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Growing together

An Iraqi bomb shattered Jace Badia's legs. It also ripped at his marriage, even his bond with his baby girl. Now, the hard part.

By ALEXANDRA ZAYAS
Published April 22, 2007

"Kiss me!" demands Susan after helping Jace change his shorts. "I didn't marry his leg. Everything that is wrong with him can be fixed," she insisted. Photo gallery
	[Times photos: Justin Cook]

ADVERTISEMENT "I've always been a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants kind of guy," said Jace Badia, 22, as he cleans what remains of his left leg that was blown off in Ramadi, Iraq on Veterans Day, November 11, 2006.

TAMPA — Susan has loved Jace Badia since first grade, long before she got pregnant with their daughter and married him, before an 8-year-old boy in Iraq detonated a bomb.

Now, Susan is 21. Jace is 22. He uses a wheelchair, his left leg gone above the knee and his right leg shattered and heavy.

Until March, the only home they knew as husband and wife was Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., where Jace had been since November.

Jace didn't realize Susan had such a short temper. Susan never knew Jace could get jealous of his own baby.

March changed everything. Jace and Susan flew to Tampa, claimed tiny Kylee from in-laws, and lived as a family for the first time.

It was supposed to be a one-month reprieve from doctors and surgery. No one knew that it would turn into a test of a fledgling marriage.

In a way, Jace and Susan would become like Jace's healing leg, held together under pressure.

Inside the leg, a soft bone jelly replaced 6 inches blown away by the bomb. Seven halos protected it. Twenty-four pins held it in place. Eight motors on the contraption had churned toward each other for weeks, slowly and painfully tearing through skin, tendon and muscle to coax a merger of bone parts. Jace will be an inch shorter than he used to be.

He'll always have scars.

But Susan fears something worse. There's a chance the process will fail. After all the pain and sacrifice, the bone won't strengthen and they'll lose it all.

---

Jace shared his mother's womb with a twin, but he was the only one born. He came with enough energy for two. At age 3, he gunned his tricycle into a door. He fired his first BB gun at age 4. At 6, he joined the Cub Scouts and decided he would one day be a soldier. Not long after, he etched "I love Susan" into his bunk bed.

Susan grew up a middle child, but her mom said she was the baby. Kids at Sacred Heart Academy called her "Poof Daddy" for her wild hair. Jace, who made up that name, defended her. She was thrilled in the sixth grade when he asked to be her boyfriend.

Jace grew to be 6-feet-4. He souped up cars and spun them out at 180 degrees. He hiked, climbed rocks and rode mountain bikes, and he dated a lot of girls.

Susan took pharmacy classes at Hillsborough Community College and went to keg parties at night.

Their parents knew they would end up together.

Jace proposed marriage over the phone from his Army base in Schweinfurt, Germany. Susan wanted to marry him, but she wondered how serious he was.

"Did you ask my dad?" she asked.

"I'll call you right back," he said.

They married in April 2006 on a StarShip dinner cruise. Before heading to their honeymoon hotel in St. Pete Beach, Jace followed friends who wanted to continue partying. Susan felt out of place sitting at the bar 7 1/2 months pregnant, wearing her wedding dress.

Jace shipped off the next week.

He returned in June after his daughter's birth. Her second night alive, Kylee Ray Badia slept on her daddy's chest.

"It was perfect," Susan said.

---

It was 138 degrees in Ramadi, Iraq. Palm trees reminded Jace of home. There was always something important for him to do, like drive a 38-ton Bradley fighting vehicle.

He was Spc. Jace A. Badia, 1st Infantry Division, 18th Regiment, Bravo Company.

Guys listened when he yelled. If they got drunk and passed out, he kicked them for being irresponsible and circled the bruise with a marker.

He lost his wedding ring dragging one of them to safety, he later told family.

He dreamed of becoming a platoon sergeant and one day flying a Black Hawk helicopter.

Apart from fellow soldiers, Jace trusted no one, not even children. He saw kids in suicide vests, kids with AK-47s, kids shielding insurgents who were burying explosive devices.

He constantly scanned the ground for out-of-place rocks and wires, soda cans in the middle of the street. When's my time? Jace asked himself. When's my time?

The bomb exploded on Veterans Day, directly under Jace's feet.

Through a cloud of dust and smoke and blood, he saw bone protruding from his skin.

He remembers the soldier who carried him to safety and the pain of each bump on his way back to the hospital.

He remembers his buddy Butler holding him, repeating: You're not going to die. You're going to see Kylee again. And he remembers telling Butler to shut up.

He remembers there was no morphine, a lot of cursing and a priest reciting last rites.

