VISALIA -- Bryan Wagner wanted to be a firefighter.
At 18, he began volunteering with the Tulare County Fire Department's Lemon Cove station. But in early 2006, Wagner put his dream on hold to enlist in the U.S. Army.
Wagner returned home this week for the first time since October, when he went to Iraq with the 529th Military Police Company. Now 22, he's a strapping young man with a ready smile, a purposeful manner, an undiminished desire to fight fires -- and just a hint of a limp in his confident stride from his artificial right leg.
The high-tech prosthetic, fashioned from carbon fiber, steel, plastic and rubber, reminds Wagner he's lucky to be alive after at least two roadside bombs planted by Iraqi insurgents ripped through a Humvee carrying him and several other soldiers near Baghdad seven months ago.
For Wagner, who played football and ran track at Exeter High School, the Dec. 17 mission was like many others he'd done as part of a protective detail for a battalion sergeant major moving from post to post around Baghdad.
He was the gunner on a Humvee team, standing in the truck's turret as the soldiers drove a route they'd been on before with no inkling of trouble.
"I don't remember hearing a blast -- I just remember looking to my right and seeing a flash of orange in front of my face," Wagner said.
The bombs that hit Wagner's team were EFPs, or explosively formed projectiles, a deadly insurgent innovation that not only scatters shards of lethal shrapnel, but also launches a plug of molten metal that can penetrate a Humvee's armor.
"I woke up on the floor of the vehicle; my helmet had been ripped off. I looked at my left foot and saw my toes and I looked at my right foot and saw my heel," he said.
"Our team leader was shouting, 'Is everyone OK?' The others were saying, 'I'm good,' but I just said, 'No, I think I lost my leg.' "
Something -- Wagner's not sure whether it was shrapnel or the searing EFP core -- shattered his right leg, demolishing 22 centimeters of his tibia, the main structural bone of the leg below the knee.
He also had burns on his back and shrapnel wounds all over his body, including large chunks in his left leg.
Within minutes, a quick-response team evacuated Wagner and his team to a Baghdad base.
Four days later, a heavily sedated Wagner was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.
As he regained a handle on his surroundings, doctors discussed the prospect of limb salvage -- using his fibula, the smaller bone of the lower leg, as a replacement for his tibia.
"They said I'd be in a wheelchair for two years, I'd have to use a cane and I'd be in pain the whole time -- I wouldn't be able to be real active or be able to run. So I told them to cut it off.
"It was a huge decision, but I know I made the right choice."
He credits his parents, Hope and Harry Wagner, and his two older sisters for their support and strength in his recovery.
What some might see as a handicap -- "and I hate that word," he said -- Wagner considers only an interruption. Wagner said he wants to finish the last 21/2 years of his Army commitment with the military police before returning to a civilian career as a firefighter.
"A lot of it is just attitude," he said. "I may not be able to do something just like everybody else, but I'll find a way to do it."
Such determination is common among amputees wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, said Louis Givens, director of orthotics and prosthetics for the Veterans Affairs Health Care System in Palo Alto.
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