Images of War: Carnage, the Last Push, Nightmares : In the hospital: Injured Americans recall horror of seeing friends die in battle.

It was Valentine’s Day. The sun was shining in the desert. A round of ammunition ripped into Specialist Scott Gill’s left leg. Blood started spraying everywhere. A hard-rock song came into his head. Appropriately, it was by Guns N’ Roses.

“Take me down to Paradise City,” Gill recalls murmuring, “where the grass is green and the girls are pretty.”

Then someone was slicing off his clothes. An intravenous tube got snagged on a cot, yanking the needle from his elbow. He came out of surgery delirious, mumbling infantry cadences.

Gill met an Egyptian nurse in a hospital in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. She said she had been in Kuwait when Iraq invaded. She told a tale so horrible that even now Gill can’t bring himself to repeat it. For the first time, he decided the Persian Gulf War was about more than oil. The nurse’s story justified it.

“I feel I’ve paid my dues,” said Gill, a 21-year-old infantryman from The Dalles, Ore., a small town on the Columbia River. Sitting in a hospital here, confronting the possibility that he might never regain full use of his left foot, Gill said with certainty, “I want to go home.”

They sat in U.S. military hospital wards across Germany and England this week, some of the first combat casualties evacuated to Europe--men in blue-striped bathrobes with shrapnel wounds in their heads and legs, watching the war wind down on television and pondering what they had been through.

They told remarkable stories--of a desert emptiness and solitude so profound that the sight of telephone poles was a thrill; of a sergeant fleeing in a flaming poncho, creating a wall of fire; of seeing a friend decapitated; of strange prayers and the rarely spoken fear of dying.

One had lost his sight in one eye. Another had a shattered kneecap. There were burns, bullet wounds, a lot of shrapnel. Even so, some said they regretted having been evacuated and would have gone back. Only one, Pfc. Robert Gebhard, admitted anger.

“I think about it every day,” said Gebhard, who survived an attack of “friendly fire” that killed two of his friends and injured five others. “Why did they confuse us with the enemy? . . . It really does make me mad. . . . I don’t think there’s any excuse for shooting your own.

“They shouldn’t have gone by their own (side’s) fire,” Gebhard added bitterly of his friends’ deaths. “They deserved to die better than that.”

Like many, Gill enlisted in the Army for lack of choices--not enough money for college, too much for a grant. But he found that he liked the military, particularly being an infantry “grunt.”

Then he learned in October that he was going to Saudi Arabia. He was skeptical about the conflict.

“A white-collar war,” he called it, about nothing more noble than money and oil. It also interfered with his wedding plans. But he never hesitated to go. He says he rarely thought about dying. He was sure he’d be fine.

Gill won’t say exactly where he was or what he was up to when he was injured Feb. 14. But he and his platoon were doing something called “military operations in urban terrain”--going from house to house, checking out rooms, either by tossing in a grenade or rushing the door.

Rushing through the door, Gill led with his left leg. As it crossed the threshold, the enemy round split his calf open “like you stepped on a grapefruit.” Bullet fragments ricocheted off the door frame into his thigh and forearm. Falling backward, he grabbed his leg “to hold it together.”

“It’s like a bunch of snapshots,” he said, recalling the scene: Blood soaked the dressing. His limbs cramped. He shook so violently they were calling him Chubby Checker. Allergic to opiates, he went without painkillers for hours until surgery. Coming out, it was “like my brain was wrapped in gauze.”

Gill’s recovery will determine his future in the Army. Because of nerve damage, he has lost some control of his foot. But leaving the Army wouldn’t bother him now, he said this week. He’d like to go home, have that wedding and start a business.

“I have a much greater appreciation of things on that side of the world,” Gill said of the Middle East. “People (in the United States) complain too much. They ought to stop complaining. I’ve seen a lot of people that are a lot worse off.”

Unlike Gill, Army Lt. Christopher Robinson, 25, of Atlanta wasn’t confident that he’d be fine. Just the opposite. On Christmas Day, he made his wife a tape:

“I’m going to get hurt, but I’m not going to die,” he said in the tape. And, as Robinson puts it now, “damn skippy if that didn’t happen.”

It happened Feb. 20, about 11 miles into Iraq.

Robinson was in one of several Bradley Fighting Vehicles that had just taken seven prisoners. He was in the turret, on the radio, when Iraqi artillery hit. The turret exploded. A fire broke out, then extinguishers went off. Robinson came to, unable to breathe, seeing only in black and white.

“The round, I think, went right through my gunner,” he recalled Friday at the Landstuhl Army Regional Medical Center. “As soon as I could see, I saw his head in his lap. I’m not sure where his arm was. His right arm was missing.”

Someone dragged Robinson out of the turret by his collar and over to another vehicle. Then that vehicle was hit. But it was able to move, at least in reverse. Carrying six wounded men, it backed all the way to the aid station. Robinson learned later that three men had died on the way.

Shrapnel had riddled his left leg and his hands. His hands, face and eyes were burned, and his lungs and ribs were bruised. He feels as if he was hit in the chest with a baseball bat. Every day, he can make out a few more lines on the eye charts.

But in sleep, two nightmares recur.

In the first, he’s in the Bradley on the radio. He asks the gunner to change frequencies, but nothing happens. So he ducks down into the turret to find out why. And he sees the gunner, headless, as he saw him in reality that day.

In the second, Robinson has a new crew. But he’s sent back out to the battlefield with all his injuries. They get hit again, but he is unable to help because he can’t see.

“I don’t worry about the future. But I wonder what it is,” he said. “I’m sure that after this, my wife doesn’t want me in the Army. I wonder if I’m going to stay in. If I don’t, what will I do? If I do, what effect will it have on me and her?

“I thought about changing branches. But if I’m in the Army, I want to be a grunt, I don’t want to be a ‘support puke.’ If you’re in the Army, you want to be in combat arms. And I’m not sure I can do that anymore.”

Gebhard, too, was in a Bradley when he was hit. He and his crew were out on reconnaissance about 1 a.m. on Feb. 17. There was a radio report of Iraqi tanks spotted. The battalion commander dispatched helicopters to take them out. He told the crews in Gebhard’s vehicle and one near it to sit tight.

Then the vehicle just exploded, “like a big flashbulb,” Gebhard recalled. He could hear the crew screaming. He leaped out of the driver’s hatch to help. Suddenly, there was a second missile hurtling toward him, like a white ball of flame. It hit the adjacent vehicle dead center.

The impact sent two crew members flying into the dirt. Then Gebhard saw one of them, his poncho on fire, running between the burning vehicles “like a wall of flame.” He grabbed the other soldier and they fled into the night, lit up by the exploding vehicles as though by a giant spotlight.

“I didn’t think anybody else made it,” said Gebhard, recovering from burns and shrapnel wounds to his thigh. “I thought it was just me and him. Because I had heard people screaming, and I didn’t hear them anymore.”

On the evacuation helicopter, he recognized the voice of one of the scouts from his Bradley.

“I said, ‘Hey! Is that you?’ I wanted to jump down and hug him,” Gebhard recalled. There, he learned that two of the crew had died. He and the other two had lived.

Gebhard, a former high school boxer and triathlete, plans to head home to Brainerd, Minn., to see his family. Then he plans to return to Germany to complete his tour of duty, which ends in July, 1993. After that, he’s not sure what he will do.

Maybe race motorcycles, he said.