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After medic Billie Grimes stopped the bleeding with an elastic cord, I was rushed in the humvee to a nearby brigade clinic and then medevacked to a U.S. Army hospital elsewhere in Baghdad for surgery to clean what was left of my arm and the shrapnel wounds in my right thigh. There, I learned that everyone else in the back of the humvee had survived, though Jenks had serious leg wounds, Beverly had knee and hand injuries and Nachtwey had taken shrapnel in his knees and abdomen. The next morning, a middle-aged nurse with blond highlights approached my bed.
"You're a hero," she said. "You lost a hand and saved lives."
Hero? I was feeling anything but valiant. Mangled. Pitiful. Disoriented. Scared. I was anxious about my ability to work again with one hand and to parent my children, who lived with me half-time in Washington. My son Skyler was 11 years old, the same age I had been when my father, a workaholic community newspaper publisher, dropped dead of a heart attack. Olivia was 8, roughly as old as my sister had been. I couldn't bear to think I might let such wrenching family history repeat itself.
Mostly, however, I was angry at myself for getting in the wrong humvee, releasing the grenade too slowly, even grabbing it in the first place. Nothing would have happened if I hadn't picked it up. Why had I been acting like a cowboy? Why hadn't I just left the damn thing alone?
"It was an impulsive act," I told the nurse. "If I hadn't picked it up, I'd still have a hand."
"You probably wouldn't have had a life," she retorted. "You and everyone else in the vehicle would have died. It wasn't an impulse; it was an instinct to survive."
TIME colleagues pushed for my transfer from Baghdad to the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. They then joined my friends and sister Leslie Flesch in lobbying to get acting Secretary of the Army Les Brownlee to admit me to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, making me the first reporter wounded in combat known to have received such treatment at the premier hospital reserved for soldiers.
Among the pros on the amputees' Ward 57 at Walter Reed, no one seemed fazed by my injury. But just the word amputation made me shudder. It conjured up a disjointed series of images: a childhood friend who had lost his leg in an auto accident; World War II veterans wheeled into ballparks for holiday games, their empty trousers or shirtsleeves pinned up. I had avoided mirrors all week. Now I feared seeing the startling reality in the faces of my family and friends who would be visiting on my first day in the hospital.
My fears turned out to be groundless. The one emotion everyone showed was happiness to see me alive, maimed or not. But two exchanges stood out. My sister surprised me with a gift: a 1900 silver dollar our gambler father had won in Las Vegas and given to her in 1956 when she was 8 years old.
I held my father's winnings and thought of the larger bet he lost. He deferred a family life to business success, and died before he had either. I had almost repeated the mistake. The realization put my father's death in a new light. I understood for the first time why he exited before getting to know me: he had gambled on a future that never materialized. It was a mistake I could begin to forgive.