Sharon Teich folds the flag she flies daily in front of her East Side home. Her son Bernard, an Army staff sergeant, recently had a leg amputated after being wounded in Iraq by a bomb.

The Providence Journal / Mark Patinkin

His name has been on my mind since last month, when I first heard it. I was at Rosh Hashanah services at Temple Beth-El in Providence when the assistant rabbi, Sarah Mack, said something that got my attention. She offered a prayer of healing for those in the congregation who were ill, mentioning one in particular.

“We keep in our hearts and in our prayers this morning, Bernie Teich,” she said. “Bernie’s leg was amputated in recent days after being injured during valiant service to our country in Iraq.”

Last week, I called to find out more. I learned that Bernie is still in treatment in Texas. His mother, Sharon Teich, lives in Providence. She gave me directions to her home on the East Side, near Blackstone Boulevard, telling me to look for the big American flag out front.

It’s not the kind of block you picture when you think about the military, which tends toward a working-class base. It was a reminder that the war touches all neighborhoods.

Sharon Teich is 53, and her son 30. She said he began school at Providence Hebrew Day, and learned basketball at the Jewish Community Center. He didn’t love being a student, and eventually moved to School One.

In 1996, at age 19, he joined the Marines.

Bernie wasn’t good at writing home, and, early on, his mom got so worried she asked that they tell him to get in touch. At the time, he was at Parris Island. He wasn’t pleased. Sharon acknowledges it’s embarrassing for a Marine to be pulled out of boot camp and told to call his mother.

Bernie found a calling in the military and after four years reenlisted, this time in the Army. He rose to staff sergeant and was based at Fort Hood, in Killeen, Texas. He married a woman who also enlisted, Jamie, a medic. During their five years at Fort Hood, they had a son and two daughters.

But they recently moved to San Antonio’s Fort Sam Houston. That’s where Bernie is being treated in the Brooke Army Medical Center, a new hospital with an advanced program for amputees.

I asked Sharon why they wouldn’t have held onto their home at Fort Hood, where they have roots.

“He’s going to be in therapy a long, long time,” she said.

Bernie Teich has done two tours in Iraq, the first for 14 months starting in January 2004. He began his second tour in October 2006, a month after his youngest daughter was born.

Not long after, his wife was told she was to be deployed to Iraq, too. Their kids were 7, 4 and a baby and would have to be cared for by relatives.

But Sharon said neither Bernie nor Jamie complained. It’s the life they chose, and they saw it as duty to country.

Last February, Bernie was given a brief leave from Iraq to help move the kids to Florida, where they would stay with an uncle’s family. Sharon flew down from Providence to help.

Bernie, she felt, looked great. He ribbed his mom about all the care packages he was getting. Temple Beth-El had put out a list of things soldiers can use, and Bernie was getting whole cases of socks, magazines, even food. A down comforter was on the list, and he’d been sent so many he was able to give one to every soldier in his unit.

“He told me, ‘enough already,’ ” Sharon recalled.

Bernie didn’t talk much about Iraq. Sharon sensed he was protecting her from what he’d seen. During his first tour, there hadn’t been many roadside bombs. This time, they were going off every day. As commander of a unit of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, built like tanks, Bernie was constantly searching for improvised explosive devices and heading into combat. Sharon would later hear of how he sometimes had to put on a special suit to put body parts of dead soldiers into bags.

They said their goodbyes. He went back to Iraq.

Two weeks later, Sharon was in her office when someone from the Army called. It was 10 a.m. on Wednesday, Feb. 28, 2007. She and her second husband, Fred Ricci, run a staffing agency off Route 2 in Warwick.

The officer said her son had been critically injured in Baghdad.

He said it was a bomb under her son’s Bradley. He named the bones in Bernie’s legs that had been broken.

“There were none that weren’t broken,” Sharon would later say.

A major artery was torn, which is why it was life and death. He had been taken to a “CASH” — a Combat Support Hospital — in Baghdad.

It takes a while to learn the details of an injury in war. In time, the pieces came together.

Her son’s unit was rolling near Baghdad’s Dora market, where people have been known to throw bombs into open American vehicles, so Bernie had ordered everyone inside and the hatches closed.

He was at the bottom of the interior, and therefore closest to the explosion. He was crouched on a mechanical robot they sometimes roll out to check for booby traps. That probably saved his life.

The explosion blew him upward and halfway out the main hatch, but his legs were stuck in tangled junk. There was an intense chemical smell from both the bomb and the wreckage, which Sharon would later wash out of her son’s personal effects.

The vehicle was burning, and Bernie was spattered with fuel, oil and dirt, but an emergency system on the Bradley put out the fire. The thinnest member of the unit, a medic who was in a different vehicle, crawled past Bernie, into the ruined Bradley, and used metal-cutting tools to free his legs. Still, he was stuck. He later told his mom that he recalled thinking, “Will they get me out of here?” At that, Lieutenant Brown, the biggest member of the unit, climbed up and managed to lift him out.

They put tourniquets on, and covered his legs with patches. He still had his feet, but chunks of his legs were missing, including the whole back half of one knee.

They put Bernie in another vehicle and headed for the CASH. As they left, they took fire from snipers.

