Victory of the Spirit : A Badly Wounded Marine Begins His Healing Process With Determination to Pick Up Life Where He Left Off

The day it happened, Marine Cpl. Brett Doggett of Mission Viejo was clutching his rifle and taking hushed steps past a smelly chicken coop and an old well, checking house-to-house for Iraqi snipers.

A charcoal sky from distant oil fires covered a Kuwaiti landscape as flat as Kansas while the 26-year-old Camp Pendleton Marine gingerly minced through a spoiled garden and walked along the bottom of a berm.

Then, the explosion. “I looked down and the left front of my boot was missing completely and the right boot was peeled back like a can,” Doggett said.

“I yelled ‘Corpsman!’ as loud as I could. The captain came over and immediately elevated my legs. Other guys, they held my head and said, ‘You’ll be all right. Just lie back and take it easy.’ The captain was, like, rubbing my stomach the whole time.”

Doggett stepped on the enemy mine one month ago. It was March 3, only four days after President Bush decreed that the allies had won the war against Iraq and the guns would stop their killing and maiming.

Doggett’s left foot has been amputated. One toe on his right foot is gone, and others were mauled in the explosion. Doctors are waiting for the shrapnel to work its way out of his damaged foot.

Soon, the victory parades will come, then quickly pass from review. Then the world will begin to forget. And just like the others, the Persian Gulf War will become an old war fought by graying veterans who shared something no one else can truly understand. But for Doggett, every day, as he mundanely pulls his trousers up his legs, there will be remembrance of war.

Even so, Doggett has already made a pact between his spirit and his physical wound. It is this:

The painful injury will not change the course of his life. He will not be a cripple. He will be fitted with an artificial foot, undergo therapy and be walking in 90 days. He will return to college.

He is whole, and perhaps, by the sheer exhilaration of being alive, even more.

“It’s like facing death and staring it down,” Doggett said.

He is too busy to wait for time alone to fully mend him, so he has started the healing his own way, by feeling gratitude rather than bitterness or pity.

“You look down and your foot is missing and you know there was a lot of damage. At least I’m still living,” Doggett said. “I’m going to walk again. What more can you ask for?”

These days, as he recuperates at the Naval Hospital in Balboa Park, Doggett, who lived in Mission Viejo before he shipped out for the Gulf, has become a celebrity.

Although serious and reserved by nature, he engages in random bursts of impishness. Like the times when, as if the ghost of Groucho Marx were whispering the commands, he’ll chase pretty women in his wheelchair.

Or when the young corporal--with two stripes, not exactly an exalted position--enjoys a robust camaraderie with hospital staff of superior rank. It didn’t hurt his status when a Marine general came by two weeks ago and pinned a Purple Heart on his chest.

“I can get away with murder,” he said gleefully.

Pat Kelly, the hospital spokesman, said, “there’s some kind of warmth he radiates that reflects back on him. He’s everybody’s son, he’s everybody’s brother. He’s just a sweet, sweet guy.”

Doggett said he’s having no emotional problems now, but there was that strangely poetic, vaguely disturbing little dream before his injury.

“I was just walking in a field and there’s a bunch of wildflowers like daisies, and there’s one dark flower and I stepped on it and jerked my foot back, but nothing happened,” he said.

There was another eerie dream before he was hurt.

“I had a glimpse, a real sharp glimpse, of the hospital room I’d end up in,” he said. “I saw the room, the way it looked and the way the people were. They were walking around. They were waiting for me.”

His mother, Sandy Garrett of Mission Viejo, had her own premonition even before war broke out, back when Doggett, who joined the Marines in 1986 and was honorably discharged from active duty, joined the Marine Corps Reserve in November, 1990.

“I had this feeling,” she said, “I begged him not to join the reserves. It was onerous. I knew we were going to war.”

Not even Bush’s announcement of a cease-fire brought her complete peace of mind. “I was excited, but not as excited as most people. I knew there was still a threat. Maybe I knew something,” she said.

Doggett’s unit, Alpha Company of the 4th Light Armored Infantry Battalion, was deployed to the Gulf last December, but the unit stayed aboard ship until one day before the allied ground war was launched.

