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By John E. Mulligan
Journal Washington Bureau

David Murray was home in bed on Haverhill Street in North Kingstown when he got the call from one of his son’s commanders at Fort Devens. His son, Patrick, had been wounded on patrol in Fallujah. First reports were of burns on his face and hands, serious but treatable, a severe compound fracture of his right leg.

It was the news from Iraq that every mother and father dreads. But it was not the knock on the door from a stone-faced Marine in uniform. Anyway, David had seen a ton of compound fractures in his years as a North Kingstown firefighter. Patrick would be OK.

Back in Fallujah, the battlefield diagnosis did not hold up for long. Murray winced as Navy corpsmen scissored away his pants in the Humvee that sped him from the site of the roadside bombing through a storm of gunfire.

Murray’s right leg was hamburger, glistening with bits of bone and shreds of tendon. Inside Fallujah Surgical, he made the doctor promise to try to save his leg. Soon, he was counting down backward through the anesthetic mask over his face. “Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”

“. . . I think we may have to amputate,” said a voice as Murray went under.

When he came to the next day most of the leg was gone. Furious that his parents had already been contacted, Murray insisted on calling home from the intensive care unit of the U.S. Air Force Theater Hospital at Balad, a sprawling base north of Baghdad.

“That was a little bit of a shock, to hear from my son that he’s lost a leg,” David Murray said of the 5:30 a.m. call. The Murrays began to alert the family network. Suzanne called her sister, Mara Motherway, a Navy commander at the Pentagon, who began to track Patrick’s itinerary and care. Suzanne called her uncle, a retired admiral in New Hampshire. His son, an Army major in Iraq, hitched the next flight to Balad.

The scene in the ICU at Balad would have seemed pitiful to any passing stranger: the soldier on watch; the young Marine, fading in and out of consciousness, his right eye swollen shut, face marred with burns, his arms broken and bandaged, his right leg gone forever.

But Suzanne recalls the ring of the telephone that night as an answer to a mother’s prayers. “I’m sitting here in the hospital with Patrick,” came the voice of her cousin Neil Doherty.

Now her wounded son had family by his bedside in the faraway war. Patrick’s spirit was strong, Neil said. He was going to be all right.

Patrick was quick to reach outside of his own pain and loss. Suzanne’s cousin Neil was the first of many to report that Patrick would not stop pestering the doctors about his wounded buddies from Weapons Company.

LESS THAN 36 HOURS after the attack, Murray was flown to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. Within a day, his parents were at his bedside. Suzanne mounted her father’s photograph on her son’s wall. Big Joe Motherway was another Marine wounded in battle, more than half a century before his grandson, in Korea.

Patrick went first to the burn center at Brooke because burns were his most urgent medical priority — burns on his hands and the back of his right thigh that required painful skin grafts. At first sight, his face was also a mess, but those burns proved to be less serious.

With Suzanne’s family ties and David’s background as North Kingstown fire chief, the Murrays navigated the military-medical bureaucracy with a minimum of added heartache — at least compared with other families. “Communications were just terrible,” said Suzanne.

Patrick’s own sense of his relative good fortune was an early touchstone of his recovery. As soon as he was able, he took to wheeling down the corridors to visit with his buddies wounded on Sept. 4.

Corporal Cody Hill, an Oklahoman, was burned across most of his body was covered with severe, disfiguring burns; part of one ear was gone.

Sergeant Terrence “Shane” Burke was seated with Murray when their Humvee was bombed. Burke was now a left-leg amputee, above the knee. Murray was his mirror: right-leg amputee, above the knee.

As the fog of the painkillers lifted, Murray set himself an outlandish goal. The 1st Battalion of the 25th Marines was due to leave Iraq in a few weeks. Murray resolved to stand on his new leg and salute his comrades when they returned to Massachusetts.

Murray’s burns healed ahead of schedule, so his doctors approved an early transfer to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

What will the new leg look like? he asked at his first session in the nation’s busiest prosthetics shop.

“Well, it’ll look something like this,” said his therapist, pulling up a trouser leg to display his own artificial leg. John Warren, injured in a scuba-diving accident in the early 1990s, was a legend at Walter Reed for his knack of connecting with the young amputees just back from Iraq.

Warren quickly judged Murray’s attitude to be a key to his recovery. He endorsed Murray’s decision to start right to work on his homecoming journey.

1/25’s HOMECOMING trek ended when the tired Marines trooped off their C-130 transport at Westover Air Reserve Base in Chicopee, Mass., not long before midnight last Oct. 25.

“We are all dragging and when we walked off the plane it was freezing,” recalled Corporal Patrick Foley. “We walked into the hangar and the battalion commander is there saluting, and the sergeant major.”

