COLUMN ONE : Wounds From War Run Deep : Hundreds injured in the Persian Gulf are coming to terms with a new sense of self. While some adjust well, others feel forgotten and alone. Watching the parades isn’t easy.

Don Beaulieu’s homecoming fell a little short of a ticker-tape parade. He returned from the Persian Gulf War on a stretcher, his body in tatters. It took the U.S. military 12 days to get him to the right hospital. Then he learned that his left foot would have to be amputated.

In late March, two days before the operation in an Augusta, Ga., medical center, the 26-year-old U.S. Army sergeant from rural Maine turned to his fiancee, Sandra Sapp. “Are you still going to marry me?” he asked her sadly. “After all this?”

“I just looked at him,” Sapp said recently. “And I was crying. I said, ‘How can you even question me? I’ve been with you since Day 1 and I’ll be with you till we’re both gone. . . . I love you , not your foot.”

In military hospitals across the country, young men are relearning how to walk. They are being fitted with new legs, new feet, an occasional plastic eye. They are having nerves reconnected. They have had shrapnel sliced from their heads.

Many are struggling to come to terms with a new sense of self--a tank repair technician making macrame plant hangers in occupational therapy; a long-distance runner getting his exercise in hobbled laps around a hospital bed.

Some among the hundreds of men and women that the Department of Defense counts as being wounded during combat in the Gulf War say that they are adjusting well. They say what happened was an occupational hazard. It could have been worse; after all, they could be dead.

But there are others, among the most seriously injured, who find that the war has deposited them in a painful limbo, feeling forgotten and alone. Some are unsure whether they can even remain in the military. Some will be discharged, others will be transferred to sedentary jobs.

While they wait, much of the rest of the country celebrates with a seemingly endless series of homecoming parades--last month in Hollywood, on Saturday in Washington, D.C., Monday in New York City with its “mother of all parades.”

“I can understand their jubilation,” said Anthony Walker, a 25-year-old infantryman who lost a leg after a U.S. tank accidentally fired on his vehicle. “But I just think they’re forgetting about the people who were wounded. I don’t hear them say anything about that. I haven’t heard the President say anything. It’s as though they don’t even want to talk about that.”

“They gave me my Purple Heart in the intensive care unit,” said Pfc. Walter Vaughn, 32, of Compton. “I wanted to take it and throw it up against the wall. Because it didn’t mean a damn thing to me. Because I got my face blew off.”

It is not easy to get accurate numbers on the combat wounded. The main public information office for the Department of Defense said it had no such figures. It referred a reporter to public information officers for each branch of the service.

A spokesman for the Navy then referred queries to the headquarters of the U.S. Central Command. It counts 455 injured U.S. troops and 434 injured coalition troops. The Army counts 360 injured with about 70 still hospitalized as of late last week.

Their injuries include massive shrapnel and mortar wounds requiring the amputation of legs; bones so badly shattered that they could take years to heal; feet blown apart by land mines; nerves so severely damaged that soldiers can no longer use their hands.

Many of the wounded tell similar stories--the explosion and flash of light, the legs buckling, the curious initial absence of pain; then the morphine, evacuation, battalion aid stations, hospitals, more hospitals, and surgery, more surgery, surgery again.

Many were hit by their own side--Walker was struck by a U.S. tank round, Robert Collin was hit by shrapnel from U.S. artillery fire that accidentally exploded. Some were re-injured by mistake during evacuation or left wondering afterward whether a limb might have been saved.

“Right now, my future’s kind of blurry,” Beaulieu said. “That’s the way I look at it. I’m not sure what the military’s going to do with me. And with that, I can’t go out in the world and do something. Until they (decide), I’m sort of on hold.”

Anthony Walker remembers the moment his left foot fell off. He was being pulled from the back of his Bradley fighting vehicle, which had just been hit. The foot seemed to be hanging by a thread; then it was gone. Lying on the ground, Walker heard his right leg crunch.

The right leg turned out to be so badly fragmented that it could take 22 months to heal. As for the left leg, it “looked like someone had torn it open.” When infection started spreading, a doctor informed Walker that the bottom half of his left leg would have to go.

