Via Michelle, a story that will bring tears if you're human. Where do we get such men?
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.
Take the time to read it all and understand the depths to which some are sacrificing.
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