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Healer who never fell back laid to rest
By Jim Sheeler, Rocky Mountain News
December 30, 2006
ARLINGTON, Va. - The sergeant with no legs sat inside the cemetery, thinking about how this homecoming was supposed to happen.
The 24-year-old Marine had spent the past two months in a hospital bed, grimacing as he devised his own painful physical regimen to strengthen the tender stumps that end just above his knees, hoping to earn his prosthetic legs early. His unit wasn't supposed to return from Iraq until April, so he figured he had plenty of time to learn how to walk.
"I wanted to walk when they came off the bus to see all of them, but especially 'Doc,' " he said, referring to the last face he saw before everything went dark.
"I wanted to shake his hand and say, 'Thank you.' "
Wednesday morning, near the perfect rows of headstones that stretched up and along the hillsides at Arlington National Cemetery, the man in the wheelchair spoke quietly, in a soft Southern drawl.
"To be honest," he said, "I'm pretty nervous about this."
"You'll do fine," his mother said.
The sergeant's body is still riddled with shrapnel wounds, pitting the skin on his entire left side with deep pink scars. What is left of his legs jutted from the wheelchair, filling only a fraction of his jeans, which were folded at the place where his knees used to be. Only one hand works.
He looked over at his wife and two daughters, at his parents and the rows and rows of white marble. Somewhere out there was a fresh grave.
As he entered the place known as "our nation's most sacred shrine" for the first time, the sergeant said he was unshaken by the seemingly endless headstones. What got to him, he said, are the people left behind to grieve.
"I just think about all the families," he said, "and the people like myself who had to go into Arlington for this."
The sergeant's father wheeled him into a waiting room, where the Marine asked to sit in the corner, out of the way. Soon, the room was filled with crisp Navy uniforms - admirals, chiefs and hospital corpsmen, many of them sporting dress coats jingling with medals.
Then, down the stairs, the sergeant saw the people who wore no uniforms, the ones who wore only grief.
As it turned out, the man with no legs didn't need to learn how to walk to welcome home Navy Hospital Corpsman Christopher A. Anderson.
Doc's family walked over to him.
...much more...