- - -

Another scream punished Jace's traumatized ear.

It was 6:58 a.m., March 23.

Susan had brought the baby into their bed.

"Shut up!" Jace yelled.

It had been like this for three weeks. Everyone screaming. Nobody sleeping. Everyone feeling ignored.

Kylee, at 9 months old, couldn't help that her wails hurt her father's ears. Jace couldn't help that every tangled nerve in his leg tormented him and that his ears still recoiled from the blast. Susan couldn't help feeling as if she had to keep everyone quiet.

All night, she had been up and down with the baby, Jace hiding under a blanket and trying to sleep.

Five pills, OxyContin and Lyrica, had failed to quell the throbbing.

And there was Kylee in bed, babbling, crying and climbing all over them. Before long, Susan fell asleep. Jace was in charge.

He and his daughter were almost strangers. He had missed all of her firsts: her first tooth, her first crawl, her first word, "Da Da." At the beginning of March, Kylee screamed when left alone with him.

"She hates me," Jace would say.

Susan had noticed something. Whenever the baby needed her, Jace seemed to need her too. When Susan fed Kylee, Jace was hungry. When Kylee got a diaper change, Jace needed to go to the bathroom. He finally admitted it: He sometimes got jealous of the baby.

On this night, nothing Jace did could get Kylee to sleep. Not feeding her with a bottle, not brushing his beard against her foot, not bouncing her on his left stump.

Just when Kylee started to coo in his arms, she changed her mind and crawled to her sleeping mom. Jace closed his eyes.

"Son of a b----!" Susan yelled just before 8 a.m.

Kylee had jumped off the bed.

- - -

They had come home to Seminole Heights, where someone posted a sign in the window: Welcome Home, Jace and Susan.

The novelty wore off after the welcoming party.

Jace found it hard to call the house his, and often called it Susan's. Her parents bought it while he was overseas. They thought Susan needed a place to grow up and learn to be a parent.

Susan kept Parenting magazines in the bathroom.

After Jace moved in, American Hunter joined them.

At night, he parked a 9mm Beretta pistol next to his bed. He bought it to protect his family. From the pillow he had a clear view of the bedroom door.

Being home was hard in a way that was different from war.

At Walter Reed in December, President Bush had awarded him a Purple Heart and shaken his hand.

But at International Plaza in March, everybody stared at the weird contraption on his leg. Older women in business suits, hipsters with Mohawks, they all looked.

"Whoa, he actually pointed!" Jace yelled one day, staring straight at a chubby teenager with a curly mop of hair on his head. The kid half-mouthed "sorry," and rushed away.

Jace missed his Army buddies. He missed being around people who had a clue.

---

He was in the house on March 25 when he heard the distant roar of motorcycles grow into a thunder. He followed it outside.

He knew Susan was planning a barbecue for family and friends. But she hadn't told him everything.

Leather-clad, tattooed veterans from all over the country had stopped in front of the house. The Patriot Guard Riders lined up on 132 motorcycles, looped around the block. They honked, waved and saluted him - and then reached out to shake his hand.

"Welcome home, brother," one said.

"Thanks so much for your service," said another.

The toughest looking one, with a bandana and a Hulk Hogan moustache, told him "Keep in mind, we're just a little bitty bunch. There's a whole nation out there that love you, son."

Susan clapped and bounced up and down as the veterans surrounded her husband. It felt like a big happy family.

"This is, like, our best day home," she said, tears in her eyes.

She had spent three weeks putting this together to surprise Jace.

Jace cried, too. These men and women understood what he had been through. He turned to his wife, his mouth trembling.

"Thank you," he told Susan.

- - -

It wasn't long before things returned to normal.

The night after the barbecue, Susan came home from a half-hour errand to find the baby screaming in her high chair, her face a splotchy red. Jace sat next to her, watching TV.

Jace told Susan that Kylee was on "time out."

Susan couldn't believe that Jace was just letting the baby cry.

His leg hurt, he told her, and he needed to keep it elevated. It was swollen, and it needed to heal.

She told him to stop using his leg as an excuse not to pitch in. He told her to stop telling him what to do.

"Your whole life is an excuse," she told him.

"Well, so is yours," he said.

She used the word "divorce." It wasn't the first time. The first time she said it was in January. She got so angry, all she wanted to do was get out. Now she said it more easily, whenever they fought.

Back in the hospital last winter, Jace had said "divorce," too, though he couldn't remember. Susan told herself it was the medication talking when Jace said, "I don't love you. I don't care about you. I want to divorce you."

"Divorce" was like a word bomb.

