Published: Friday, November 12, 2010, 5:30 AM
Sgt. Jon Duralde walked across the sunny lawn at Medal of Honor Park on Thursday with a barely discernible limp.
“You can’t tell, can you?” he asked. “About my leg?”
In blue jeans and T-shirt imprinted with “woundedwarriorproject.org,” Duralde looked like any other young man enjoying a visit home.
That he endured a savage bomb blast in Afghanistan six months ago — the bottom half of his left leg was blown off — seemed not to get him down.
“I’ve tried to keep positive,” he said.
Despite the shrapnel wounds on his forearms, the skin grafts on his legs and the prosthesis below his left knee, he described himself as “blessed.”
“I could have lost both legs,” he said, “or not been here or been burned all over.”
After his ordeal, he said, “the rest is easy.”
Taking a seat at a picnic table, Duralde, 25, talked about how he had enlisted in the U.S. Army right out of Murphy High School, did two tours of duty in Iraq, then headed to Afghanistan.
On June 25, with Bravo Unit 1-71 Cavalry, Duralde was doing reconnaissance in Rumbasi, Kandahar Province.
He stepped on an anti-personnel mine attached to two 84-millimeter mortars.
“Boom!” he said.
Next thing he knew, he was lying on the ground, blood gushing from his legs. He was screaming and praying.
He struggled to get out his tourniquet to cut off the blood. A friend — “my brother,” he calls him — Sgt. Luis Gamarra, had also been hit.
But Gamarra was able to stand up and apply the first tourniquets to Duralde.
Moments later, aided by a medic, Duralde was carried on a stretcher to a helicopter, Gamarra at his side.
A photographer snapped a picture of the two soldiers — Duralde was wrought up in pain, an oxygen mask strapped to his face — and the “brothers” clutched hands. When the New York Post reprinted the picture a few weeks later, millions saw it.
These six months later, Duralde keeps a copy of that picture on his smart phone and clicks it on as he sits under the trees in west Mobile.
As he peers at it, it all comes back to him: the multiple surgeries for skin grafts, the long weeks at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., the relocation to Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio.
Two weeks ago, he took a break from physical rehabilitation and made his first trip home to Mobile since the blast.
In addition to seeing family and friends, he added to his tattoos, getting one on his upper arm of crossed sabers.
At Walter Reed, Duralde got to know former U.S. Senator Robert Dole, who had been wounded in World War II and visited the facility. Duralde and Dole used the gym together.
“He was a nice man,” Duralde said. “He liked to joke.”
U.S. Rep. Jo Bonner, R-Mobile, visited with Duralde and fulfilled a request he made — for a dozen Krispy Kreme Donuts.
University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban sent him a photo signed, “To Sgt. Duralde, Thank you for everything you do.”
One night at Walter Reed, when Duralde woke up after hearing a loud explosion, one of the nurses came into the room to talk with him.
There had been no explosion, only Duralde’s imagination.
Duralde and the nurse began a series of long, healing conversations, he said, and a friendship formed.
And others at Walter Reed — veterans who had suffered so much, including one double-amputee from the Korean War — helped give Duralde strength and inspiration.
Blue-eyed, in a cap with a crimson “A,” Duralde said he had not yet “set foot in college,” but hopes to get further education in the near future and become a nurse.
Even in Mobile, he said, he keeps close contact with his fellow soldiers on the front through the phone and Facebook.
“If I could, I’d go back to Afghanistan in a heartbeat,” he said. “I miss my guys.”
He does not romanticize combat, though.
On his chest is tattooed: “Dulce Bellum Inexpertis.”
He translates: “War is sweet for those who haven’t been.”
“It’s not a hero thing,” he said. “I’m just a guy doing a job.”
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