CAMP LEJEUNE, N.C. - For 10 weeks, ever since Cpl. Raymond D. Hennagir was blown up, he had longed for this moment, this homecoming, when the rest of his platoon would return from Iraq.
He missed them, his brothers. Hennagir, a 21-year-old Marine from Deptford, N.J., felt he had let them down by stepping on an improvised explosive device (IED), blowing off both legs and four fingers on his left hand - now, he said, in his darkest Marine humor, just "a pink mist and a memory."
Hennagir desperately wanted to mend enough so that the Marine Corps would let him travel to Camp Lejeune for this day, Aug 26.
That wish motivated him, maybe even kept him alive, through the summer's 16 surgeries and three skin grafts. The pain was so intense that he was sure his screams were heard all through the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
"There were times when I wondered if the kid was ever going to get a break," said his uncle Jim English, a 20-year Navy veteran, who would stare helplessly out the hospital window.
And now here Hennagir was. The late-August sun was blazing. He sat in his wheelchair, his baggy new jeans from American Eagle tucked up under his lost legs.
Still taking strong doses of methadone, a narcotic used for chronic pain, with newly grafted skin on his left arm in danger from the menacing sun, the corporal waited for the busload of Marines to pull up at the barracks.
His fiancee, Sherri Baskerville, was beside him, wiping sweat off his face with a tissue. They had gotten engaged three weeks before he shipped out, and his first thought, once he realized his legs were gone, was that Sherri would soon be gone, too.
She was still with him, though. His aunt and uncle, Donna and Jim English, who had raised him since he was 9, were there, too.
Through two tours in Iraq, Hennagir's platoon had been his family. He had this profound need to see these Marines home safely, to be with them, to find out - was he still one of them?
"I wanted to prove to myself that I'm better than my father," he said.
The first five years of Hennagir's life were chaotic, to say the least, and he has only harsh words about his biological parents.
