Hennagir and Norris found the explosive - a 155mm artillery shell. They called for a demolition team.

Maybe an hour later, as Hennagir and Norris walked along a path to meet the demolition crew - a path they had already walked four times that evening - an IED exploded beneath Hennagir's feet.

'I'm still alive'

"It was like deja vu in one second."

He flew through the air, spinning and somersaulting, blacking out and waking up, still in the air.

"I was upside down. And I could feel my body flipping. It didn't hurt to hit the ground. I didn't even feel it. My body stopped moving. That's all I felt.

"The first thing . . . that went through my head when I noticed I wasn't moving anymore was, 'Oh, my God, I'm going to die.' I couldn't move my body at all, but I could lift my head. I looked down, and saw the meat hanging out of my leg. All I knew was that leg was done. I put my head back down and acted like what I saw I never did. It wasn't worth it.

"I started screaming for a corpsman. I asked, first thing, not about myself but, 'Where's the other engineer?' "

(Norris was badly burned and is recovering at the Brooke Army Medical Center, a burn center in Texas.)

"I was feeling that I wasn't going to make it through this," Hennagir recalled. "I felt tingly all over, like the inside was trying to push itself to the outside of my body. That's the best that I can explain it. I just started thinking to myself, 'Wait. I can actually make it through this. I'm still alive. I made it through the blast. I might actually make it through this.'

"Then I started thinking about the pain. It was an intense feeling that was really hard to handle. . . . I kind of slapped myself and said, 'Shut up. It won't last forever. When you look back you can say you had self-control.' "

Evacuated by helicopter, Hennagir found it harder and harder to breathe.

"That's when I realized my lungs collapsed. . . . Going into shock and stuff. 'Oh, my God.' I tried to bring myself back around. 'Calm down. Control your breathing. You'll be fine.' "

The last thing he remembers is yelling, "I can't breathe! I can't breathe!"

At the new American field hospital in Balad, in central Iraq, doctors did their best to stabilize him. Within 24 hours, he was on his way to the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, an American military hospital.

"When I woke up," Hennagir recalled, "I was on a big plane, a C-class, and I was in a bed, three tubes shoved down my throat, hooked up to all these lines, and there was a nurse standing beside me.

"When I tried to talk, I realized I couldn't because my mouth was too dry from these tubes, and I couldn't move my tongue. And no sound would come out. She read my lips, and I mouthed the words really slowly. I asked her if I had any legs. She looked at me and said, 'No.'

"I thought she was kidding me. I asked her again, and she said, 'You don't have any legs.' I still thought it was a joke. Kind of in the back of my mind, I knew I was just denying it.

"I mouthed the words again, to another nurse, 'Can you tell me if I have legs?' That's when I knew. I started getting teary. She said, 'Don't worry. It's not a bad thing. Your life will be OK.' "