“After the amputation, they couldn’t find the source of the fever,” Walker said at Eisenhower Medical Center near Augusta, where he has spent the last three months. “So I’m starting to wonder whether I needed that amputation at all.”

What also nags at Walker is the official version of the incident, which occurred Feb. 27 during an early morning assault on an airport in Southern Iraq. Walker says he has simply been told that the tank that fired was disoriented; that is, it was a mistake.

“I feel I deserve a better answer than the one I got,” Walker said. “. . . I had one soldier killed, I’m missing a leg, another soldier’s missing a leg. The thing is, because it’s wartime, they just chalked it up to a wartime incident.

“I don’t believe they’re telling me the full story. Who was in charge? Who gave the order? In peacetime, someone would (be tried) for that. . . . The military is full of ethics. I guess they decide we use ‘em when we want to use ‘em.”

“The unit that did the firing, no one has contacted us,” Walker added. “I guess calling us might be an admission of guilt. I’m sure they’re going on with business as usual. They’re back with their families and the war’s over.”

Don Beaulieu was injured in a March 8 explosion while cleaning out an Iraqi bunker near the Euphrates River. Leaving the bunker, the man ahead of him tripped a land mine. It exploded, ripping into Beaulieu’s left leg, stomach and intestines.

At the first field hospital, Beaulieu underwent three simultaneous operations--to remove his damaged intestines and clean out his shattered leg and foot. Then came another hospital, more surgery, evacuation to Germany, more surgery, and evacuation to the United States.

For 12 days, Beaulieu languished in the “medical evacuation system” en route to the Army hospital at Ft. Gordon, Ga. According to Beaulieu, he received no treatment during that time. People just changed his dressing and cleaned his wounds.

In frustration, Beaulieu’s fiancee got him released into her custody in Montgomery, Ala., then drove him 5 1/2 hours to the hospital at Ft. Gordon. The doctor on call wouldn’t admit him that night; he was finally seen the next day.

By that time, Beaulieu could no longer move his toes. The foot would have to be amputated, the physician informed him. Beaulieu wonders if it might have been salvaged had it not taken the military 12 days to fly him from Maryland to Georgia.

He has contacted a physician who examined him in Maryland to back him up before the Army medical board that will decide his fate. Though the case will be hard to prove, Beaulieu intends to argue that it was “the evacuation system that made me lose my foot.”

These days, Beaulieu waits for a new one. He has become adept with crutches and tries not to ask people for help. He has devised systems for carting food and six-packs from the kitchen to the living room. But it still takes a long time to make a sandwich.

He sleeps badly, Sapp said. He gets up six or seven times a night. She has found him in the living room, sitting alone in the dark. There are occasional phantom pains: He feels his foot is still there and must remind himself that it’s not.

As for Sapp, she won’t watch another parade. Instead, she staged her own when Beaulieu returned on convalescent leave to her home in Ozark, Ala. There were signs along the road, banners and a chocolate devil’s food cake decked out with yellow ribbons and a flag.

“He did real good till everyone was leaving. Then we went into the bedroom and he was crying. He was saying, ‘Nobody can understand how I feel. They don’t care about me, about my foot.’ Oh, it was awful! I just hugged him. I said, ‘You’ve got to let this out.’ ”

“People do care,” Sapp said recently. “But they are not going to know what to say. People tell me, ‘It could have been worse.’ I say, ‘You’re right.’ But the land mine was put there to maim him, not kill him. It did its job.”

Walter Vaughn finds that his new appearance creates a stir.

“First thing, they ask what happened to my hand. Then they’ll look in my face. . . . ‘Oh! What happened to your eye?’ Then they see the scar from the craniotomy. ‘Oh! What happened to your head? Oh! You were over there. Thank you! You guys are real heroes.’

“That word really got to me,” Vaughn said recently, at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora, Colo. “Because I was just doing a job. They paid me $1,000 a month to go over there and kick somebody’s butt.

“I’m not a hero. It’s an exaggeration to the nth degree. That’s what the military is for, to make war. When we go over there, we hope to do a good job. Fine, you pat us on the back. That’s good enough.”

