THE GUNNER

At 35, Edmund Aponte went to his third war.

He had been active duty from 1988-92, and had parachuted into Panama in 1989 as a member of the 82nd Airborne Division taking part in Operation Just Cause, against the regime of Manuel Noriega. In the 1991 Gulf War, Aponte was among the forces guarding the border of Saudi Arabia. Once the war started, his unit moved into Iraq.

After his discharge, he served in the National Guard in Maryland, and then in Puerto Rico. He moved to Mt. Pleasant, in Providence, in 2001, and worked briefly at Kmart before landing a job as a metal fabricator at Electric Boat.

In Rhode Island, Aponte, who has three children, joined the 115th and was deployed in February 2003.

He spent 10 months at Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital after the attack. His family left New England because cold weather gives him headaches.

Aponte speaks slowly, deliberately, over the telephone from his home in Florida. A television is on in the background on his end of the line.

"My skull got fractured in the front -- it got cracked and it got depressed down," he says. "The shrapnel went into my neck, the shrapnel came through the right side of my face, like behind my ear. When it went in, it damaged nerves."

Including nerves to his right ear.

"I lost my balance because of the liquid in my right ear. So I feel dizzy sometimes. And, I dunno, like somebody just spins me a lot. I puke. I feel sick. I puke and then I'm okay.

"I'm deaf in my right ear, for all of my life. They don't think I'm going to get my hearing back. I got posttraumatic stress. And I'm having a rough time with my family, especially my wife. I don't know, I'm like, very aggressive. Arguing, you know? And with my brain injury, I got mood disorder."

His two younger children don't yet understand what happened to their father. "My little boy, he always say that I got bit by a dog in the head," Aponte says. "My teenager, he's 13 when it happened, I don't know what kind of effect it is on him.

"But with my wife -- I think she is the one who is dealing with the toughest. Now instead of having three kids, it's like having four. I mean, I'm a man, I can act. Except that I make little mistakes because of my brain injury. I'm writing a check for $200, I could easily make it for $20 or $2,000. I could leave the stove on. She could say, 'Honey I need you to pick up the kid at this place at this time -- don't forget.' But I don't think she would put me in that situation because I would forget. In 15 minutes, I'd forget.

"I've been reading and learning about head injury. Once you hurt your brain, there is no healing completely. When you lose some brain cells, it's going to be hard to function."