Will and Amelia Glass rebuild their lives after Will suffered a traumatic brain injury in Iraq.
(Will and Amelia Glass )Army Sgt. Will Glass had plans to start college, a business and maybe even a family after his active-duty commitment was to expire in April 2006.
Instead, the Army extended his deployment in Iraq, and he was hit by an improvised explosive device (IED) in September of that year, while on his second tour of duty.
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The blast scorched his face and hands, destroyed his left eye and left him with a traumatic brain injury (TBI) that forced doctors to remove part of his skull.
He was in such serious condition when he left Iraq that soldiers pinned a Purple Heart to his chest, certain he would not make it home alive. Six months later, Glass was able to show me that Purple Heart when I visited him at his home in Eugene, Ore.
"I understand I wasn't supposed to make it," Glass said.
While he has no memory of the roadside bomb that wounded him, Glass will bear the scars of the attack for the rest of his life.
At 23 years old, he faces years of rehabilitation to recover from his injuries, even though he has already made tremendous strides since he first arrived at Bethesda Naval Hospital.
Glass's wife, Amelia, recalls the moment when she saw her husband for the first time. It was just a month after their first wedding anniversary.
"His whole face was burnt and he had tubes coming out of his head and his throat," she said.
Glass' mother, Karen Mitchell, said, "It didn't even look like Will. I wouldn't have known until they pointed over to where he was."
Amelia took photos of her husband with a cell phone so she wouldn't forget how she felt that day. "I wanted to remember how bad it used to be, so that we could be excited about how he looks now," she said.
She never believed her husband would be injured in Iraq. "He made it through the first deployment fine," she said, "and he was always so smart and so careful, I just figured he would be OK."
Amelia and Will Glass blame his injury not only on the enemy that planted the bomb, but also on the Pentagon's stop-loss policy, which allows the military to issue orders keeping soldiers overseas even after their active-duty commitments have ended.
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