thedrifter
12-16-07, 08:30 AM
Blasted off an Iraqi bridge, Cpl. Eric Morante fights back
He won't rest until his Marines make it home
11:40 PM CST on Saturday, December 15, 2007
By DAVID McLEMORE / The Dallas Morning News
dmclemore@dallasnews.com
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Marine Cpl. Eric Morante and seven members of his squad were injured on April 20 when a suicide bomber blew up the bridge that served as their operation post near the town of Saqlawiya in Iraq. In this series, The Dallas Morning News will try to put a face on the more than 30,000 injured since the war began through Eric's story, his road to recovery and his struggle to re-establish his identity, which until this day had been inextricably tied to his status as a Marine.
12/16/07: Eric's Journey Home
12/23/07: The Road to Recovery
First in a two-part series
It's sometime after noon on a Friday, the end of a four-day rotation on Bridge 286.
Marine Cpl. Eric Morante can see heat waves rising from the six-lane highway below the overpass bridge his squad uses as an observation post near the town of Saqlawiya, Iraq. Thick lines of traffic, mostly trucks, travel the road that cuts from Baghdad through Anbar province to the Jordanian border.
Eric walks into the post nicknamed Club 286, a glorified shack fortified with sandbags and steel plating. The overheated air smells of dust, gun oil and men in close quarters.
Squad members cover the highway's western approach with M-240 machine guns. Others pick out MREs for lunch, and Eric prepares for a relief team set to arrive in minutes from their unit half a mile away at Forward Operating Base Riviera.
Suddenly, the floor pushes up violently under their feet.
Marines fly like children's toys 10 to 15 feet into the air, along with weapons, gear, sandbags and huge chunks of concrete. As quickly as they rise, they drop to the highway below, jagged masonry and rebar raining down on them. An oily column of smoke rises into the air.
Eric opens his eyes, breathing in concrete dust and smoke and spitting blood. He hears screaming. Then he realizes it's his people.
"I never heard the blast. ... Everything was dark. I heard some Marines crying," Eric recalls. "It was like a dream."
The members of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines would later learn that an Iraqi suicide bomber had driven a dump truck just under the checkpoint and ignited 3,000 pounds of explosives with his cellphone.
On this day, April 20, 2007, Eric and his squad members entered life among the wounded and became a statistic in a war that has claimed 4,200 U.S. lives and resulted in more than 30,000 injured in nearly five years of combat.
On this day, Eric began his long journey toward recovery and a new life. A hero on the battlefield, he worked with quiet courage back home in Houston to re-establish his identity and sense of purpose, which until now had been inextricably linked to his status as a Marine.
Eric enlisted in the Marines straight out of high school and became consumed by the Corps, relishing its spirit of dedication and responsibility.
He tattoed three Chinese characters on the back of his right arm that spell out the Marines' core values: "Honor, courage, commitment."
This was all he'd ever wanted.
At 23, he looked like most any young man you'd see crossing the street or dancing at a club – short, muscular, with dark, close-cut hair and a quick, impish smile. A guy older women call "cute" and younger women give a second look.
This was his third deployment to Iraq.
'I felt calm'
Eric is on his back and pain is beginning to filter through his body as he mentally ticks off the things he needs to do.
Check on the wounded. Round up weapons for a defensive position and call in support.
But he can't move – his lower half is pinned by a large piece of shattered concrete.
"I looked up and saw the bridge was broken. It was just gone," he says. "My left wrist was twisted and bent in a weird way."
When he looks down at his legs, he sees the right one is shredded and bent into an unnatural L-shape.
"I felt calm. No panic," he recalls. "I held my left hand together and looked around. I told myself not to pass out, to stay alert and check on the squad."
Lance Cpl. Steven May is 45 feet away, face down on a pile of debris – a section of thick steel plate from the roof of the OP had fallen across his back, pinning him from the waist up. The rest of the men are scattered about the wreckage of the bridge, covered with dust and debris.
