Staff Sgt. Kyle Malin of Lakeville was in a mud-walled forward base camp northwest of Kandahar City in Afghanistan when his U.S. Army squad heard an explosion. The radio snapped: "Man down."
A soldier had stepped on a land mine while his squad was moving through grape and pomegranate fields. His leg was blown off. A helicopter tried to rescue him, but insurgents deterred it with ground fire.
Malin's squad headed out that hot July day to clear the insurgents so the chopper could land.
On the way, Malin's point man saw something suspicious in a crater and stopped the unit. Malin, the squad leader, approached to check it out. Seconds later he stepped on a land mine and his world changed forever.
"I felt my body rise up and there was sand everywhere," Malin recalled, sitting in his wheelchair at the dining room table of his parents' home in Lakeville.
"The dust engulfed me. Everything from my waist down felt like it was on fire."
He blacked out, revived briefly to see an Army doctor had put tourniquets on what was left of his legs, and faded again. Then he was being strapped on a stretcher and loaded into the helicopter. Medics shot him full of painkillers and medication. The next time Malin was conscious, he was at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington D.C. He doesn't recall four days that he spent en route at an Army hospital in Germany.
When Malin, 28, awoke at Walter Reed, his first words were asking how his squad men had fared. Then he said "I love you," said his wife, Alicia, who sat at his bedside.
