By Patrick McGroarty
News Editor

Chris Saunders was lounging on a chair in his mother's living room, his heavily bandaged foot propped up on the coffee table, as his mother and a handful of friends buzzed around the room and the phone rang incessantly.

"It's definitely weird to be home," said Saunders. "Good &endash; but I dunno, it's such a strange feeling."

Saunders, a 24 year-old Lance Corporal in the U.S. Marines, was about five weeks from returning home with his unit when the Humvee he was riding in rolled over an Improvised Explosive Device outside of Fallujah, Iraq, on September 14.

The explosion flipped the Humvee, where Saunders was riding as a gunner in the rooftop turret. The blast blew out his right eardrum, caused him a serious concussion, and broke his leg in two places.

"It happened about five in the morning, so I couldn't see anything," Saunders recalled. "I felt the pain in my leg immediately, and for a minute I thought it was gone. As I pulled myself out of the wreck, I looked down and saw my boot, and I knew I still had it."

All four soldiers riding in the Humvee at the time of the incident survived, and only one is still in the hospital, awaiting surgery on his hand.

Saunders was airlifted to Germany before returning to the United States a week ago for surgery at Bethesda Naval Hosptial in Maryland. Surgeons placed two plates and ten screws around the broken bones in his lower leg, and Saunders was released just six days after reaching Maryland.

He has to return to Bethesda on October 9 for an outpatient check-up, then begin the long road to recovery with physical therapy appointments at the U.S. Veterans Hospital in Jamaica Plain.

Saunders says he is anxious to get back to the life he put on hold when he left for Iraq in mid-March.

"Before I was deployed I was accepted into the Boston Fire Department," he said, adding that he's always wanted to be a firefighter. He missed entering a class last spring while he was in Iraq, and will likely miss a second in November as his leg heals.

He said he has also been talking to a fellow Marine from Methuen who is heading to Iraq on a boat patrol in the Eurphrates River.

"I kind of want to go back," he said.

Like so much of the experience that he left behind only days ago, Saunders said it is hard to explain why he would be willing to head back to the heat, the danger, and the uncertainty of life as a soldier in Iraq.

"Its just… it's because of my buddies," he said. "You become like brothers. It's why I went over in the first place, because my unit was going. "

"And, it's the adrenaline rush, its something else - yeah, you can lose your life. But you might lose your life crossing the street. Any day of the week I'd rather die in a war zone."

Asked about the morale of the troops in Iraq, Saunders again paused before putting his thoughts into words.

"It fluctuates. Some days you're happy-go-lucky, joking with your buddies," he said. "Other days it's just so sad, and whatever happens you don't want to go outside the wire," he said. "The wire," he explained, is the secured perimeter around a base.

In the military hospitals of Germany and America, he said, the mood is easier to gauge.

"You're in a hospital bed coming back from a war. I think that answers that."

The phone at the Saunders' home in Lower Mills has been ringing off the hook, and Saunders' mother Celia is already planning a welcome home party for Chris on October 28 at the Columbia Yacht Club.

"The pride is unbelievable. It's tough for any parent to go through," said Celia, who remembers how hard she cried as her son first left home for basic training in South Carolina four years ago. Now, after serving in Japan, the Phillipines, and Iraq, he's come home a Purple Heart winner.

"I can't see myself not doing what I do- not being a Marine," said Saunders.