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FORT BRAGG, N.C. - George Perez still feels the sweat between his toes when he exercises. He's still plagued with nagging cramps in his calf muscle. And sometimes, when he gets out of bed at night without thinking, he topples over.
Perez, 21, lost his leg to a roadside bomb in Iraq more than a year ago, but he says he is determined to prove to the Army that he is no less of a man - and no less of a soldier. "I'm not ready to get out yet," he says. "I'm not going to let this little injury stop me from what I want to do."
Perez is one of at least four amputees from the elite 82nd Airborne Division to re-enlist. For now, he must content himself with a job maintaining M-16s and M-4s, machine guns and grenade launchers in his company's armory, but with a new carbon-fiber prosthetic leg, Perez intends to show a medical board he can run an 8-minute mile, jump out of airplanes and pass all the other paratrooper tests that will allow him to go with his regiment to Afghanistan next year.
On Sept. 14, 2003, Perez, of Carteret, N.J., and seven other members of his squad were rumbling down a road outside Fallujah when a bomb blast rocked their Humvee. Perez recalls flying through the air and hitting the ground hard.
The blast killed one of Perez's comrades. Perez felt surprisingly little pain, but when he tried to get up, he couldn't. He saw that his left foot was folded backward onto his knee. His size 121/2 combat boot stood in the dusty road a few feet away, still laced. A photograph of Perez's lonely boot transmitted around the world and spread across two pages of Time magazine became a stark reminder that the war in Iraq was far from over.
Doctors tried to save part of Perez's foot. But an infection crept up his leg, and Perez agreed to allow the amputation below the knee joint. When he arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., for his rehabilitation, Perez asked a pair of generals who visited his bedside if it were possible for him to stay in the Army. "They told me, "It's all up to you, how much you want it,' " he says. "If I could do everything like a regular soldier, I could stay in."
A visitor found him doing push-ups in bed. He trained himself to walk normally with his new leg, and then run. Perez has to rise at least an hour earlier than his fellow soldiers to allow swelling from the previous day's training to subside enough for his stump to fit into the prosthetic.
"I think it's a testimony to today's professional Army," says division commander Maj. Gen. Bill Caldwell of the amputees who re-enlisted. In July, amputee program manager Chuck Scoville of Walter Reed told a congressional committee that amputations accounted for 2.4 percent of all wounded in action in the Iraq war - twice the rate in World Wars I and II.