Jacob Knospler: 'I'm a Marine. I Had to Go In and Help Them.'

Cpl. Jacob Knospler, his jaw mostly blown away by a grenade, did not wake up for a month. His first clear memory is of President George W. Bush standing over his bed at Bethesda Naval Hospital. "How the hell you doin'?" asked the president. Knospler couldn't really answer, but he liked Bush. "I felt bad for him 'cuz he comes down to the hospital, sees all the wounded people there and knows he put them there," he said.

Knospler's brain was so swollen, his face so disfigured, that his mother later told him that she had been able to identify him only by the tattoos on his arm. A 175-pounder when he arrived in Iraq, he had ballooned to 239 pounds from the water pumped into him. But then a case of meningitis sent his weight plummeting down to 125 pounds. "A good-looking girl weighs 125 pounds," said Knospler, who stands six feet tall. "Not me." Sent home to East Stroudsburg, Pa., in January 2005, he has had to return every month to Bethesda. There was little that doctors could do for his partially blind right eye, but they put a plate in his skull and tried to rebuild his face. In November 2004, surgeons extracted flesh from his shoulder to close a large --open wound in his cheek. But thick, ropelike knots disfigured him and made it difficult to talk. Sometimes, painful surgery seemed to make little or no difference. Slowly, he has learned to lower his expectations. He hates the hospital and appreciates only the doctors, he says bitterly, "who are honest with me."

Knospler thinks his personality has changed. He can be testy with his wife, who has the burden of raising an infant daughter as well as caring for him. "I think the part of my brain they removed was the part with my inhibitions," he says. "If I think something, I just say it. Sometimes my wife will say to me, 'You're being an a--hole,' and I'll think, 'Huh? Am I being an a--hole?' "

As a boy dreaming of becoming a warrior, Knospler had hunted deer with his father. He has begun hunting in the Pennsylvania woods again, though he has changed shooting arms because of his blind eye. His shooting skill, he says, has come back more easily than he might have thought. He feels a jumble of emotions about his wound, including bitterness, though never regret. "I'm a Marine," he says. "Marines were going down and I had to go in and help them."

© 2006