Soldier badly wounded in Afghanistan wants to return to duty

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Soldier badly wounded in Afghanistan wants to return to duty
By Lesley Clark, McClatchy Newspapers
Stars and Stripes online edition, Monday, January 4, 2010

WASHINGTON — Army Sgt. Robert Samuel knew that he had lost much of his leg almost as soon as the improvised explosive device went off beneath his Stryker armored vehicle. Bloodied and dazed, he asked his buddies to grab what was left of him as they yanked him out of the wrecked vehicle.

One just shook his head.

"The medic said he didn't think I'd make it," Samuel, 29, a soft-spoken Miami native, said of the injuries he sustained during the attack in November in the desert outside Kandahar, the birthplace of the Taliban in southern Afghanistan. "He figured I'd lost too much blood."

As the U.S. prepares to send 30,000 to 35,000 more troops to Afghanistan to fight what President Barack Obama calls a war of necessity, Samuel is mending at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, and willing to return to duty.

"I have buddies I carried over my shoulder," he said, sitting in a wheelchair after a workout in the rehabilitation center at Walter Reed. He rolled up his sleeve to show two tattooed tributes to fellow soldiers, comrades who died in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. "There's so many sacrifices others have given, and I'm going to keep on, for a lot of my friends.


Rest of article at: http://www.stripes.com/article.asp?section=104&article=67019