Meet Terry Rodgers

Terry Rogers, aged 21, grew up in Rockville, Md. Now he is one of the 13,877 Americans wounded in Iraq. This is his story:

"The Humvee finally comes to a stop and the right side is just torn apart and I hear my squad leader screaming, 'I think I lost my arm!' And my best friend Maida was in the front passenger seat where the bomb went off and he was screaming, 'Where's help? Where's help?' And then he went quiet.

"And me, I'm trying to crawl out of the Humvee and I get most of my body out and just this leg is stuck and I thought it must be caught on something in the twisted metal. I look back and I see it's just laying there on the seat, so I'm like, 'Why is it stuck?' So I try to lift my leg up and it won't lift. I just had to pick up my leg and crawl the rest of the way out."

He mimes the action of picking up his leg with his hands, then he continues the story.

"I started patting myself down and that's when I noticed that my face took some shrapnel," he says. "It was all swollen on this side, so when I'm patting myself down, my middle finger went, like, this deep into my cheek where the shrapnel went in."

He points to a spot about halfway down his finger, showing how far it went into the shrapnel wound behind his right eye, which is still pretty much blind, unable to see anything but bright light.

"Then I started checking out my leg. I knew my femur was broken, but at that time I didn't know my calf was missing," he says. "And that's when I hear my best friend Maida and he started heaving." Rodgers takes a few loud, quick breaths to show what Mark Maida sounded like.

"And he breathes like that for a few seconds and then he just stops. And that's when he died."

Rodgers pauses a moment.

"The two trucks behind us had to stop and make sure the area was secure before they could help us," he says. "And the first guys that showed up saw Maida in the front seat, leaning against the windshield and all I heard was, 'Sir, we lost Maida.'

"And then they helped my squad leader, who lost his right arm, and then they came over and helped me. They bandaged us up ... and when the helicopter finally showed up, they loaded me and Maida into the chopper and flew us to Baghdad.

"And after that, I don't remember anything 'til like a week after I got to Walter Reed."

...

"The first memories I have turn out to be hallucinations," he says. "I thought my leg was burned off. I thought half my face was blown off. I thought little kids were jumping on me, stealing my eyes and my teeth."

He was doped up on pain medicine that made him see things that weren't there.

"He kept yelling at me to get the people behind him," his mother, Ann Rodgers, recalls. "He said, 'Get them away from me!' I said, 'There's nobody behind you.' He asked me if I could see the back of his eye because his face was gone. I said, 'Your face isn't gone.' He said, 'Liar!' "

...

Generals came by to shake his hand and ask how he was doing. The Dave Matthews Band visited, as did players from the Washington Nationals and the Colorado Rockies.

"I didn't catch their names," he says. "I was kind of high on morphine at the time. And you can't read their autographs."

One day a nurse came in to ask Rodgers if he wanted to meet President Bush, who was visiting the hospital. Rodgers declined.

"I don't want anything to do with him," he explains. "My belief is that his ego is getting people killed and mutilated for no reason -- just his ego and his reputation. If we really wanted to, we could pull out of Iraq. Maybe not completely, but enough that we wouldn't be losing people -- at least not at this rate. So I think he himself is responsible for quite a few American deaths."

...

Rodgers says he also declined to meet Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice. This wounded soldier has lost faith in his leaders, and he no longer believes their repeated assurances of victory.

"It's gonna go on as long as we're there," he says. "There's always gonna be insurgents trying to blow us up. There's just too many of 'em that are willing to do it. You're never gonna catch all of 'em. And it seems like they have unlimited amounts of ammunition. So I don't think it's ever gonna end."

Story courtesy of the hateful lefty Communist-loving pond-scum at MichaelMoore.com.