Army Reservist Matthew Small came home from duty in Afghanistan for Christmas with a severely broken leg and a harrowing war experience.

About a month ago, Small was in the hills in Afghanistan helping to provide security to engineers attempting to help the Afghanis. His unit was ambushed, and mortar shrapnel left him with a compound fracture in his left leg.

Although Small is hobbled for the foreseeable future while he recovers from his injury, he’s also grateful that he’s still alive and was able to spend Christmas in Maine with his family.

“I’m very thankful because it’s not my last Christmas,” he said. “You know what I mean?”

His family is also very grateful that they had him home this Christmas. Since he was injured, Small has spent the last few weeks at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., having numerous surgeries and beginning his recovery. He said he rushed through the last part of his initial recovery to try to get home to his grandparents for Christmas.

Small, 20, originally from Limington, grew up in his grandparents’ care from the age of 7. He graduated from Bonny Eagle High School and was a long-time Boy Scout, eventually achieving Eagle Scout. His grandparents, Dick and Mary Small, moved to Westbrook after he graduated. Small said he always envisioned himself in the military, especially since his grandfather had been a Marine.

Dick and Mary Small were at the Portland Jetport when he got off the plane last Wednesday. He was also greeted by about 30 of his family and friends, along with friends from the Army Reserve.

“It was great,” said Dick Small.

April Lacey, Small’s aunt from Casco, said it was a big relief to see him home safe and sound. She said when she’d heard over a month ago that her nephew had been wounded, she had to pull her car over.

“It was great having him,” she said. “It was a long time coming.”

While Small said he felt bad leaving his unit in Afghanistan, he had to admit that he didn’t mind coming home from that country.

“The mortar was a blessing in disguise,” he said. “It brought me home, and I really needed it.”

As of Wednesday, Mary Small still hadn’t asked her grandson to tell her how he was injured, preferring to wait until he decides to talk to her about it or never hearing about it all.

“You see enough of it on the news. You know what’s going on,” she said.

An ambush

Small said his unit was on an assignment to assess a village in a region where local Afghani resistance fighters had attacked U.S. soldiers on a regular basis. After completing their work in the village, the unit left and was ambushed on their way back out of the region.

Small said the unit was driving military Hummers, which they usually drove as quickly as possible out of danger when attacked on the road. The place where the attack took place, however, limited their ability to escape because of narrow dirt roads, boulders in the road and cliffs on the sides. Also, they were accompanied by Afghan National Army soldiers in vehicles less capable than the Hummers, which slowed their escape. They were attacked by machine-gun fire as well as anti-tank grenade launchers.

The firefight lasted a couple hours, resulting in one Hummer breaking an axle. Small said normally one Hummer would tow another back, but the broken axle prevented that. The unit considered destroying the broken vehicle, but were overridden by their superiors and told to stay in the area and await help.

The unit was forced to seek high ground and stay the night, each soldier taking a turn manning a turret gun on top of one of the Hummers. Small said no further attacks came during the night, and in the morning they were hoping a helicopter would come for the broken-down Hummer. Instead of a helicopter, a tow truck came, protected by additional troops.

Just as the tow truck was getting ready to load up the broken-down Hummer, and Small’s unit was readying to blow up one of the Afghan National Army trucks that had broken down as well, the second ambush came.

This time the attackers brought machine guns, grenade launchers and mortars. Small said the mortars are tough to judge because they give off a puff of smoke when they take off but are then difficult to see and hear.

Small was running toward a Hummer to get ammunition when a mortar landed nearby and blew him into the air.

“All of a sudden, I heard this loud explosion from my left side, my ears were ringing and I was flying through the air,” he said.

Small said he landed about 10 feet from where he’d left the ground. His left arm seized up immediately because he said it was “completely peppered” with shrapnel, and his upper arm had a large gash. Also, he said he knew something was wrong with his left leg because it was hurting badly, much worse than what a fall would do. He said he didn’t look at it, but called for a medic and tried to stay calm.

The shrapnel had ripped through his leg, breaking both his shinbone and calf bone, and left part of the bone sticking out through the skin. He had shrapnel entry points all along the side of his body and back. His mouth was full of blood, and, feeling around, he pulled out a piece of shrapnel that had gone through his cheekbone.

Small said the medics dragged him 20 feet behind a vehicle and took off his body armor and most of his clothes while the firefight went on around him. For an hour, he waited for the fighting to end so that a helicopter could transport him to a hospital.

“It was an excruciating pain that I couldn’t imagine going through again,” he said.

Small was taken to a hospital in Afghanistan. From there, he was transported to Iraq and then to Germany before he was taken to Andrews Air Force Base and the National Naval Medical Hospital. From Nov. 8 to Dec. 20, he said, he underwent more surgeries than he could remember to work on his leg and shrapnel wounds.

In his leg, he now has six metal pins holding the bones in place in a contraption that resembles something Dr. Frankenstein might have used while creating his monster. He tries to hide it for most people so he doesn’t make them uncomfortable. He said he has to wear it for about six months while his leg heals, and he’s hoping to recover most if not all of the mobility in his leg, although he said the doctors haven’t really told him what to expect.

While he realizes he’s in for a long haul during recovery, Small said he’s not complaining. In fact, since leaving Afghanistan, he has new perspective.

“I appreciate things more than I ever did before,” he said.

Small is currently on convalescent leave from the Army Reserve and plans to leave the military when his contract ends in January 2009. At that time, he said, he wants to work on his college education.

Mary Small said while he was home for Christmas, her grandson insisted on having all the old traditions so things were just like they always were.

“He wanted everything to be the same,” she said, adding that they even put cookies out for Santa Claus.

Small said while he was in the Bethesda, Md., hospital a week before Christmas, the doctors told him it was his choice when he went home, depending on how hard he worked. They told him he had to walk 200 feet using crutches and go up and down a flight of stairs, all with the Frankenstein contraption on his leg. Small made a promise to his grandmother that he’d be home for Christmas.

“That was my main goal,” he said. “I promised her that I’d be home on the 23rd.”

In fact, he got home on Dec. 20, something his grandmother was very grateful for.

She said she told him not to make promises he couldn’t keep, but he worked hard and kept his promise.

“I wish all parents right now, before anything else happens, can have their boys home,” she said.