Wounded Soldier Home and Healing

Private First Class Adam Smith is living on a liquid diet of Ensure. Scrapnel took off his left jaw when a bomb went off near his humvee in Iraq last month. "We were going to a park in Baghdad doing a clean-up there," he explains through teeth that are wired shut. "Then the bomb went off, they set off a remote IED. When it went off, it went in behind my ear and broke my jaw." Doctors removed bone from his hip to surgically reconstruct his jaw. "He was bandaged behind his ear and of course he had the trache in, but it was swollen real bad, and had feeding tubes. It was pretty hard," his mother Melinda describes her visit to see Adam at Walter Reed hospital. Smith is speaking much better now. "At first it wa hard, it was like someone trying to learn how to talk all over again," he explains. What he hates the most is his diet and says he`s ready to bite down on something. Smith says he`s staying with the guard, he`ll be working at the armory for the 1st 206th Field Artillery in Dardanelle. The military told him he will be deployable again, once he`s healed, but he won`t be sent back to Iraq. Meanwhile, he`s hoping to have his teeth unwired next month. Even then he`ll have more dental reconstruction to go through, since the accident took out all of his teeth on the left side of his mouth.