Lt. Robert M. Vaccaro of South Kingstown

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

PROVIDENCE — The hair-parting scar runs like a pink zipper up and over the young lieutenant’s skull, ending several inches behind his right ear.

It will serve now as a clear demarcation line between the life Robert M. Vaccaro lives from this point forward and the death he escaped one night in Baghdad seven months ago.

Vaccaro, 24, of South Kingstown, volunteered to be there, in battle, with men he had joined up with and men he was trained to lead.

His family supported his decision, knowing and worrying it might cost him his life.

“Actually, we didn’t, at that time, think so much about this possibility,” his father, Richard J. Vaccaro, said yesterday as he watched his son, still recovering from a severe brain injury, receive congratulations from fellow National Guardsmen in uniform, the most recent recipient of the Purple Heart.

“Ever since he was 12 years old his dream was to serve his country in the Army,” Richard Vaccaro continued.

The father bit his lip to keep his emotions in check.

“His [maternal] grandfather had been in World War II. His uncle had been an Army soldier. So it was in his genes, though he didn’t get it through me.”

In the spring of 2005, Robert Vaccaro graduated from the University of Rhode Island with an engineering degree. That same month he was commissioned as a 2nd lieutenant Army officer through the Reserve Officer Training Corps.

The oldest of five children of a URI professor and his wife, Sarah, who home-schooled them all, Vaccaro joined the Guard and spent the first six months of 2006 attending officer training school in Missouri. When he returned, he filled out papers for immediate deployment. But the local 861st Engineering Company had recently returned from Iraq. Vaccaro wanted to serve as soon as possible. So when the 130th Engineering Company, based in Puerto Rico, put out a call for volunteers, Vaccaro signed up.

Last summer Vaccaro trained with the 130th in Wisconsin before being deployed in September to Iraq. He had been there four months when he set off on a night mission on Jan. 13, in a convoy of about five armored Humvees to detect and destroy roadside bombs.

It was after midnight, his father says, when the convoy, returning from its mission and about 30 minutes from its base, drove by an “EFP” device on the side of the road. The explosively formed penetrator detonated. Its projectile tore through the steel of Vaccaro’s Humvee and exploded.

“It blew a hole through the Humvee just behind his head and the shock wave of that explosion is what caused the traumatic brain injuries,” said Vaccaro’s father.

The projectile struck the driver and killed him instantly. Shrapnel buried into the vehicle’s gunner. The Humvee veered off the road and crashed into a building.

Within an hour of the attack, Vaccaro lay unconscious in a Baghdad hospital, his brain swelling.

The swelling needed a place to go, so surgeons “removed a large section of his skull to allow his brain to swell,” his dad said. “That started the long process of recovery.”

Doctors at National Navy Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., initially treated Vaccaro, who remembers nothing of the attack. While waiting for their son’s condition to improve, his parents made trips to nearby Walter Reed Army Hospital to visit the gunner wounded in the Humvee and learn the details of the attack.

In Tampa, doctors told the Vaccaros that they weren’t sure their son would ever walk again, the brain injury was so severe.

But yesterday, Vaccaro stood in his Army boots and fatigues as Maj. Gen. Robert T. Bray, adjutant general of the Rhode Island National Guard, pinned a Purple Heart on his lapel, the medal awarded in the name of the president of the United States for those in the armed forces wounded in combat. Several dozen members of Bray’s command were on hand inside the North Main Street armory for the presentation.

“We are grateful to our medical services for what they have done to bring him back to us so soon in the condition that he is,” said Bray. “He has a ways to go. I want you to know that the Rhode Island National Guard and the U.S. Army are behind him and his family all the way. And we know that he will return to his normal self and his duty as soon as he possibly can because, as you know, this is a dedicated American soldier here.”

Richard Vaccaro said his son isn’t “100 percent yet, but he’s doing so well that there is this sense of relief that he’s made it this far.”

The soldier left in-patient therapy just 10 days ago in Tampa, Fla., and will be undergoing outpatient therapy for about six months. The extent of his recovery is still uncertain.

“Certainly,” his father said, “we’re very proud of him.”

But the pride, he said, is eclipsed by relief.

“Great relief.”

Robert Vaccaro’s middle name is Martin, the first name of his maternal grandfather.

“He was in Normandy a couple of days after D-Day,” Vaccaro said, surrounded by his family, “and later in the Battle of the Bulge. He was an infantry soldier.”

Robert Vaccaro says he wants to return to Iraq if a medical review board allows him to. The decision should come in about six months, he said.

So he’s staying in?

“Yep.”

One soldier’s story.

One face of war.

To date, 21 members of the Rhode Island National Guard have been awarded the Purple Heart, including four members who died in combat.

tmooney@projo.com