"I couldn't tell where everyone was, but I knew they were alive," Eric says.
Members of Fox Company scramble to the blast site, set up a security perimeter and begin evacuating the wounded. Maj. George Hasseltine, the company commander, is one of the first there.
"Morante was ... shell-shocked, but conscious ... trying to explain what had happened," he says.
As Eric looks up at the remains of the overpass, Marines in full battle gear scramble down the rubble pile and he suddenly feels "really at ease."
"Help was there," he recalls. "Now, I could black out."
He and the others are flown by helicopter to a combat hospital in Balad, Iraq, where surgeons remove Eric's right leg at the knee.
Eric wakes up in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany a day later.
At the medical center, Eric can't get information on Cpl. May, who'd been manning one of the M-240s, or on Navy Corpsman Anthony "Doc" Thompson, who was lying on a bunk in the center of the operation post just before the explosion.
He pesters doctors and nurses for information, fearing his men are both dead.
"When I found out they were both at Landstuhl and that everyone was alive, I cried for 30 minutes," he says.
Doctors there put the jigsaw puzzle of his left hand and wrist together with 10 titanium pins. But he still has a crushed cheek and cracked front teeth.
Miraculously, all of his squad survives.
Two Marines who had been picking out MREs – Lance Cpl. Chad Perreault, 19, and Lance Cpl. Nehemias Merroquin, 27 – are uninjured and return to duty. Lance Cpl. David Volk, 20, is treated at military hospitals in-theater.
The rest go to Landstuhl.
Lance Cpl. Brandon "Little" Mendez, 20, who'd been looking out on the barricaded on-ramp to the bridge, has lost his left arm below the elbow.
Cpl. John "Big" Mendez, 23, has shattered shins.
Cpl. May, 21, has two fractured ribs, a torn shoulder and fragmented vertebrae in his lower spine.
Doc Thompson, 26, remains unconscious.
Violent as it was, the attack on Bridge 286 raises only a blip on the news wire. Reuters summarizes it in one paragraph:
SAQLAWIYA – One civilian was killed and eight U.S. troops wounded in a suicide attack on a U.S. checkpoint near Saqlawiya, near Falluja, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. A dump truck loaded with explosives detonated under a highway overpass, causing a large part to collapse.
'I'm all right, Mom'
Once in Germany, Eric calls home.
His mother, Maria Espinoza, 60, can tell you the precise moment when she heard her youngest son had been injured in Iraq.
It's April 25, after work.
She's gone to get her nails done at a neighborhood shop when another son, Arthur, calls, looking for her.
"His voice was funny, and he said he had to come over. When he walked into the shop, I knew from his face something had happened. All he could say was, 'Eric.' I asked him what about Eric and he started crying and couldn't talk. I was afraid he'd been killed. I went home and was like a crazy person."
When she gets home, her 17-year-old daughter, Gabriela "Gabby" Villalobos, is crying.
"She had taken the call from a nurse in Germany, who told her Eric had lost his leg. Just like that," Mrs. Espinoza says. "And she had to be the one to tell me. Eric's friends from school started coming to the house. All I could do was cry."
The phone rings about 8:30 that night, and Mrs. Espinoza takes the call.
It's Eric.
"I said, 'Mijo, what happened?' And he said, 'I'm all right, Mom. I'm all right.' I could tell by his voice he was tired and hurt, but it felt so good to just hear his voice," she says.
More than 6,000 miles away, Eric holds a phone to his ear, his face bruised, his teeth broken. He weeps as he speaks.
"Don't cry, Mom. I'm good," he says. "I'm perfect. I just feel happy to be alive."
As she listens to her son, Mrs. Espinoza feels a sudden sadness come over her.
"His life was changed," she says. "Just like that. Eric is always moving, always doing something. He can't be still, not even as a little boy.
"I didn't know what he'd do now. I knew I had to get to Germany."