Vaughn can’t remember exactly what happened to him. But he woke up in a hospital in Germany one day with no left eye. A damaged radial nerve had left him unable to fully use his left hand. Three times, surgeons went in to take shrapnel from his brain.

Then a general turned up with the Purple Heart. Vaughn tried to be gracious.

“For some reason, I knew that I had to give this man this,” he said. “Because he felt good about giving it to me. What I really felt like doing was taking it and melting it down and making cuff links out of it. Or a tie tack.”

Back in Compton, on convalescent leave, Vaughn struggled for equilibrium.

“It was pleasant, but it wasn’t exactly what I expected,” he said of the visit. “At first I thought it was because I didn’t get what I wanted. That was, ‘Oh, you poor baby,’ all the sympathy. . . . Oh, they did that for the first week. But I was home for 30 days.

“I didn’t realize that people would treat me just like they did before. I wanted to be treated special. . . . (Then) I realized that wasn’t right, it wasn’t good. My family, they know me, and I’m just Walter to them.

“It’s difficult--when people come up, shake your hand, tell you you’re great--for it not to go to your head,” Vaughn said. “I thought I was keeping a good rein on things. But in actuality, I wasn’t.”

In early spring, Marine Cpl. Brett Doggett of Mission Viejo got a new left foot. It was made of wood, with cork on the bottom, non-slip. The man from the prosthesis dealer showed Doggett how to use multiple layers of socks to protect the still-healing stump of his leg.

Doggett was leery at first. The stump hurt, “like a thousand needles going in, all the way around the leg.” So he started out with crutches, to minimize the pressure of the prosthesis. Within a week, the 26-year-old Doggett was off on his own.

In physical therapy, he learned how to walk upstairs--one foot at a time, push down, lock the knee, bring up the other leg. To build up endurance, he did laps around his bed at the Naval Hospital in San Diego, then around the room, then out to the duty desk.

Strangers were showing up--retirees bearing cookies, another Operation Desert Storm veteran whose leg had been hit by a mortar fragment. There was a World War II veteran with a similar injury who, in his 60s, was busy parasailing, sky-diving and windsurfing.

“A big morale booster,” Doggett says.

Now Doggett, at home with his parents, is looking into buying a mountain bike. He’s getting a new leg with a movable ankle, for golf. There is still some shrapnel in his right foot. But when that gets better, he plans to resume his long-distance running.

Doggett is upbeat.

“There’s no reason to be down about it,” he said recently. “Nothing’s really changed. Just one more thing to do in the morning--put on your foot.”

The commuter airplane carrying Staff Sgt. Robert Collin home on convalescent leave swung wide over the airport in Augusta, Me. The four other passengers peered down. Milling about the tiny airport were 350 people and an Army band.

“What’s this for?” they asked out loud. Then they noticed Collin and fell silent.

Collin, a 46-year-old National Guardsman and business manager for the state of Maine, was injured when a foot-long shaft of shrapnel pierced his left elbow like an arrow, damaging two of three crucial nerves and leaving him barely able to use his left hand.

The shrapnel struck him after some U.S. artillery accidentally exploded above him the day before the ground war started. He remains hospitalized at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, undergoing surgery to reconnect his nerves and doing therapy.

“You take what you’ve got, and just live with it. You’ve got to,” Collin said. “You drive yourself crazy if you don’t. Ever see a cat that’s lost its paw? After a week, they stop worrying about it. They continue on.”

On his visit home, Collin was met at the airport by the governor of Maine, the general in charge of the National Guard and 350 well-wishers. The band played the national anthem, in honor of Collin, the only Maine resident wounded in combat in the war.

Collin spent the week with his wife and children. They went out for a lot of meals. But Collin’s sudden celebrity made it almost impossible to eat. People kept coming over to talk. Finally, a steakhouse in Bath hid the Collin family at a corner table.

After about three days, Collin says, life returned to normal. One afternoon he was sitting in the kitchen, doing exercises with his hand. His daughter came home from school with a friend. They swept through the kitchen.

“That’s my Dad,” Collin’s daughter said in passing. “He got shot in the war.”

The discovery of his ordinariness thrilled Collin.

“It was almost like, ‘Doesn’t everybody have (a dad) like that?’ ”