FT. CAMPBELL, Ky. - (KRT) - If not for the Purple Heart pinned to his blue hospital gown, it would be impossible to identify David Ainslie as a hero of war.

When his stretcher was carried off a military medical flight late last month, returning him to Ft. Campbell, the home of the Army's 101st Airborne Division, his arrival was an understated affair. Just one man_a doctor_made up his welcoming committee. Bands did not play patriotic songs; politicians did not line up to call him a great American; schoolchildren did not hold flags and banners and say they wanted to grow up to serve their country, too.

Ainslie, a 35-year-old sergeant first class, was whisked within moments from the medical plane to a medical bus to a medical facility. He saw his orthopedic surgeon before his saw his wife and 2-year-old daughter. He lay alone for hours in an unadorned hospital room, just him and the pain and the shiny medal that attested to the fact he was gravely wounded while fighting in Iraq.

"It hasn't quite sunk in that I'm home yet," the soldier said, twisting uncomfortably in his narrow hospital bed, trying to find a position in which his mangled leg, ankle and foot didn't throb so much. "I'm not sure when it will."

Less than 24 hours after Pfc. Jessica Lynch returned to West Virginia in an emotional homecoming covered live on television, Ainslie was back on the base where, before the war, he had been honored as the division's top non-commissioned officer of the year.

Unlike Lynch, whose capture and rescue in Iraq made her a household name, no one aside from Ainslie's family and a few doctors paid the slightest heed to the platoon sergeant who had been injured when four Iraqis speeded through a traffic control point in the northern city of Mosul last week, their Kalashnikov rifles blazing.

Ainslie's story illustrates how the scores of soldiers wounded in Iraq are coming home: with little fuss from a nation that was philosophically torn over the war and that focuses much of its attention on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein.

The men and women of the war in Iraq are not scorned as so many Vietnam veterans remember being; neither are most of them fawned over like World War II soldiers - a group so revered it still is dubbed "The Greatest Generation." Instead, the majority of the war's ever-mounting casualties are anonymously setting out on the hard roads to recovery from the kinds of massive injuries that stem from a modern war: limbs blown off by land mines and rocket-propelled grenades, gunshot wounds from enemy snipers armed with high-powered automatic rifles, severe burns from phosphorus tracer rounds or long-range missiles.

In the nearly three tense months since President Bush declared major combat operations over in Iraq, the deaths and injuries of troops there have not stopped. Dozens of military personnel are arriving home each week with non-combat injuries - bad backs from routinely humping 70-pound rucksacks for miles on end, broken bones from traffic accidents on Baghdad's chaotic streets, skin diseases from the dry, hot, dusty environment. But on top of that, many of the more than 820 soldiers the Department of Defense reports have been wounded are making their way back to the United States, many to check into military hospitals where they will spend weeks, if not months, being nursed back to health.

U.S. military hospitals - most of which had spent months before the war preparing to be inundated with hundreds or even thousands of casualties from intense battles or chemical and biological attacks - are having no trouble treating the number of soldiers they are receiving. In fact, because their staffs trained for worst-case scenarios that never materialized, they have seamlessly made the transition from peacetime hospitals to wartime hospitals, and that has allowed wounded soldiers to slip into the routine of recovery with even less fanfare or attention.

At Walter Reed Army Hospital in Washington, an entire ward has been dedicated to war wounded. At National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., a medical plane known as the Nightingale drops off newly injured Marines almost daily and picks up others who have recovered to take them home. Away from Washington at Blanchfield Army Community Hospital in the heart of Ft. Campbell, an innovative physical therapist has rigged up a one-of-a-kind exercise tool from an old bicycle wheel to be used by division soldiers who have lost limbs.

"In hospitals like ours, it's not about the parades or the great awakenings," said Dr. Bret Logan, the chief of the medical staff at Blanchfield. "Here we get down to the hard work of recovery."

The physical recovery of these soldiers is nothing that can be rushed. Less than 12 hours after arriving back at Ft. Campbell, Ainslie on Thursday was being prepped for what likely will be the first of many surgeries to repair his damaged right leg. The majority of the bones were shattered when the Iraqi vehicle - carrying four men shooting from its windows - mowed him down. The bulk of Ainslie's foot eventually will be held together by steel plates, and doctors have told him that he might be up and mobile "in about a year."

Two doors down the hushed hospital hallway, another wounded soldier came and went from appointments with physical and occupational therapists last week.

Pfc. Robert Shrode had come home to Ft. Campbell unheralded, emerging from the belly of an Air Force jet to only his wife and father. There had not been a throng of well-wishers to thank him for giving his right arm for his nation.

Now, Shrode passes his days in a room where a kind, apologetic occupational therapist spends hours "putting him through hell." Sgt. 1st Class Barri Land carefully unwraps Shrode's stump and attempts to bend the inch or so of flesh that remains under his elbow. The 29-year-old soldier needs to be able to bend the crook of his arm at least 90 degrees before he can be fitted for a prosthetic limb; so far, he's between 50 and 60 degrees.