By his seventh day at Landstuhl, though, Eric is sufficiently stabilized for a medevac flight to Bethesda National Naval Medical Center, the sprawling complex near Washington, D.C.
The two Mendezes, Cpl. May and Doc Thompson join him there. Doc is the most severely injured with brain trauma and what doctors fear is a severed spine.
But these are strangely good days for Eric. He's with his Marines. They can visit each other and make bad jokes about their wounds. He even arranges for a change in diet.
"For six weeks at Bethesda, I was on a baby-food diet. I couldn't tell the mashed potatoes from the meat," he says. "Finally, I had some pizza snuck in."
More important, the Marines of 3rd Squad can stay close to Doc.
In an emotional meeting with Doc's pregnant wife and parents, Eric describes in detail the moments of confusion and terror the Marines felt in the explosion.
"Doc was always doing more than he was supposed to," he says, wiping tears from his eyes. "He wanted to stay, and I decided which guys went out there. I blame myself for Doc. I feel responsible."
Always the leader
On May 1, Mrs. Espinoza finally gets to see her son.
"It was the first time I had seen him since he left for Iraq in January," she says. "He was so pale and thin."
Eric's right leg ends abruptly at the knee and is wrapped in an oversize bandage.
"His left arm was messed up and his teeth were broken," she says.
She has to put on a gown and gloves just to see him because "the doctors were worried about infection," Mrs. Espinoza says. "I hugged him and kissed him. I didn't want to stop."
Even in the hospital, Eric stays in squad leader mode.
He gets reports on the attack from phone calls and text messages from members of his squad still in Anbar. He asks whether they'd found weapons and gets reports on how others are doing.
"It was what I was trained to do – part of leadership is that you're responsible for people. You take care of them and the equipment," he says. "It's all a matter of accountability."
At Bethesda, Eric undergoes additional surgery to remove more damaged tissue from his amputated leg.
As soon as they can, Eric, Cpl. May and Little Mendez make their way to the ICU to visit Doc and his wife, Ivonne, who is pregnant with their first child.
Eric remembers Doc Thompson lying in the dim lights of the ICU, his head wrapped in white, with a bewildering array of wires and IV lines running out of his body to machines with blinking lights.
His eyes haven't opened and he hasn't spoken a word since the explosion.
Army doctors say Doc's brain banged around in his skull, bruising it in multiple points. Doctors initially fear that his lower spinal cord had been severed and he'd be paralyzed below the waist. However, specialists at Bethesda find the cord intact but pinched by a bone fragment from his fractured spine. They remove it.
"We'd talk to him all the time, but he'd never respond," Eric says.
He remembers bending down and whispering in Doc's ear: "Dude, you need to get your ass up out of bed. You're scaring everybody."
Having the Marines around is a great comfort, Ms. Thompson says.
"Here were these big, tough Marines, with their own wounds to worry about, and they're coming every day to see Anthony," she says. "Eric especially so. I think he loves Anthony more than himself. As far as we're concerned, he's family."
Ms. Thompson still relies on Eric when "things get the darkest."
"I call on Eric to knock some sense into me and remind me things will get better. He always does," she says.
Mrs. Espinoza, too, can see a change come over her son just being around his fellow Marines.
"They were good for each other," she says. "Sometimes, some of the Marines would call from Iraq. I think that helped them all."
Mrs. Espinoza had already met many of the Marines in her son's unit. Eric would occasionally drive the 1,500 miles from 29 Palms, Calif., to Houston with some buddies and surprise his mother.
"Eric feels bad about Anthony, particularly since [Anthony] was going to be a father," she says. "Anthony was very excited about the baby."
A favor from the president
On May 25, President Bush arrives at Bethesda to present the Purple Heart to a few of the wounded at the hospital.
Eric is among the recipients, and Mrs. Espinoza has a photo of the moment: Eric in shorts and a Marine T-shirt shaking hands with the president.
"They told him he could sit in his wheelchair, but Eric refused," she says.
Instead, he stands on one leg, at full attention, and salutes. It only takes a moment.