Alpha Company was put ashore in Saudi Arabia with orders to move toward Kuwait and merge with other units. Doggett ended up at Kuwait’s El Wafra refinery, which is surrounded by a community of scattered homes and businesses made of simple gray block.

And there was a nearby forest of tall, skinny growth that Doggett could see through, but was thick enough for Iraqi stragglers to use for cover.

The initial nervousness had left him, and Doggett, who had served in Panama but not during the invasion, was hoping for combat.

“I felt privileged to actually be in the war, it was like history in the making,” he said. “I was one of the few looking for combat action after I missed out in Panama.”

The day before he was wounded, another unit had taken sniper fire, and Doggett’s unit was harassed by sporadic small-arms fire. He was the frustrated gunner on an armored vehicle.

“I heard shots but couldn’t find a target. It would have been nice,” he sighed.

The next day, Doggett and the other Marines awakened early, rolling up their sleeping bags and ponchos. They had coffee and moved out by 8 a.m. with orders to head back toward the Saudi border since the cease-fire had been declared and the war was won.

While they waited, the Marines began patroling the area to make sure it was secured, even though most Iraqis had pulled out. “We knew there were units real close in the area and had some type of armor,” he said.

Filtering through the forest in two patrols, each with five men, the Marines searched each structure for enemy snipers or ordnance to be destroyed. Doggett took the right, and moved cautiously.

He said the type of mine he set off is nicknamed “Toe Popper,” a shallowly buried mine that is triggered by pressure.

As he lay wounded, a corpsman injected morphine, and he was evacuated to a battalion aid station, then rushed to a temporary hospital near Kuwait city. His boots were cut off. Shock and more pain set in.

Over the next week, Doggett went from Kuwait city to a U.S. military hospital in Lanstahl, Germany, then was flown to Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. He arrived in San Diego on March 15.

In the meantime, his mother and stepfather, Larry Garrett, were going through their own pain.

Two Marines arrived at their front door.

“I didn’t know what to think. (One sergeant) said right away, ‘No, no, he’s not dead, he’s just injured.’ ” Garrett said. “They didn’t know very much at the time, except he stepped on a land mine and had a traumatic injury to the foot.”

When a follow-up telegram arrived detailing Doggett’s injuries, “my heart just hit the pavement,” Garrett said.

The Garretts are buoyed by Doggett’s determination, and they have confidence in him.

“The first thing he asked me in Germany is if he could still take golf lessons when he gets back,” said Garrett, who looks forward to “quality time together. We’re going to take advantage of the situation.”

Doggett’s mother has her own agenda.

“I want him to get on with his life, get a girlfriend and go back to school,” she said.

Of course, Doggett is using the days to contemplate his future once the physical therapy is finished and he is fitted with an artificial foot and a special shoe to support his damaged right foot.

It will take time for the metal fragments to dislodge themselves from his right foot. Doggett said the doctors told him “I have enough shrapnel to set off the metal detector at an airport.”

He wishes for a speedy recovery that will enable him to resume his studies this fall at Saddleback College in Mission Viejo. Eventually, he wants to earn a master’s degree in international business.

Although his goals haven’t changed, he has a newfound sensitivity for the world of handicapped people. “Before, I used to see handicapped people and not really feel about it,” he said.

Now, Doggett is learning what it’s like to open a door from a wheelchair and push himself onto the sidewalk.

He knows his feet will make him conspicuous sometimes, but he won’t try to hide his injury, and he’s decided to make light of it.

“I’ve heard stories about other people who might be missing part of a leg and a kid comes up to them at the beach and says, ‘What happened to you?’ ‘Oh, it was a shark attack,’ ” he said.

Since he’s been back and gained a little notoriety, he’s begun receiving letters from women. He wouldn’t mind meeting the right one and isn’t fearful that his injury will be an obstacle to a relationship.

“If someone can’t accept me for what I am, then they’re not right for me,” Doggett said.

Perhaps the greatest uncertainty is whether he and the Marine Corps must part company. He is thinking about whether he wants to stay in--or whether he’ll be allowed to.

But Doggett knows he could never have what he wants most.

“I wouldn’t be a front-line troop anymore,” he said. “I don’t think I can settle for second best.”