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Photo by Brian Cox
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John and Lisa Lockwood returned home last month after spending more than three months at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland where John underwent dozens of surgeries after he was seriously injured by a roadside bomb while serving in Iraq. He will be the keynote speaker at the Saline Memorial Day parade.
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A sense of obligation and duty runs deep in the marrow of Marine Cpl. John Lockwood.
As a student, he felt an obligation when he was earning a degree in computer information systems at Eastern Michigan University.
As a law enforcement officer, he felt an obligation when he joined the Saline Police Department and then the Washtenaw County Sheriff's Department.
As a soldier, he felt an obligation when he enlisted in the Marine Reserves and deployed in September 2006 for a seven-month tour of duty in Iraq with the 1st Battalion of the 24th Marines.
And now, as a wounded veteran of the conflict returned home, he feels an altogether different and unexpected obligation.
He is duty-bound to his family and friends and community to get better and to wear the uncomfortable and unsought mantle thrust upon him of small-town war hero.
"My obligation now is to heal so that I can help those who helped me," he said.
Lockwood has agreed to be the keynote speaker at the Saline Memorial Day parade May 28 and to throw out the first pitch on the opening day of Little League baseball. He makes time to talk with friends and well-wishers. He understands his role in the community has fundamentally altered.
"It would almost be disrespectful to the support I've received from my family and the community not to do these things," he said while sitting in a chair at his Saline home, his discolored left leg propped up and encircled with a metal frame pinned securely to the bones of his lower leg. The device is designed to lengthen Lockwood's bones. He expects to have it removed by the end of the year.
Lockwood can't wait. He wants it gone. It has been a long recovery process, encompassing more than 30 surgeries, and he knows he still has a long way to go.
"My goal is that by January 2009 I want to go running with my dad," he said.
The explosion that took part of Lockwood's left leg Nov. 19 during a mission to flush out insurgents in Fallujah also took his left eye. It broke both his feet and legs, fractured his pelvis, cracked two vertebrae, broke bones in both hands, and crushed his nose.
And it killed the driver of Lockwood's Humvee, his friend Lance Cpl. Jeremy Shock.
Lockwood remembers nothing from that day when he was manning a machine gun atop a Humvee and an improvised explosive device, or IED, went off, and that is just fine with him.
"What tends to bug guys is they want to know what happened," he says. "Me, I don't want to know."
The next thing he remembers is waking up in a MASH unit in Balad in northern Iraq.
"It was real cold," he recalls. "I remember freezing. I knew something was wrong."
He remembers asking if he still had his legs and begged the Navy doctors not to amputate them. He couldn't see out of his left eye and asked if it was gone. The doctors told him it was.
Lockwood was put into a medically induced coma and remembers waking next two weeks later at Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland, his wife Lisa and his parents, Ruth and Roger, at his bedside.
Lockwood's odyssey toward recovery was only beginning. The doctors told him if he had been injured three years ago, he would have died; a year ago, he would have lost his leg.
"I ask myself to this day, wow, how did I survive that?" he says. "There are so many things that could have gone wrong, a head injury, a lost limb. I guess I'm so grateful for that."
When Lisa Lockwood learned the devastating news that her husband had been severely injured, all she could think was that he was going through it alone. She didn't want to be with anyone until she could be with John.
"I will know what to do when I'm with John," she told those close to her.
She remembers "as clear as a bell" seeing her husband in the hospital for the first time after she, his parents and his younger sister Kate arrived in Bethesda Thanksgiving Day. Kate held Lisa's arm as they walked down the hospital hall toward John's room, reassuring her. They came to the room and stepped in.
Lisa Lockwood knew immediately everything was going to be okay.
"The second I saw him, I thought we can do this," she recalls. "We're a good team."
John and Lisa Lockwood spent the next three months in Bethesda as John underwent surgery after surgery. The couple returned home March 13, five days before John Lockwood's 27th birthday.
It took John Lockwood days to become accustomed to being home. When he first arrived at the house, he felt numb. He sat in a side room and stared at the floor for hours.
"You don't know what to do," he says.
His wife, however, was overjoyed to be home.
"It's ridiculously how happy I am to be home," she says. "I'll joke to John, listen, it's the dishwasher."
John Lockwood is quick to make jokes, too. He is considering titling his keynote speech at the Saline Memorial Day parade, "How I Got Blown Up in Iraq by John Lockwood." He says of his months at Bethesda, "Surgery was like the thing to do." Of having to live 24 hours a day with the sometimes painful, awkward, and uncomfortable fixator on his leg, he says, "That's just the way I roll."
He has bad days, he admits.
"I've cried tons," he says, "and I'll continue to cry."
But he then reminds himself of his obligation. And he remembers he considers himself fortunate to be alive and loved.
"In some ways this has been a wonderful thing," he says. "You learn so much about yourself, your family, and your friends. I want to be healthy, but I never want to forget that. Then you truly know and understand what you have."
Staff Writer Brian Cox can be reached at 429-7380 or bcox@heritage.com.
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