The president, they're told, is on a very tight schedule.
But Eric stops him, politely, and asks if the president can personally give Doc his medal in the ICU.
He does.
By late May, the wounded members of 3rd squad split up, going to separate medical facilities.
Doc Thompson stays in the ICU at Bethesda but is eventually transferred to a VA Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center in Tampa, Fla., in what doctors call a "low minimal conscious state."
After three surgeries – and with more pending – Cpl. May returns to the company at the Marine Air Combat Training Center at 29 Palms while waiting for a medical review board.
The full-body plastic brace he wore chest-to-hip for three months is gone. He still can't touch his knees when he bends at the waist. Sitting or standing in one place for any length of time is painful. Simple tasks, like putting on boots, are an ordeal, he says.
"I'm really feeling pretty useless right now."
He remembers when Eric came in as squad leader in October, shortly before the company went on pre-deployment training known as Mojave Viper.
"He was hard on us at first, but he was good to us," Cpl. May says. "You knew he was in it to keep us alive, not win medals."
The cost he and the squad bear for Bridge 286 is theirs alone, Cpl. May says.
"Being back home, it's clear that nobody really cares," he says. "Everyone's nice and all, but it's just not something that touches their lives. I'll never forget it."
On May 26, Eric, accompanied by his mom, flies to San Antonio aboard an Air Force C-130 equipped for medevac flight with a number of other wounded from Iraq.
They touch down that day at Kelly Field at Lackland Air Force Base and drive by ambulance across town to Brooke Army Medical Center.
"The whole trip, the sirens screamed and all the cars stopped," Eric says. "I cried all the way."
At Brooke Army, Eric goes into quarantine for medical evaluation for a few weeks, then is transferred to the Center for the Intrepid, a new rehabilitation and treatment center next door.
The hard stuff is just beginning.
Video: Watch Eric's homecoming and the beginning of his road to recovery
www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/photography/2007/marine/
Ellie
He won't rest until his Marines make it home
11:40 PM CST on Saturday, December 15, 2007
By DAVID McLEMORE / The Dallas Morning News
dmclemore@dallasnews.com
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Marine Cpl. Eric Morante and seven members of his squad were injured on April 20 when a suicide bomber blew up the bridge that served as their operation post near the town of Saqlawiya in Iraq. In this series, The Dallas Morning News will try to put a face on the more than 30,000 injured since the war began through Eric's story, his road to recovery and his struggle to re-establish his identity, which until this day had been inextricably tied to his status as a Marine.
12/16/07: Eric's Journey Home
12/23/07: The Road to Recovery
First in a two-part series
It's sometime after noon on a Friday, the end of a four-day rotation on Bridge 286.
Marine Cpl. Eric Morante can see heat waves rising from the six-lane highway below the overpass bridge his squad uses as an observation post near the town of Saqlawiya, Iraq. Thick lines of traffic, mostly trucks, travel the road that cuts from Baghdad through Anbar province to the Jordanian border.
Eric walks into the post nicknamed Club 286, a glorified shack fortified with sandbags and steel plating. The overheated air smells of dust, gun oil and men in close quarters.
Squad members cover the highway's western approach with M-240 machine guns. Others pick out MREs for lunch, and Eric prepares for a relief team set to arrive in minutes from their unit half a mile away at Forward Operating Base Riviera.
Suddenly, the floor pushes up violently under their feet.
Marines fly like children's toys 10 to 15 feet into the air, along with weapons, gear, sandbags and huge chunks of concrete. As quickly as they rise, they drop to the highway below, jagged masonry and rebar raining down on them. An oily column of smoke rises into the air.
Eric opens his eyes, breathing in concrete dust and smoke and spitting blood. He hears screaming. Then he realizes it's his people.
"I never heard the blast. ... Everything was dark. I heard some Marines crying," Eric recalls. "It was like a dream."
