Stryker Brigade News

Gaya felt his leg throbbing as he helped the others escape the 19-ton vehicle. Shrapnel had torn through the leg and shredded a knee ligament.

Then he felt a sharp pain in his left eye. His vision began to blur.

While attention has focused on the more than 2,000 American soldiers who have died in Iraq since the U.S. invasion in March 2003, another 16,000 have been wounded, nearly half so severely they didn't return to duty. Their injuries have altered their lives, in some cases leaving hopes and plans in tatters - or futures uncertain like Gaya's.

Evacuated back to a U.S. base in Germany and then to the United States, Gaya had to leave behind his camera, still tucked in a backpack inside the crippled vehicle on a Mosul street.

In the first moments after the explosion, Gaya was just grateful to be alive. He had survived an earlier roadside bombing with burns on his lower back and some hearing loss.

But then, with each painful blink as he helped set up a security perimeter around his disabled vehicle, his mind raced with fears that the blurred vision would never clear.

His old Leica was retrieved from the blast site in Iraq, but he chuckles when he thinks of its battered condition. He still takes black and white shots, but now he sometimes uses color film to take pictures of his children.

Gaya's enlistment is up next spring, and he's busy compiling a portfolio of his photographic work. He hopes news agencies or magazines will look past the dark patch he wears over his left eye and hire him as a photographer.