This time, she also took off a necklace he gave her for her birthday and left it on the couch. Susan knew it was a blow, "like him seeing I can give all his love back to him."

She stormed out of the house with the baby, sat in their Ford Expedition and cried.

This was the same fight they always had. Jace wouldn't answer Kylee's cries. He wouldn't change her diapers. Even in the days after her birth, when Jace had two legs, he wouldn't pitch in.

The previous day had gone so well.

Now Jace's words lingered in her head: "Was yesterday just a front?"

Susan thought, maybe she loved Jace more than he loved her.

From the car speaker, Frank Sinatra chimed in with Love and Marriage.

This I tell you brother / You can't have one without the other.

She shut it off and drove to her parents' house, three blocks away.

- - -

Back home, Jace seethed. He couldn't storm out like Susan. He couldn't drive to a bar like he wanted to. Or even kick something in anger.

So he sat with his friend Kyle and drank beer instead.

It was one of those days when he wished he was back in Iraq.

He could still drive a Bradley or shoot a gun. Instead, his guys are down "two eyeballs and a trigger finger," and he hates that. He's heard of other amputees returning to combat but with both knees.

Some days, he scours the Web, hoping someone will post a video of his attack, so he could see what really happened in the haze. After all these months, he still coughs up Iraqi sand.

He double-clicks through insurgent propaganda, watching the enemy celebrate while guys like him get blown up. He calls the insurgents "a bunch of g--d--- cowards."

- - -

Susan draped herself on her mother's lap on a couch in her childhood home, in tears after the fight.

"You have to be patient," Donna Baker said. "His world was dumped upside down, too. So can you try to be patient?"

"Yes," Susan muttered.

"Can you ask him nicely for him to help you? Without the tone in your voice?"

"Yes."

Susan's parents have been telling her and Jace to see a marriage counselor.

Mrs. Baker pointed to Kylee, fast asleep on the couch.

"Her world depends on both of you," she told Susan.

Susan drove back home and swept a broom furiously across the floor as Jace lay in bed, hidden under the blanket. The next morning, Jace slept on the couch, and Susan cleaned some more.

Amid the silence, she strategized. Jace was better with Kylee in the mornings, and he liked to see his friends later in the day. Maybe they could set up a schedule.

She pitched the idea to him. He brought up his daily morning physical training regimen at the hospital.

"You don't need to be making excuses yet," she told him.

He wheeled out the door without a word. She covered her face in frustration.

Outside, Jace lit up a cigarette.

He doesn't get upset when Susan talks about divorce, he said.

"We'd be back together in a couple weeks."

Things will be better when he's walking, when Kylee is walking, when Susan is back in school.

"Give it a year and a half."

That night, they cuddled on the couch.

- - -

The clock struck midnight on March 30. In nine hours, Susan would start their 14-hour drive to Washington, D.C.

The month of rest was over. It was time for more rehabilitation.

As Susan snoozed on the couch, Jace packed.

He scooted two suitcases down the hall with his wheelchair, returned and re-emerged with Susan's pink Fossil handbag and two makeup bags to add to the pile.

He needed help reaching the laundry, though.

"Susan, Susan," he tapped her. "Susan."

"Leave me alone," she said, half asleep.

She didn't want to return to the hospital, away from her family, from her new home. Jace did. He was eager to get back to his fellow soldiers, to fixing his leg.

After a bit, she got up and stacked towels on his lap.

"Sorry, being up for 17 hours makes you a little bit sleepy," she told him.

"I'm an infantry man," Jace said. "That don't mean s--- to me."

"No," she responded. "You're Jace, who likes to sleep a lot."

He told her he had moved suitcases with his wheelchair. Susan had spent three days packing, and he messed it up, she told him.

Jace retreated into the house, cranking up South Park.

The next morning, Susan got behind the wheel. Kylee was in her car seat in back. Kylee had grown three teeth since they moved to Tampa. Now, she sometimes reached out for Jace. He no longer frightened her.

Jace sat next to her. He had grown, too. His last full day in Tampa, he lifted his right leg, something he hadn't been able to do since Iraq.

Susan looked at the sign still in the window, Welcome Home, and she cried.

Their first night had felt like playing house. Now, they fought to stay awake, to stay together.

Now, they knew they needed marriage counseling and resolved to make an appointment first thing in Washington.

"Say goodbye to palm trees," Susan said, and she slammed the driver's side door.

It was a long drive to the hospital, a long road to fix what was broken.

Times photographer Justin Cook contributed to this report. Alexandra Zayas can be reached at 813 226-3354 or azayas@sptimes.com.

[Last modified April 21, 2007, 17:40:00]