And on his own two feet — one of them man-made — was Murray, saluting with the brass. “It was awesome,” said Foley. “There’s Pat just standing there waiting to give you a handshake and a hug.”

Suddenly, Murray was mobbed. He was pulling up his uniform pants to flash his new prosthesis, making his buddies laugh at amazing tricks you can do with a stainless-steel leg.

“I might have been thinking, ‘Why me?’ ” said Foley. “But not Pat. He has the best spirit in the world.”

There were other moments for Murray to cherish last fall and winter: a thunderous reception as the Marines of 1/25 unfurled a huge American flag during halftime of a New England Patriots game at Foxboro; the holidays with family and friends in North Kingstown.

All that time away from Walter Reed may have slowed Murray’s physical recovery somewhat, he said, “but it was much better for my mental rehabilitation to be getting back into the world.”

EARLY IN THE NEW YEAR, however, Murray fell into a valley. It was almost exactly the time when he had long ago planned to be starting his new life as a firefighter, training with the latest class of cadets in Rhode Island. Instead, he was in training in the special workout room at Walter Reed, starting his new life on one leg.

Murray was finally coming to emotional grips with the hard reality. There were limits to where he could go on an artificial leg. He would never follow in his father’s footsteps.

Suzanne, still in Washington with Murray, also worried about her son’s forgetfulness and his flashes of temper — especially at night when he was tired from the exertions of therapy.

But in time, the work and routines of physical recovery seemed to be balm for Murray’s low spirits. He worked with his therapists an hour or more a day, five days a week. Murray and other Marines and soldiers added irregular training outside — stair work, for example, and walks on the gently sloping grounds around their residence on the hospital base.

The first big challenge was “just learning to trust the fact that you can put weight” on the artificial leg, Murray said. There were also the unexpected facts of life with a stump. Like many comrades, he still had painful bits of shrapnel lodged in his thigh. There were the abrasions from the suction that holds the socket of the artificial leg to the stump. “It’s like a giant hickey,” by Murray’s deadpan observation.

There was the danger of falling. One night in North Kingstown, he lurched to reach something on a nightstand and fell out of bed to land full-force on his stump — an excruciating reminder that the underlying bone, sinew and nerve tissue were only thinly padded with flesh.

Murray learned the great cliche of the society of amputees: you never know how much you need your knee until you lose it. As an “above-the-knee,” Murray was robbed of the natural hinge for precious functions that his below-the-knee comrades retained.

He had to master a tricky motion in order to step forward with his artificial right foot: a forward and upward push of the thighbone and a slight leftward rotation of the hip. If the maneuver wasn’t just right, the artificial knee joint wouldn’t “break” properly for the foot to step forward and bear Murray’s weight.

Murray’s early rehab work was mostly drudgery on the parallel bars. “Take three steps down and turn around. Take three steps back and turn. Do that for an hour,” he said.

With the gradual gains in his mobility came Murray’s daily reminders that he had a better deal than a lot of Marines and soldiers around him, the double-amputees, the disfigured, the despairing. A little service to such comrades proved to be good medicine for Murray himself.

As always, Murray displayed his flair for “keeping it light.” He had T-shirts made that bore, on the front, the message: “Marine for Sale: 25-% off.” On the back: “Some Assembly Required.”

Another boon was the Wounded Warriors Project, a network that gave Murray Super Bowl tickets, a trip to the Cayman Islands, an excursion to the U.S. Open.

“Pat,” said his Weapons Company buddy Mark Wills, “this keeps up, I’m going to get my leg cut off!”

By spring, Murray had a healthy dose of cabin fever. He was beginning to examine possibilities for his future — most of them away from Rhode Island: well-paid internships, special programs at a number of universities, lines to older veterans in the business world.

Early in the summer he borrowed another far-fetched goal from a buddy in Wounded Warriors — to run in the Ground Zero memorial 5K race in New York at the end of this month.

Meanwhile, Murray has taken to returning to Fort Devens, Mass., for drill weekends with his fellow reservists. He still gets on the range behind the 50-caliber machine gun that was his weapon in Fallujah. Never mind the steel leg.

For a lot of the Marines of 1/25, the events of Sept. 4, 2006, still haven’t ended. Three comrades were killed, three are afflicted with wounds they will bear all their lives.

“There’s no closure from those days yet,” said Wills. But just as Murray has drawn strength from the double-amputees at Walter Reed, who are pushing ahead with their lives, friends have drawn strength from Murray.

“With his presence, his ability, his courage and his strength — Pat helps heal all of us in some small fashion,” said Wills.

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