Aaron Rice lifts his left pant leg to his knee. Inches below the knee is a socket attached to a prosthetic foot by a titanium pole. The socket is decorated with a design that includes the emblem of the United States Marine Corps in the center, which takes its place in the center of the design.
Two flagstaffs create an “X” behind the emblem. On the right, an American flag displays its stars and stripes. On the left, the Marine Corps flag bears its emblem. A sword hides directly behind the centerpiece, while a yellow ribbon at the bottom reads “Semper Fidelis.”
Rice, a junior political science major at Mississippi State University, turns his leg around. A purple heart is on the back of the socket. The words “Combat Wounded” drip below the heart in bleeding text. “Operation Iraqi Freedom” runs above the heart.
Rice’s prosthetic leg is a badge of honor to him.
“The guy is just unbelievable to me,” said Stan Mayer, a fellow Marine veteran and friend of Rice. “Nothing can stop him.”
Rice doesn’t think he would have been a part of Mobile Assault Platoon 7 if it weren’t for Mayer, a senior creative writing major at Kent State University. Mayer highly recommended Rice to a superior as the right person to fill a position in the platoon.
Mayer recalled Rice’s adamancy for the infantry position.
“I cannot be in the rear during this entire war,” Rice told Mayer.
Rice received the position in the platoon, and it was largely because of Mayer’s willingness to back him.
Rice was a driver for his platoon, and he always wanted his Humvee to be in tip-top condition. In fact, Mayer said Rice was “pretty anal” about the vehicle. From day one, Rice routinely worked on the Humvee – checking and changing the tires, oil, transmission fluid and coolant – while other drivers sat in their rooms watching DVDs.
But Rice’s meticulous care of the vehicle wasn’t unwarranted. “Your vehicle is your lifeline,” Mayer said.
“We were always moving,” Rice said. “If you stayed in the same spot long enough, you would get attacked.”
On March 18, 2005, Rice had a bad feeling as he drove his Humvee during a mission.
“We passed a group of kids playing soccer, and they just looked at us and didn’t run for us,” Rice said. “They knew we were in a minefield.”
Then a mine exploded when Rice ran over it with the Humvee. “It’s so instantaneous. There’s no warning,” Rice said. “One minute you’re sitting there and you’re fine, and in a split-second everything changes. Every bone hurts. Every nerve in your body is in pain. Your teeth hurt.”
After the explosion, Rice expressed disgust over the Humvee being destroyed because he had spent the time and effort to fix it up, Mayer said.
But the vehicle wouldn’t be Rice’s sole worry for long. His left leg had been bent back toward his face. The break was in the middle of his shin. Rice’s foot rested above his knee, the heel now representing the top of his foot as he looked at it. His right leg fared better, although it was trapped in twisted metal.
Rice went into shock at first but received a shot of morphine. He had to wait an hour before the medivac arrived to get him out of Iraq.
“I spent the time talking with my buddies,” Rice said. “The morphine wore off in that period. That wasn’t good.”
When the morphine lost its effect, the pain came rushing back. “How about another shot of morphine, doc?” Rice said to the doctor. The doctor laughed. Rice grabbed him by the shirt and told him it was no laughing situation.
Rice received the second shot of morphine, although he didn’t feel the needle sinking in. Because of this absence of feeling, Rice grabbed the doctor by the shirt again and said, “Are you screwing with me? Did you really give me the shot?” The doctor assured him that the morphine had been administered.
Days later, the doctors at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., assured Rice he was going to be OK after he came out of a coma.
“You know they’re doctors, and you know that they know what they’re talking about,” Rice said. “But it’s different hearing it and experiencing it.”
When Mayer first heard about the extent of Rice’s injury, he became worried. He thought Rice was going places – even outside of the military – and hoped that he wouldn’t lose focus because of his lost leg. Mayer felt responsible because he had helped Rice become a part of his platoon.
Mayer finally mustered the courage to call Rice. “I expected to hear a pretty depressed man,” Mayer said. But during the conversation, Rice said, “I’m home now. We’ve got nothing to cry about.”
One person helped Rice’s recovery more than any other: his wife, Kelly. Aaron told Kelly about leaving for Iraq just two months before their wedding.
