Florida soldier is glad to be alive despite loss of leg to bomb in Iraq

WASHINGTON — He shouldn’t have been there.

The thought crosses Luke Murphy’s mind when the nurse comes in to change his IV. And then again when another nurse appears to change the stitches on a thick gash on his leg. Then again when he throws off a white sheet with splotches of dried blood and notices the stump, all that’s left of his right leg.

He thinks about it yet again an hour before his next surgery, one of dozens, in the past six weeks.

“It’s gonna hurt when I come back in a few hours,” said Murphy, 24, a Palm City resident who has been at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in suburban Washington, D.C., recovering from injuries he suffered while serving his second tour in Iraq. “It’s gonna hurt like hell.”

Murphy, an Army sergeant in the 101st Airborne Division, was on a routine mission late the night of April 25, providing security for other soldiers looking for mass graves from the time of Saddam Hussein’s regime. The convoy was on its way back from the mission when an explosive device tore through Murphy’s Humvee “like a knife through butter.”

It was supposed to be his day off.

“I did my time,” he said. “I was supposed to get out in 2005. I wasn’t even supposed to be working that day, but I wanted to be with the guys out front.”

Gunes Kocatepe/Scripps Howard News Service

Iraq war veteran Luke Murphy, just before his operation at the Walter Reed Hospital in Washington, D.C.

The Humvee caught fire. Murphy and three other injured soldiers were rushed to a truck. Several minutes after the explosion, a doctor cut off the lower half of his right leg in the truck en route to a Baghdad hospital. His other leg was severely crushed. He could see the bones.

He called his mother and told her he had an injury. He would be in the hospital for a few days, he said, but he would be fine. He called his girlfriend, Kristine, and told her he had “a scratch on my leg.” She knew better.

“She said you don’t go to the hospital for a scratch,” Murphy said.

He said he never lost consciousness.

“I was awake through the whole thing,” Murphy said. “I knew I had lost my leg from the moment it happened. I thought I had lost them both.”

As he tried to fight off the burning sensation in his legs and the mere shock of it all, Murphy heard doctors talking in the background. He was bleeding too much, they said. He wasn’t going to make it.

He had a hunch he would.

“I knew if I got to the Baghdad hospital, I had a 94 percent chance of living,” Murphy said, weaving his fingers through his brown crew cut, revealing a devilish smile through gallows humor.

He had dreams of serving his country since he was 10, watching Desert Storm on television, following a family tradition of grandfathers and other relatives who went off to battle.

Some of those men returned home with the label “prisoner of war.” Some were missing limbs. But what were the chances he would be another one of them?

“We’ve got 100 guys in this company and the odds are good that someone is going to get hit,” he said. “But I never thought it would be me. Never. Unbelievable.”

Murphy spent four days at an Army hospital in Germany before he was transferred to Ward 57 at Walter Reed, a floor devoted to amputees.

His girlfriend of seven years, a pretty blonde he met at South Fork High School, flew in for the emotional reunion. His parents, Larry and Wilette, followed, leaving their lives in Palm City behind and moving into the Mologne House Hotel on the Walter Reed campus so they could be there each day to help their middle son.

“Every day, I’m on my knees and I say, ‘Thank you, thank you. He’s alive,” his mother Wilette said. “He’s home.”

If you can call Walter Reed home. It is a place where tears are common, where strong men and women moan and wince, where breakups and heartache are common.

It is a place people learn to walk the sterile halls with metal legs and learn to pick up glasses of water with rubber hands made to match their skin tones. It is a place no one wants to be. Yet, they are glad they made it back, even if they left whole parts of themselves behind in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The days are long for hundreds who reside there, who dream of swimming and running — and in Murphy’s case — hunting again. One day, Murphy dreams of running his own construction business. But he knows he has much to accomplish before then.

At 5 in the morning, nurses hover over him, drawing blood. An hour later, doctors come into his room and perform their own checkups.

Every day, Murphy goes to physical therapy to keep his upper body strong while his remaining leg — with crushed bones and muscles and torn-up skin — heals. It is where he also receives treatment for his scars, where he makes great progress at bending his foot.

Two weeks ago, during physical therapy, he tried on his first prosthetic leg. “It was nothing,” he said, trying to downplay the moment. “Nothing.”

Each day he participates in an occupational therapy class, where he has to teach himself how to do the things he once took for granted: getting into the shower, picking up a plate off the counter.

Most days, there is surgery. On Thursday morning, doctors inserted a new fixator, a device used to stabilize the bones in the leg until they knit together.

“We’ll get along after this surgery,” he said. “Once I start walking. I’m gonna be scooting. I wanna get the right treatment. I wanna get the right treatment and get the hell outta here. I wanna go home.”

He says he is not bitter about the war and feels lucky he still has his head and his sense of humor — something he needs more than anything to get by.

“At least they didn’t kill me,” he said. “They tried their best and this is all they got.”