The members of Fox Company, 2nd Battalion, 7th Marines would later learn that an Iraqi suicide bomber had driven a dump truck just under the checkpoint and ignited 3,000 pounds of explosives with his cellphone.
On this day, April 20, 2007, Eric and his squad members entered life among the wounded and became a statistic in a war that has claimed 4,200 U.S. lives and resulted in more than 30,000 injured in nearly five years of combat.
On this day, Eric began his long journey toward recovery and a new life. A hero on the battlefield, he worked with quiet courage back home in Houston to re-establish his identity and sense of purpose, which until now had been inextricably linked to his status as a Marine.
Eric enlisted in the Marines straight out of high school and became consumed by the Corps, relishing its spirit of dedication and responsibility.
He tattoed three Chinese characters on the back of his right arm that spell out the Marines' core values: "Honor, courage, commitment."
This was all he'd ever wanted.
At 23, he looked like most any young man you'd see crossing the street or dancing at a club – short, muscular, with dark, close-cut hair and a quick, impish smile. A guy older women call "cute" and younger women give a second look.
This was his third deployment to Iraq.
'I felt calm'
Eric is on his back and pain is beginning to filter through his body as he mentally ticks off the things he needs to do.
Check on the wounded. Round up weapons for a defensive position and call in support.
But he can't move – his lower half is pinned by a large piece of shattered concrete.
"I looked up and saw the bridge was broken. It was just gone," he says. "My left wrist was twisted and bent in a weird way."
When he looks down at his legs, he sees the right one is shredded and bent into an unnatural L-shape.
"I felt calm. No panic," he recalls. "I held my left hand together and looked around. I told myself not to pass out, to stay alert and check on the squad."
Lance Cpl. Steven May is 45 feet away, face down on a pile of debris – a section of thick steel plate from the roof of the OP had fallen across his back, pinning him from the waist up. The rest of the men are scattered about the wreckage of the bridge, covered with dust and debris.
"I couldn't tell where everyone was, but I knew they were alive," Eric says.
Members of Fox Company scramble to the blast site, set up a security perimeter and begin evacuating the wounded. Maj. George Hasseltine, the company commander, is one of the first there.
"Morante was ... shell-shocked, but conscious ... trying to explain what had happened," he says.
As Eric looks up at the remains of the overpass, Marines in full battle gear scramble down the rubble pile and he suddenly feels "really at ease."
"Help was there," he recalls. "Now, I could black out."
He and the others are flown by helicopter to a combat hospital in Balad, Iraq, where surgeons remove Eric's right leg at the knee.
Eric wakes up in Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany a day later.
At the medical center, Eric can't get information on Cpl. May, who'd been manning one of the M-240s, or on Navy Corpsman Anthony "Doc" Thompson, who was lying on a bunk in the center of the operation post just before the explosion.
He pesters doctors and nurses for information, fearing his men are both dead.
"When I found out they were both at Landstuhl and that everyone was alive, I cried for 30 minutes," he says.
Doctors there put the jigsaw puzzle of his left hand and wrist together with 10 titanium pins. But he still has a crushed cheek and cracked front teeth.
Miraculously, all of his squad survives.
Two Marines who had been picking out MREs – Lance Cpl. Chad Perreault, 19, and Lance Cpl. Nehemias Merroquin, 27 – are uninjured and return to duty. Lance Cpl. David Volk, 20, is treated at military hospitals in-theater.
The rest go to Landstuhl.
Lance Cpl. Brandon "Little" Mendez, 20, who'd been looking out on the barricaded on-ramp to the bridge, has lost his left arm below the elbow.
Cpl. John "Big" Mendez, 23, has shattered shins.
Cpl. May, 21, has two fractured ribs, a torn shoulder and fragmented vertebrae in his lower spine.
Doc Thompson, 26, remains unconscious.