The therapy is excruciating. Tears come, unbidden and unwelcome. Shrode, an infantryman used to pushing his body to the brink of physical collapse, grits his teeth and insists that Land continue the therapy even when his stump begins to swell and when the angry, red scars on his flesh turn angrier and redder.

"More," he croaks as she forces the damaged limb to bend, "more."

After Shrode's session is over for the day, Land makes a confession. Sometimes at night she falls asleep imagining the pained faces of the soldiers she worked on that day. When she makes these gung-ho guys cry, it haunts her. A soldier herself, she keeps volunteering to go to Iraq, but laments, "Who needs an occupational therapist there?" Land listens intently as her patients tell her how they came to be back at Ft. Campbell's hospital.

Shrode's story is particularly hard to hear - and particularly hard for him to tell. It was the night of June 5 in Fallujah, a city due west of Baghdad that resisted U.S. occupation for several bloody weeks. A group of soldiers from Shrode's unit, the 2nd Battalion of the 502nd Infantry Regiment, was just returning from a foot patrol through the city. As about six of them stood around a Humvee, a rocket-propelled grenade smashed into the vehicle. Iraqis on nearby rooftops started firing rifles at the same time.

As he lay there, bleeding from his arm wound and the shrapnel embedded in his face, neck and close-cropped head, the private had three thoughts: At least one of his buddies - later identified as Pfc. Brandon Oberleitner, 20 - was dead. He was going to lose his right arm. And where the hell was his gun?

The attack had happened shortly after midnight. By about 3 in the morning, Shrode's arm had been amputated. At about 6 a.m. he watched the sun rise over Kuwait City as the medical helicopter landed to take him for treatment. Before the sun had set that evening, he was in Germany, being stabilized to come back home. He got his Purple Heart in a brief, private bedside ceremony that is hard to recall through the haze of painkillers.

As hard as the steps to a physical recovery may be for soldiers in places like Blanchfield, that's only half of their story. Whether they come home to parades like Jessica Lynch, or to a hug from First Lady Laura Bush as a number of 101st Airborne soldiers did recently, or to nobody other than a hospital physician, the men and women wounded in Iraq also struggle mightily with what they saw and did in that faraway country where their compatriots are still at work.

"Here the soldiers have time with their own thoughts, and eventually I think all of them come around to the question, `Why me? Why did I put my foot on that mine? Why did I stand where that bullet flew?' " said Logan, who is a psychiatrist in addition to being the chief of staff at Blanchfield. "Those questions that come to light as life becomes quiet and not disrupted by the early frenzy of those first days of injury or the long journey home will haunt some of these soldiers forever."

At Ft. Campbell - a base that dealt with fatal injuries even before the war started when a soldier from there allegedly attacked a tent full of officers with grenades and gunfire, killing two - a support group for wounded soldiers has been up and running for more than a month. Though no two soldiers recover the same way, at least three stages of emotions seem to be common.

At some point almost everyone wonders if his or her sacrifice was in vain. Ainslie and Shrode, despite the severity of their wounds, both answer no. Ainslie brags that his men killed all four Iraqis who attacked his platoon that night, an attack that also wounded a second soldier who remains hospitalized, with half of his stomach, intestines and colon removed. And Shrode, who had joined the Army less than two months after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, puts it this simply: "I joined the military at a time when it was almost certain my country would be doing battle somewhere. I made my peace then that I might get hurt - or worse."

Another common emotion is the guilt at leaving their units behind. Once back in the States they watch CNN around the clock, trying to spot some of their friends. They comb newspapers and the Internet trying to get the identifications of soldiers killed. Ainslie, even as he was learning the details of his upcoming surgery, was making calls to check the condition of the second soldier wounded in his attack.

And - in a reaction that might shock most non-military Americans and even the troops still overseas - a large number of the wounded spend hours trying to persuade their doctors to send them back to Iraq. Many actually go back. At Ft. Campbell, for example, an officer who was shot through both hands recently deployed back to Iraq, despite the medical dressings that had to be changed on his wounds at least once a day.

"The military and medicine have made a lot of strides," said Col. Steve Jones, commander of the Blanchfield hospital. "Even with very serious injuries, perhaps even with artificial limbs, a soldier can continue to serve."

Shrode, who watched with pride as the soldiers of his old battalion dominated the news by their attack on the house that left Saddam's sons dead in Mosul last week, is one who wants to go back. He knows it would be hard to be an infantry rifleman with only one arm, but he refuses to hear that it's impossible.

"If I go back I want to be right in the mix of it again, not far in the rear dealing with supplies or something," he said. "I'm a front-lines kind of guy."

Part of Shrode's therapy each day is learning how to write with his left hand. If he goes slowly enough, the letters look almost as good as if he were penning them with his missing right hand. He's tried a couple times to write to his buddies in Iraq, but so far the words won't come.

"I don't know what to tell them," he said. "I guess, `Hey, I heard you got in a firefight yesterday. And the day before. And the day before.' What do I say then? That things are much quieter here?"

© 2003, Chicago Tribune.