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thedrifter
01-11-09, 08:51 AM
January 11, 2009


Against all odds

By ED KEMP

Of the more than 12,000 students beginning the second semester on Jan. 21 on the University of Mississippi campus, it's safe to say that most have their biggest challenges in front of them.

Not necessarily so, in the case of one law student. Aaron Rice, 25, is an Oak Grove High School graduate, a Mississippi State University political science major and a Purple Heart recipient for injuries received during Operation Iraqi Freedom.

One of five children, Rice grew up in Yazoo City to parents Randy Rice, a forestry consultant, and Deborah Rice, a homemaker. He moved to Hattiesburg at age 10 and graduated from Oak Grove High School, before beginning work at Mississippi State as a political science major.

After his freshman year, Rice took a semester off to intern with Haley Barbour's run for state governor in 2003. He said he did a lot of the grunt work in the campaign, while gaining valuable political experience in the process.

"I learned more in that political campaign that I did during my political science classes in college," he said.

Rice called that decision to intern "one of the biggest decisions I ever made," but he made an even bigger one after the confetti had settled from Barbour's successful gubernatorial bid.

He joined the U.S. Marine Corps.

Service

A military career had always attracted him growing up, said Rice, whose twin brother Ryan currently serves with the Marines in Iraq. When that ambition succumbed for him to the call of other careers, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that occurred his senior year in high school reinforced his desire to serve.

"Even though I wasn't going to make the military my career necessarily, I thought there was still no harm in trying to serve in the war and help my country," he said.

Aaron Rice attempted to join the Marines after graduating from Oak Grove, but a chronic ear problem involving fluid buildup in his Eustachian tube caused him to flunk his physical. He tried again in January 2004 - this time employing some trickery. When his doctor took out a tube that he wore in his ear in order to monitor his condition without it, Rice quickly enlisted in the Marines before the onset of an ear infection.

While his father Randy said he tried not to "influence unduly" his son's decision, his mother felt torn emotionally.

"I was pretty conflicted. While I was in support of what our country was doing, I didn't want my child to die," she said. "I really struggled with it for a long time."

His mother recalls the moment when she came to terms with his decision, after she asked despairingly him why had he decided to join the military.

"Mom, I just can't understand how, having been raised in this country, with the benefits I have and the health I have, how I cannot do this," she said he responded.

She almost got him back anyway. Aaron Rice's ruse was called during the first day of boot camp in Paris Island, S.C., when he underwent a second physical, while reeling from an ear infection. The camp doctor nearly sent him home, but Rice convinced him to let him stay.

"I begged him into not doing it," Aaron Rice recalls. "And he basically said, OK. But if you come crying back to me about your ear, I'm sending you home.'"

Rice endured his ailing ear - so painful he said it often prevented him from sleeping at night - while undergoing the rigors of boot camp. He was switched from infantry to artillery to motor transport during his training, landing with the Jackson-based 2-14 Echo Battery, attached to the 3rd Battalion, 25th Marine Regiment.

It was during this period that he and his wife, Kelly, 24, also a Mississippi State student, were married. Kelly Rice said that she backed Aaron in his decision to serve.

"I supported him because I knew he had to do it for him," she said.

When Aaron Rice was deployed to Iraq in March 2005, as a member of an 18-member mobile assault platoon, he found himself in an area - the Al Anbar province - at the heart of some of the area's heaviest insurgent attacks. Just two months after deployment, three members of the platoon were killed and seven injured during a surprise attack.

Aaron Rice wasn't there that day - a fact, he says, wracks him with guilt even now. His service had ended six weeks earlier, on March 18, when the Humvee he was driving in a convoy rolled over an anti-tank landmine. The force of the explosion not only blew up the front of his truck, it also took off part of his left leg.

"It didn't hurt or anything," he recalled. "It was just gone."

Recovering

Kelly Rice remembers the knock at the door that brought her the news. She opened it to two Marines in uniform and a chill went down her spine.

"My first thought was that he was dead," she said.

She received much more tolerable news that sent her to the Bethesda (Md.) Naval Hospital to be with her husband as he underwent a series of surgeries. Over the next nine months, she stayed with her husband first in Bethesda and then to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, where he trained physically to walk on a below-the-knee prosthetic leg.

Right from the start, Kelly Rice said her husband showed incredible resilience, pushing himself physically even in the first weeks after the amputation.

"He was up walking, using a walker three or four days after he got hit," Kelly Rice said. "He pushed himself to the point where he would knock himself out - seriously. He would exert himself to where he would be seeing stars."

His determination did not surprise his parents.

"Aaron is very unusual, and I'm not sure I've ever met anyone like him, but he does not let anything stop him," Deborah Rice said.

Aaron Rice pressed on with breath-taking rapidity. Two months after being fitted with his new leg, he competed in a 10-mile race for wounded veterans in Washington. In September 2006, he returned to Mississippi State, where he graduated in 2008.

Aaron Rice said that his resolve came from accepting his condition.

"I made the decision early on to accept my situation and not worry about it," he said, adding that he asked himself instead the simple question: "What do I need to now to get better to keep moving with my life?"

As he has progressed, he has received prestigious honors. His first year in law school has seen him earn two scholarships - the Mitchell Scholarship in Law and the rare Harry S. Truman Scholarship, awarded to 65 students nationwide for "a desire to enter public service."

Aaron Rice says he doesn't have any definite plans for his future, gravitating towards both law and politics, especially political issues at the local level.

"I like policy problems a lot and dealing with social problems," said Aaron Rice, whose Truman scholarship application included a proposal to better fund education in Mississippi.

Surprisingly, much good has come from that fateful day in March 2005.

Kelly Rice said their time together during his training at Walter Reed helped solidify their marriage.

"It's how we learned how to be married by depending on each other," she said and then quipped. "It's a good way to start a relationship, having someone blown up."

Aaron Rice himself sees the event as giving him a balanced approach to events around him.

"I guess I'm real cool under fire. When people are stressing out about stuff and pulling their hair out, I've been able to step back and realize that things people think are so bad aren't really that big an issue," he said.

"It made me grow up a little quicker; (in college) my top priority wasn't where to hang out," he added. "When you've had certain experiences, your priorities become a lot different."
Additional Facts
A soldier's reunion


In 2004, Aaron Rice received as a Christmas gift a special knife from his wife's uncle Bob Dean, a U.S. Marine veteran of the Vietnam War. It was a patent-pending Ka-Bar knife, with the words inscribed LCpl Aaron R. Rice World War on Terrorism

Rice wore the knife during combat, and when his service ended, he gave it to his fraternal twin Ryan as he was about to deployed with the Marines to Africa.

Just before Ryan was to ship out at end of 2005, someone broke into his car in Hattiesburg and stole the knife.

In August, 2008, Jim Spurlock, 61, of Pensacola, Fla., attended a local gun and knife show. He was surprised to find a knife with a Marine insignia and a special inscription.

Upon buying the knife and "Googling" Rice's name on the Internet, he found a story about Rice winning the Truman scholarship. He promptly called him to return it.

"I just kept saying, 'I knew it. I knew that knife would come back to me,' " Rice recalls.

"He never asked for the knife back," Spurlock says. "But I finally told him I wanted him to have it. But I also told him, 'You're going to be a lawyer, and you've got a brother in Iraq. One of these days, when you've got loads of money and your brother is back home safely, how about sending me a replacement knife with some dings of character and a story behind it?'

Ellie