Violent as it was, the attack on Bridge 286 raises only a blip on the news wire. Reuters summarizes it in one paragraph:
SAQLAWIYA – One civilian was killed and eight U.S. troops wounded in a suicide attack on a U.S. checkpoint near Saqlawiya, near Falluja, 50 km (32 miles) west of Baghdad, the U.S. military said. A dump truck loaded with explosives detonated under a highway overpass, causing a large part to collapse.
'I'm all right, Mom'
Once in Germany, Eric calls home.
His mother, Maria Espinoza, 60, can tell you the precise moment when she heard her youngest son had been injured in Iraq.
It's April 25, after work.
She's gone to get her nails done at a neighborhood shop when another son, Arthur, calls, looking for her.
"His voice was funny, and he said he had to come over. When he walked into the shop, I knew from his face something had happened. All he could say was, 'Eric.' I asked him what about Eric and he started crying and couldn't talk. I was afraid he'd been killed. I went home and was like a crazy person."
When she gets home, her 17-year-old daughter, Gabriela "Gabby" Villalobos, is crying.
"She had taken the call from a nurse in Germany, who told her Eric had lost his leg. Just like that," Mrs. Espinoza says. "And she had to be the one to tell me. Eric's friends from school started coming to the house. All I could do was cry."
The phone rings about 8:30 that night, and Mrs. Espinoza takes the call.
It's Eric.
"I said, 'Mijo, what happened?' And he said, 'I'm all right, Mom. I'm all right.' I could tell by his voice he was tired and hurt, but it felt so good to just hear his voice," she says.
More than 6,000 miles away, Eric holds a phone to his ear, his face bruised, his teeth broken. He weeps as he speaks.
"Don't cry, Mom. I'm good," he says. "I'm perfect. I just feel happy to be alive."
As she listens to her son, Mrs. Espinoza feels a sudden sadness come over her.
"His life was changed," she says. "Just like that. Eric is always moving, always doing something. He can't be still, not even as a little boy.
"I didn't know what he'd do now. I knew I had to get to Germany."
By his seventh day at Landstuhl, though, Eric is sufficiently stabilized for a medevac flight to Bethesda National Naval Medical Center, the sprawling complex near Washington, D.C.
The two Mendezes, Cpl. May and Doc Thompson join him there. Doc is the most severely injured with brain trauma and what doctors fear is a severed spine.
But these are strangely good days for Eric. He's with his Marines. They can visit each other and make bad jokes about their wounds. He even arranges for a change in diet.
"For six weeks at Bethesda, I was on a baby-food diet. I couldn't tell the mashed potatoes from the meat," he says. "Finally, I had some pizza snuck in."
More important, the Marines of 3rd Squad can stay close to Doc.
In an emotional meeting with Doc's pregnant wife and parents, Eric describes in detail the moments of confusion and terror the Marines felt in the explosion.
"Doc was always doing more than he was supposed to," he says, wiping tears from his eyes. "He wanted to stay, and I decided which guys went out there. I blame myself for Doc. I feel responsible."
Always the leader
On May 1, Mrs. Espinoza finally gets to see her son.
"It was the first time I had seen him since he left for Iraq in January," she says. "He was so pale and thin."
Eric's right leg ends abruptly at the knee and is wrapped in an oversize bandage.
"His left arm was messed up and his teeth were broken," she says.
She has to put on a gown and gloves just to see him because "the doctors were worried about infection," Mrs. Espinoza says. "I hugged him and kissed him. I didn't want to stop."
Even in the hospital, Eric stays in squad leader mode.
He gets reports on the attack from phone calls and text messages from members of his squad still in Anbar. He asks whether they'd found weapons and gets reports on how others are doing.
"It was what I was trained to do – part of leadership is that you're responsible for people. You take care of them and the equipment," he says. "It's all a matter of accountability."
At Bethesda, Eric undergoes additional surgery to remove more damaged tissue from his amputated leg.
As soon as they can, Eric, Cpl. May and Little Mendez make their way to the ICU to visit Doc and his wife, Ivonne, who is pregnant with their first child.
