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OLYMPIA -- Three times the enemy bombs and bullets found Army Sgt. Greg Rayho.
Three times the combat medics did their work.
Three times at home in Olympia, his wife, Sue Rayho, felt the sick feeling of her adrenaline pumping as she received the news, willing herself, and him, to stay strong.
Rayho, 30, an infantryman with the 3rd Stryker Brigade who led a team of four to five soldiers in Iraq, is a rare recipient of three Purple Hearts, the revered military decoration for those wounded or killed in military action.
Nearly three months after fulfilling his desire to return home with his men and the 3rd Stryker Brigade after their nearly 16-month deployment to Iraq, Rayho has spent a good deal of his leave undergoing surgery to repair teeth sheared from the bomb blast that delivered his first wound in October 2006. Another surgery is scheduled to remove the 7.62 mm bullet from an enemy AK-47 still lodged in his wrist from the second wound suffered, in May.
"It gets cold," Rayho says half in jest about the bullet still in his wrist.
"Each one was so close," Sue Rayho says of the three times her husband was wounded. "If it had gone a little one way or the other, he wouldn't be here."
"When you are the target, you don't hear the sound," her husband adds, "just the cracking of the sound barrier near you. If you can hear it, you felt OK."
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