“I was really happy for him because he wanted to go so bad,” Kelly said. “On the other hand, he could so easily die over there. That was the biggest twist of emotions that I’ve felt.”
The two were married on Nov. 20, 2004. Aaron was deployed in January 2005.
Originally, Aaron and Kelly were going to get married after they graduated from college and became more financially secure. But when Aaron was called to leave America, they both wanted to get married before his deployment.
“I just knew it was the right thing to do,” Aaron said.
He knew dying in Iraq was a possibility, and he didn’t want to die before marrying his love.
Kelly had similar feelings. “I wanted to be his wife when he left,” she said. “I didn’t want to be his girlfriend or fianc.”
When Aaron first got back from the war, he didn’t want to talk about his experiences. However, he knew that he would ultimately have to open up. He probably wouldn’t have opened up without Kelly, he said.
“She was there. She listened,” Aaron said.
“I always encouraged him to talk,” Kelly said. “I would hang on to every word.”
For the most part, Aaron handled the situation well. Even though he had problems with sleep, Kelly said he never went through any “hardcore depression.”
Aaron said the explosion would replay as he tried to go to sleep. “As soon as you drift off, you think you feel it happen again,” he said.
But the hardest thing Aaron went through was learning that four men in his platoon died in an ambush on May 7, almost two months after he left Iraq. A suicide bomber attacked the platoon, directly connecting with the vehicle that Mayer was in.
“I don’t know how I lived,” Mayer said. The platoon also had to deal with automatic fire and rocket-propelled grenades.
Rice felt like he was supposed to be there. “I felt so guilty,” Rice said. “I’m still dealing with that. It’s kept me up countless nights.”
Mayer experienced similar feelings when he had to say in a hospital for two weeks after the ambush. “You want to be fighting with them,” Mayer said.
But there is a consensus among the platoon that Rice’s injury kept more people from dying in the ambush. The type of truck that Rice drove was less armored than other vehicles.
“No one wanted to be in those damn things,” Mayer said.
After Rice’s injury, the platoon received a replacement Humvee. To make it safer than the previous vehicle, the men loaded it down with metal for armor.
“It looked like a Mad Max vehicle,” Mayer said.
A sergeant major saw the truck and told the platoon that he would give them a better one. Mayer described the replacement as a “tyrannosaurus rex of a vehicle.” It was a 7-ton troop truck, the only vehicle that withstood the blast from the suicide bomber. Mayer said it was essential for the platoon’s survival.
“There’s no way we would have made it out of the city [without the 7-ton],” Mayer said. “My head would have been cut off.”
After the amputation of Rice’s leg, suction devices were put on the limb to prevent bleeding and infection. The wound still needed to be sealed, but the left-behind tissue would need manipulating. His doctors had to make a decision; they could either cut off more of the bone for more suitable tissue or stretch the remaining tissue to seal the wound. They went with the latter route.
Later, the tissue used to seal the wound died from being so stretched out. The wound had to be resealed with a skin graft.
Although the first weeks after his injury were difficult, Rice thought he was going to get his prosthetic leg soon. But the skin graft procedure put him back into the bed for weeks.
“It took forever to heal,” Kelly said.
A quarter-sized section of the skin graft didn’t heal for months. If Aaron had used the prosthetic leg before the section healed, it would have prolonged the situation or torn up the tissue even more. Eventually, the surrounding tissue grew around the section to complete the healing.
On Aug. 1, 2005, Rice called his physical therapist to tell her that he was going to use his prosthetic leg. She told him to wear it for only one hour. Rice didn’t comply with the advice.
“I put it on, wore it all day long and went dancing with Kelly at a party that night,” he said.
Despite the prosthetic leg, Rice doesn’t feel ashamed to wear shorts in public. His attitude was inspired by a conversation between him and Mayer on the day before Rice’s injury.
The two Marines were standing on a balcony, looking over the Euphrates River. They had heard stories about men losing their arms and legs. The idea of dismemberment pervaded Rice’s thoughts.
“I can’t go home missing a leg,” Rice told Mayer.
Mayer took a drag from a cigarette and said: “Rice, I don’t want to go home missing a leg, either. But if I do, I’ll go back home and wear my prosthetic like a badge of f—ing honor.