Eric remembers Doc Thompson lying in the dim lights of the ICU, his head wrapped in white, with a bewildering array of wires and IV lines running out of his body to machines with blinking lights.
His eyes haven't opened and he hasn't spoken a word since the explosion.
Army doctors say Doc's brain banged around in his skull, bruising it in multiple points. Doctors initially fear that his lower spinal cord had been severed and he'd be paralyzed below the waist. However, specialists at Bethesda find the cord intact but pinched by a bone fragment from his fractured spine. They remove it.
"We'd talk to him all the time, but he'd never respond," Eric says.
He remembers bending down and whispering in Doc's ear: "Dude, you need to get your ass up out of bed. You're scaring everybody."
Having the Marines around is a great comfort, Ms. Thompson says.
"Here were these big, tough Marines, with their own wounds to worry about, and they're coming every day to see Anthony," she says. "Eric especially so. I think he loves Anthony more than himself. As far as we're concerned, he's family."
Ms. Thompson still relies on Eric when "things get the darkest."
"I call on Eric to knock some sense into me and remind me things will get better. He always does," she says.
Mrs. Espinoza, too, can see a change come over her son just being around his fellow Marines.
"They were good for each other," she says. "Sometimes, some of the Marines would call from Iraq. I think that helped them all."
Mrs. Espinoza had already met many of the Marines in her son's unit. Eric would occasionally drive the 1,500 miles from 29 Palms, Calif., to Houston with some buddies and surprise his mother.
"Eric feels bad about Anthony, particularly since [Anthony] was going to be a father," she says. "Anthony was very excited about the baby."
A favor from the president
On May 25, President Bush arrives at Bethesda to present the Purple Heart to a few of the wounded at the hospital.
Eric is among the recipients, and Mrs. Espinoza has a photo of the moment: Eric in shorts and a Marine T-shirt shaking hands with the president.
"They told him he could sit in his wheelchair, but Eric refused," she says.
Instead, he stands on one leg, at full attention, and salutes. It only takes a moment.
The president, they're told, is on a very tight schedule.
But Eric stops him, politely, and asks if the president can personally give Doc his medal in the ICU.
He does.
By late May, the wounded members of 3rd squad split up, going to separate medical facilities.
Doc Thompson stays in the ICU at Bethesda but is eventually transferred to a VA Polytrauma Rehabilitation Center in Tampa, Fla., in what doctors call a "low minimal conscious state."
After three surgeries – and with more pending – Cpl. May returns to the company at the Marine Air Combat Training Center at 29 Palms while waiting for a medical review board.
The full-body plastic brace he wore chest-to-hip for three months is gone. He still can't touch his knees when he bends at the waist. Sitting or standing in one place for any length of time is painful. Simple tasks, like putting on boots, are an ordeal, he says.
"I'm really feeling pretty useless right now."
He remembers when Eric came in as squad leader in October, shortly before the company went on pre-deployment training known as Mojave Viper.
"He was hard on us at first, but he was good to us," Cpl. May says. "You knew he was in it to keep us alive, not win medals."
The cost he and the squad bear for Bridge 286 is theirs alone, Cpl. May says.
"Being back home, it's clear that nobody really cares," he says. "Everyone's nice and all, but it's just not something that touches their lives. I'll never forget it."
On May 26, Eric, accompanied by his mom, flies to San Antonio aboard an Air Force C-130 equipped for medevac flight with a number of other wounded from Iraq.
They touch down that day at Kelly Field at Lackland Air Force Base and drive by ambulance across town to Brooke Army Medical Center.
"The whole trip, the sirens screamed and all the cars stopped," Eric says. "I cried all the way."
At Brooke Army, Eric goes into quarantine for medical evaluation for a few weeks, then is transferred to the Center for the Intrepid, a new rehabilitation and treatment center next door.
The hard stuff is just beginning.
Video: Watch Eric's homecoming and the beginning of his road to recovery
www.dallasnews.com/s/dws/photography/2007/marine/
Ellie