Purple Heart Story : Young Marine Was Wounded Early in the Ground War

“I was part of the Good Guys. I knew I was doing the right thing . . . . It was an incredible high,” said Lance Cpl. Richard J. Musicant, a 21-year-old Camp Pendleton Marine who fought with Task Force Papa Bear in Kuwait. On Tuesday he recounted how he qualified for a Purple Heart.

The elation he described didn’t last long. Musicant, a radioman, trundled into Kuwait in an armored vehicle Feb. 23. When the 16 Marines aboard got out to urinate, it was dark.

The flat sandy terrain didn’t seem much different from what he’d seen in Saudi Arabia, but the air was thick with a sulfurlike smell, a byproduct of the frequent allied bombardments that pounded in the men’s ears.

“We were taking it very lightly. It was like this was out of a movie. We were cocky,” he said Tuesday as rested comfortably on a gurney at the Navy Hospital in Balboa Park.

Musicant reached the hospital Sunday. He will undergo operations--including skin graft surgery Thursday--to repair shrapnel wounds and a broken leg. He hopes to be walking again with the aid of crutches in four to six weeks.

Hospital spokeswoman Pat Kelly said Musicant, who has already undergone several operations, and another patient are the only Persian Gulf War casualties at the hospital.

The war ended for Musicant as he and the other men in the weapons company of the 3rd Battalion, 9th Marine Regiment, were shepherding a group of Iraqi prisoners. They were suddenly pummeled by a barrage of mortar rounds.

Musicant crashed to the sand and blacked out. He regained consciousness seconds later and heard the blast of shells and voices screaming in both English and Arabic.

He suddenly realized that his left leg was splayed out, as though ripped away from his body. It seemed as if only his chemical suit kept his leg near the rest of his body.

He was swept with panic when a Marine shouted: “We’ve got to get out of here.” Fearing he would be left behind, Musicant yelled out.

A hospital corpsman--Musicant knew him only as Tony--said, “Oh my, God, somebody gimme help,” upon finding the wounded Marine rolled out on the ground. And, when no one else ran to assist, the corpsman picked up Musicant (he weighed 180 pounds with all his combat gear on), threw him over his shoulder and ran.

“Tony, put me down--my leg is killing me,” Musicant said he begged as the pain seared his body. But the corpsman ran with him for about 100 meters to a waiting medical evacuation helicopter.

For the first time in his life, Musicant thought about death. He considered the possibility and rejected it.

“The thing that bothered me the most was I didn’t want to do that to my mother, I didn’t want to put my mother through that.”

Concerned about worrying his parents, Musicant asked that they not be informed that he was injured--a request that went unheeded. But he has since reassured his family that he is comfortable and will visit them soon at their Park Ridge, N.J., home, where his younger brother, Mathew, and sister, Robin, still live.

Musicant looks like a poster child for the Marine Corps: his buzz cut cropped close at the side of his head, his skin pale and his blue eyes steady. He was unfazed by reporters’ questions.

“You gotta get me outta here so I can have a cigarette,” he said to one hospital aide.

Asked about his reaction to going to war, Musicant didn’t blink: “I knew I was going into combat, and I was kinda scared . . . . Fear is just something you deal with--you control it, or it controls you.”

But he also acknowledged that his involvement in combat was short. Although he trained in Saudi Arabia for six months, he was downed during his first mortar attack on the first day of the ground offensive.

“I don’t really see myself as a hero--I was somebody doing what I had to do.” Nonetheless he is proud of his role: “I always wanted to save the day. I helped liberate Kuwait.”

Only recently has the reality of combat begun to sink in, he said. With youthful vigor, he had kept blocking out the fact that he came close to dying. With youthful defiance, he blocked out the actual meaning of war--the fact that Iraqi soldiers were shooting to kill.

What was war like?

“It was real. I didn’t have to fire my weapon. I didn’t have to kill anyone. I didn’t see anybody die--I am very thankful for that. But it was real. It just recently dawned on me that I was there, and that people were trying to kill me. Up until the point where I got wounded, it was almost a high.”