He missed them, his brothers. Hennagir, a 21-year-old Marine from Deptford, N.J., felt he had let them down by stepping on an improvised explosive device (IED), blowing off both legs and four fingers on his left hand - now, he said, in his darkest Marine humor, just "a pink mist and a memory."

Hennagir desperately wanted to mend enough so that the Marine Corps would let him travel to Camp Lejeune for this day, Aug 26.

That wish motivated him, maybe even kept him alive, through the summer's 16 surgeries and three skin grafts. The pain was so intense that he was sure his screams were heard all through the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.

"There were times when I wondered if the kid was ever going to get a break," said his uncle Jim English, a 20-year Navy veteran, who would stare helplessly out the hospital window.

And now here Hennagir was. The late-August sun was blazing. He sat in his wheelchair, his baggy new jeans from American Eagle tucked up under his lost legs.

Still taking strong doses of methadone, a narcotic used for chronic pain, with newly grafted skin on his left arm in danger from the menacing sun, the corporal waited for the busload of Marines to pull up at the barracks.

His fiancee, Sherri Baskerville, was beside him, wiping sweat off his face with a tissue. They had gotten engaged three weeks before he shipped out, and his first thought, once he realized his legs were gone, was that Sherri would soon be gone, too.

She was still with him, though. His aunt and uncle, Donna and Jim English, who had raised him since he was 9, were there, too.

Through two tours in Iraq, Hennagir's platoon had been his family. He had this profound need to see these Marines home safely, to be with them, to find out - was he still one of them?

Finding a family

"I wanted to prove to myself that I'm better than my father," he said.

The first five years of Hennagir's life were chaotic, to say the least, and he has only harsh words about his biological parents.

When he was 5, New Mexico placed Hennagir and his two sisters in foster care. Hennagir's two aunts in Pennsylvania and New Jersey tried to get custody of the children, but New Mexico wanted to keep them close, hoping they could return to their mother.

When Hennagir was 9, in his third foster home, a social worker called one of the aunts and asked if she wanted to adopt them.

Of course she did.

That aunt, Debbie Mano of Ashton, Pa., took the two girls. The other, Donna English, raised Hennagir with her husband in their Deptford home.

The Englishes already had children from their first marriages and a daughter together.

"I wanted to have a boy," Donna said, "and Jim didn't want to have any more kids. Of course, God answers prayers in his own way. And he gave us Raymond. Raymond was our son."

But Hennagir was a mess. He was taking a lot of Ritalin, which Donna and Jim immediately stopped. He had lacked discipline in his life, and limits, and love. Donna spent 15 years in the Navy. That was where she met Jim. They knew all about discipline and imposed tough love. It was painful for them at first, but Ray responded, got himself under control, became a wonderful addition to the family, polite and respectful.