A soldier's sacrifice

He gave his leg.
'It could have been worse.'

By Gina Cavallaro
Times Staff Writer

It was sunny and cold on Dec. 18, the morning Staff Sgt. Matthew Hess stepped on the land mine that blew off his left foot.

Hess, an explosive ordnance specialist, wasn't even looking for mines when it happened.

His two-man team with the Army's 744th Ordnance Company (EOD) out of Fort Meade, Md., and another two-man team were at the end of an inactive runway at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. They were searching for, identifying and tagging scrapped ordnance left from wars gone by in one of the most heavily mined nations in the world.

"The place is so littered with mines, it would be impossible to sweep everything," said Hess, adding that some of them were placed by locals to protect their own perimeter. Others, he said, date back to the Soviet occupation of the 1980s.

The area in which Hess and his fellow soldiers were working was considered safe. By midmorning, they had identified all the ordnance they were going to remove and had moved all the items they had marked for destruction.

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Hess went back one last time to pick up some rockets he had seen.

Just off the tarmac's edge, one or two steps into the sand, a concealed Iranian plastic box mine exploded under Hess' foot. The blast severed his foot at the ankle and shredded the rest of his calf.

"There was more bone than skin," he said.

At first he thought his weapon had gone off. But after a few dizzying seconds, he regained his orientation and realized he was lying on the ground.

His teammates ran over and lifted him off the sand and put into motion their combat life-saving practices.

"I was stunned," Hess said. The feeling was "a cross between an adrenaline rush and being drunk."

Through the haze, he could hear his friends' reassurances. "I thank God they were there and they knew what they were doing."

Hess felt a burning, stinging sensation, but never looked down. He didn't feel any real pain until about 10 minutes later, when medics from the base arrived.

He first learned he had lost a part of his leg after surgery in Uzbekistan. He later underwent surgery in Germany and at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington.

He's come a long way since then and now waits to be medically retired so he can fulfill some of his personal goals, which include going back to school.

In the moments after that mine went off, he said, it crossed his mind that he might be having "a near-death experience."

"But not now," said Hess, 27, who just celebrated his second wedding anniversary with his wife, Pam, a staff sergeant with the 902nd Intelligence Group at Fort Meade. "Now it feels more like falling off a bike to me."

He's getting used to the prosthetic limb that has replaced the bottom half of his leg. He fidgets with it, and it hurts if he sits too long. What's left of his leg is still settling into it.

Hess recalled that his first reaction when he heard of the Sept. 11 attacks was to volunteer to go wherever the fighting would be. And he knows that if the United States had not been attacked, he likely never would have been sent to Afghanistan, "and things would be a lot different right now."

But he does not regret going. "The sacrifice I made was … for our country, our citizens, defending our freedom," Hess said. "I just hope people don't forget what the soldiers are doing it for."

Everything he does today is done with twice the determination as before. He's getting his strength back. He runs. He works out. He talks with other amputees.

"It's opened my eyes to something I didn't know about before," said Hess, who joined the Army in 1994. "I'm aware of other people out there in similar situations. It never occurred to me that it could happen to me."

Hess is thankful - he has a lot to live for. He recalls a friend, Staff Sgt. Adam Harding, with whom he worked on a United Nations humanitarian mission in Nigeria.

A mine killed Harding in Nigeria in November.

"All the time I think about how much worse it could have been," he said. "I think about Adam."

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