By John E. Mulligan
Journal Washington Bureau

Corporal Patrick D. Murray has moved a long way toward recovery in the year since the attacks in Fallujah that cost him his right leg and three Marine comrades their lives.

It has not been an easy march. Over the summer he had surgery on his stump to remove shrapnel — a raisin-sized nugget of metal, possibly from a propane tank used in the bombing of his Humvee. Later, the socket for his new prosthetic leg broke. More recently, he has been diagnosed with a condition that may weaken the joint between his right leg and hip.

Murray has also taken “my trip to the psych ward,” as he calls the tests he took to determine the cause for the lapses of short-term memory and the flare-ups of irritability that his parents detected after his return from Iraq. He has been diagnosed with traumatic brain injury — almost certainly from the two roadside bombings he survived in the first four days of last September.

Murray has weathered the setbacks with his congenital good cheer, passing the milestones toward his likely medical retirement from the Marines this fall, sifting through his options for school and work, and resuming his stormy love affair with the Boston Red Sox.

Last week, Murray tentatively accepted a job offer from a national construction firm that could put him on a management track and permit him to return to college part-time.

“A year ago when he was in that hospital bed, I could hardly find a part of him that I could hug, he was so badly hurt,” said his mother, Suzanne Murray. “If you would have told me then, ‘In a year, Patrick will be on his feet, he’ll be so positive about his future and have this great job’ … if you had told me that, I would have said, ‘Thank you, God.’ ”

After returning from Iraq last fall, some men from the 1st Battalion of the 25th Marines completed a mission of mercy that their fallen comrades had quietly pursued all summer. While on patrol in June 2006, Navy Corpsman Chris Walsh, Corporal Jared Shoemaker, Lance Corporal Eric Valdepeñas and Lance Corporal Cody Hill had encountered a family whose infant daughter had a birth defect that caused her bladder to grow outside her body. The Marines paid frequent visits to tend to the child they called Baby Mariam. After the Sept. 4 bombing that only Hill survived, others from 1/25 took up the cause in memory of Walsh, Shoemaker and Valdepeñas. They sent Baby Mariam to Massachusetts for the surgery that saved her life.

Today the Valdepeñas family of Seekonk, with Bishop Hendricken High School, is building a program in his memory to teach young Rhode Island students about service in support of freedom around the world.

The advances in Fallujah, meanwhile, have startled even the Marine leaders who have witnessed them.

Route Michigan, a highway into Fallujah, two days after Murray suffered an IED blast there, with remnants of the accident still in the street. Photo courtesy of Patrick Murray

The catalyst came May 24 not far from where Valdepeñas was killed last September. More than two dozen Iraqis died in the suicide bombing of a funeral procession for the assassinated chief of a grass-roots movement against al-Qaida in Iraq.

Street-level reaction was swift and dramatic, according to Lieutenant Colonel William F. Mullen, commander of the 2nd Battalion, 6th Marines, the U.S. force in Fallujah today.

“The mayor said, ‘That’s enough,’ ” and immediately joined with the local Iraqi Army brigade in police actions that the Marines had prescribed for months, Mullen said.

They closed the city to most civilian car traffic, crippling insurgent mobility. Then the Marines teamed up with Iraqi forces on a program that had worked elsewhere in Anbar province. They set up quarters with their Iraqi counterparts in precinct houses across the city and established joint patrols.

Most important, the assassination of Allawi al-Issawi and the bombing of his funeral galvanized street-level opposition to the insurgents — a change in hearts and minds that Marine leaders had struggled for more than three years to instill.

The Marines of Mullen’s 2/6 have gotten dramatic results. “We haven’t had a serious casualty since May,” Mullen said in a telephone interview a few days after the anniversary of the bombings that wounded Corporal Murray and killed his comrades. The Marines have reduced their force in Fallujah by about a third, to 600.

Violence against the citizenry has ebbed; commerce has blossomed; reconstruction work is visible in some sectors of the battle-blasted city.

Mullen asked that this message be conveyed to Murray and his comrades in 1/25: “What happened to him and his buddies was not in vain. They helped us turn it around here.”

“I would not have believed it if I were not here to see it,” military analyst Francis J. “Bing” West, of Newport, said in an interview from Fallujah on Sept. 7. “I’m standing near the marketplace without a helmet on, without any armor.”

West, who wrote a book about the 2004 battle for control of Fallujah, said the foundation for the current breakthrough was built on the earlier work of Marines who kept the city from falling under insurgent domination.

“Al-Qaida killed one sheikh too many,” West said, referring to the assassination of al-Issawi last May. “But if the Marines looked like losers,” local leaders would never have risked fighting back against al-Qaida , West said.

“Those Sunni leaders saw how the Marines kept banging their heads against the wall month after month and they decided that the Marines were the toughest tribe in Fallujah,” West said. “If it hadn’t been for the guys like Corporal Murray, taking their casualties and going back out on patrol, you never would have seen what we are seeing today on the streets of Fallujah.” President Bush cites the progress in Anbar Province as evidence that his current strategy in Iraq is working. But critics say it’s far from clear that such advances will persist or be replicated elsewhere in Iraq.

Murray takes a modest view. “The only thing I’m really proud of is that I’m not there anymore,” he said. “I’m home.”

And if his physical setbacks have changed his plan to run the full five kilometers at the annual Ground Zero memorial run at the end of the month in New York, Murray is still determined to stand at the starting line for a symbolic walk on his new leg.

“I’ll be standing at the finish, holding the beer for my buddies,” Murray said.