Perspective: Roadside bomb changed lives of the survivors, some still in Iraq

Ricky Salas was killed in the blast

The long shrapnel scar on the face of 1st Lt. Charles Bies marks the day last March when his life changed forever.

Shortly before midnight March 6, the Humvee he was riding in snapped a tripwire and detonated a roadside bomb outside Tal Afar, Iraq. The improvised explosive device, or IED, was planted by insurgents.

The blast killed Pfc. Ricky Salas Jr., the man next to Bies. Like hundreds of other IED attacks in Iraq that end in death, it changed countless other lives as well. For every soldier or Marine killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq and Afghanistan, 10 are hurt. The weapons have killed more than a thousand troops and wounded 11,200 in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The blast that killed Salas left four other soldiers with wounds, physical or emotional, that may never heal.

It severed the left leg of Army Spc. Jose "Jay" Morales, 24, whose dream since childhood was to be a soldier and whose pregnant wife had known him for less than a year before he went to war.

Army Spc. Nicholas "Nick" Helfferich, 22, was manning a machine gun in the Humvee's turret when the blast threw him into the air. It smashed his pelvis and ribs, damaged a lung and his liver, and permanently crippled his spine. "My whole body was just like ringing," he recalls.

The vehicle flipped over, trapping Bies inside the wreckage. He says his life today is neatly divided into two emotional chapters: one before the bomb, and one after.

Sgt. Martin Duculan found himself pinned under Morales and Salas. Though the blast left no visible wounds, it is seared in his memory. "I know how to control my emotions," he said in a recent e-mail from Iraq, where he remains in combat in Ramadi. "But I cannot control a few tears that roll down my cheek when I tell this story."

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