Perspective: Saying goodbye to one of the fallen, by one he saved

Christopher Anderson's voice saying 'you're going to be okay' was the last thing the Marine remembers before waking up at Walter Reed a month later

ARLINGTON, Va. - The sergeant with no legs sat inside the cemetery, thinking about how this homecoming was supposed to happen.

The 24-year-old Marine had spent the past two months in a hospital bed, grimacing as he devised his own painful physical regimen to strengthen the tender stumps that end just above his knees, hoping to earn his prosthetic legs early. His unit wasn't supposed to return from Iraq until April, so he figured he had plenty of time to learn how to walk.

"I wanted to walk when they came off the bus to see all of them, but especially 'Doc,' " he said, referring to the last face he saw before everything went dark.

"I wanted to shake his hand and say, 'Thank you.' "

Wednesday morning, near the perfect rows of headstones that stretched up and along the hillsides at Arlington National Cemetery, the man in the wheelchair spoke quietly, in a soft Southern drawl.

"To be honest," he said, "I'm pretty nervous about this."

"You'll do fine," his mother said.

The sergeant's body is still riddled with shrapnel wounds, pitting the skin on his entire left side with deep pink scars. What is left of his legs jutted from the wheelchair, filling only a fraction of his jeans, which were folded at the place where his knees used to be. Only one hand works.

He looked over at his wife and two daughters, at his parents and the rows and rows of white marble. Somewhere out there was a fresh grave.

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