Later that same night of Feb. 28, the phone rang in Sharon’s East Side home. It was Bernie. He was groggy. He sounded terrible. He wanted to know why his mom wasn’t there at his side. She understood he was in a sedated stupor, but it was still hard for a mother to hear.

They performed wash-out surgeries and tried to stabilize him. Two days later, Friday, they moved him to a hospital in Balad, Iraq, a transfer point. While there, they lost the pulse in his leg, which meant the torn artery was bleeding out. He almost died that day.

On Saturday, they flew him to the military’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany.

Sen. Jack Reed called Sharon and offered any help he could. She asked if Reed could clear a visit. The next day, he did, and she got ready to leave.

Then she found out why the military had earlier warned against such visits. They called to say her son was on his way to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, which, because of the war, has emerged as the world’s best facility for limb salvation. Their planes would have crossed in the air.

Soon, Sharon was in the emergency room at Brooke, where she met Jamie, her daughter-in-law. Jamie told Sharon to walk in front of her, because she wasn’t ready to be the first to see Bernie’s wounds. Sharon reached out to her son. Bernie smiled and said, “Can I kiss my wife first?”

For Sharon, it was hard to look. Her son’s legs were surrounded by fixators — outside cages with steel rods going through skin and wounds to bone to hold in place what was left.

Sharon stayed in Texas for five weeks, put up without cost in a Fisher House, the military equivalent of a Ronald McDonald House.

Bernie Teich went through 14 surgeries, including bone grafts. During Sharon’s stay, some soldiers went into cardiac arrest, others got infections. But the care, she thought, was better than any hospital she’s been to.

“In any other war,” says Sharon, “We would have lost him.”

Bernie’s father, Mitchell, who now lives in Florida, was there a lot, too, which comforted Sharon. Of course, there was Jamie and the three grandchildren. But at night, Sharon was alone in her room. She would lie there thinking back to Bernie playing basketball at the JCC, and Little League in Warwick, where they lived for a time. The doctors said Bernie would perhaps find a way to walk again, but not much more than that.

During his days in the Baghdad CASH, the U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, stopped by Bernie’s bed to award him his second Purple Heart. He’d gotten the other during his first tour, when a rocket propelled grenade blew up near his head, causing facial wounds. Petraeus asked if there was anything he could do. Bernie told the general his wife was about to be deployed. He asked, “Could you take her off the roster?”

The general did, which Jamie later welcomed because of the needs now at home, but she told Sharon she also felt guilty about it. Medics had saved her husband’s life. Had she gone to Iraq, she felt maybe she could have saved others.

I asked Sharon if Bernie was ever bitter.

No. A few times in Brooke, he broke down for a moment, but it was out of frustration. “These were active guys,” said Sharon, “in charge of everything, making life-and-death decisions. Now, you can’t even feed yourself.” Soldiers, she said, aren’t good at being helpless.

The closest he came to expressing regret was when he said, “I really messed up turning down that street.” Only he used a stronger phrase than “messed up.”

After 12 weeks in Texas, Sharon came home at the end of May. By then Bernie was out of the hospital, but in a wheelchair, unable to stand, getting daily therapy. His right leg was in constant pain, the foot frozen at an angle, with no hope of it working again, or even bearing weight. He faced a common decision at Brooke — sometimes, it’s better to give up the leg. He and the doctors decided to do so. Sharon flew back out in mid-August. On the 24th of that month, they amputated Bernie’s right leg below the knee. She stayed with him until the end of September.

Bernie still may face a similar decision on his other leg, though he is working hard to keep it, sometimes forcing himself to use crutches instead of a wheelchair now that, just last week, he got his first prosthetic.

“He’s strong-willed,” his mom said. “He doesn’t give up.”

She remembers being in his Fort Hood home when he got a call from the same Lieutenant Brown who had pulled him out of the Bradley. She overheard Bernie tell him that in some ways, he’s better off than before. He appreciates what he has — his kids, wife, wider family. He has a different view on what’s important in life.

Bernie faces another year or two of therapy and medical challenges. Afterward, he has talked about getting a degree and going into teaching.

I asked if Sharon has regrets.

She doesn’t. “I’m proud of him, and my daughter-in-law, too,” she said. “I think it’s a noble service, the military. I’ve never seen anyone not come out better. They have discipline. They‘re team players. They follow through. I run an employment agency — people call in sick, they do this, that. You don’t get that from military people.”

She added: “Believe it or not, Bernie is one of the luckier ones.” At Brooke, she would see soldiers who lost two legs and an arm, some with terrible burns, and it would remind her that many face worse.

It was now early evening on the East Side. Being a military mother has taught Sharon a tradition she had not known about. While at Brooke Medical Center, everything would halt each evening at 5:30 as they lowered the main flag for the day.

“If you’re walking, you stop,” she said. “If you’re driving by, you stop. People have respect.”

At home, she now keeps up the ritual herself with a flagpole she had installed after her son’s first Iraq tour. At 5:30 on the day I visited, I watched as she walked outside, unhooked the flag, and folded it first in thirds, then in a triangle, with no stripes showing, just the stars.

She brought it inside, to be raised again the next morning at dawn.

She set it down on a table, thinking about all the sacrifices that have been made in its name.

mpatinkin@projo.com