balboa Hospital.
"I did good," an excited Collins said on the phone Oct. 7. "They said you are almost legally blind (in his left eye), but have great peripheral vision. Medically, I am done and released from the doctor.
"Everything worked out perfectly," he continued. "Just in time. We said all along, put your trust in the Lord. It was frustrating waiting this long, but you just have to have faith. The day finally arrived."
His good health, his secured financial future. It was the closure, he said, that he needed.
Days later, John Collins said goodbye to their second tour of duty at Pendleton, goodbye to the Canyon Lake community that had rallied behind him and his family, goodbye to buddies who affectionately call him "Land Mine," goodbye to weekly dinners with the best friends who spent Memorial Day riding Harleys with him in Fallbrook and who "ooohed" and "aaaahed" while looking at the broken glasses and the blood-encrusted helmet John had worn on the day his life forever changed.
With the moving van stuffed and his family at his side, John Collins headed to North Carolina to begin his new life.
His wife's daughter, B.J. Harris, and Harris' two young children, went with them.
The constantly smiling John Collins has a beard now. He also has a new home. Last week, John and Debbie Collins closed escrow on their new place in Flat Rock, N.C., a village tucked into apple country in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the western end of the state.
They bought a four-bedroom farm house on an acre of land, a lot that also comes with a second home ---- three bedrooms ---- built over the garage.
Wednesday marks the third anniversary of the blast.
Collins is sure that his explosion and his injuries, coming so early in the war, saved the lives of the younger Marines with him, virgin warriors.
"It really made them pay more attention," Collins said. "It was a wake-up call for them."
Contact staff writer Teri Figueroa at (760) 631-6624 or tfigueroa@nctimes.com.
Ellie