Mike Stineman has endured more than a dozen surgeries since he survived the roadside bomb that killed two members of his unit in a Humvee in Iraq in 2004.

The last two surgeries were earlier this year at Woodbury, Minn., four years into his medical recovery.

His right leg had to be rebroken, straightened and anchored in place with seven metal pins.

Now the 25-year-old is sitting on his couch in east Lincoln, shades drawn against the afternoon sun, as he tells about dropping his “spit bottle” on the floor behind Master Sgt. Linda Turango-Griess and Staff Sgt. Jeremy Fischer.

He bent over to retrieve it in the instant before the explosion.

“That’s why I always say chewing tobacco saved my life.”

When he joined the National Guard as a senior at Centennial High School in Utica in 2001, Stineman was thinking of it as a way to pay for his college.

Later that year, during his training regimen at Fort Lee, Va., hijacked airplanes plowed into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon.

“The drill sergeant came in and said, ‘Get your butts to your rooms and stay in your rooms until you’re told otherwise.’”

He started out his military career assigned to a York unit. But as the situation in Iraq became more intense and he thought about deployment, he transferred to the 267th Ordnance Company in Lincoln to get out of driving an ammunition or fuel truck.

“I didn’t want to be driving on the road when there were roadside bombs all the time.”

In the end, it didn’t matter.

Six months into his time in Iraq, he was coming back from leave and returning to his military job in a supply warehouse near Tikrit. He heard a popping noise from the back side of the Humvee.

He couldn’t hear anything after that.

He saw Turango-Griess, his platoon leader, had been hit and he tried to get out the door behind her to help. It was welded shut by the heat of the explosion.

He slid across to the driver’s side of the rear seat and pushed that door open.

That’s when he noticed the mess that had been his leg.

“My leg smashed down and that’s what caused the femur to shatter and split open.”

The attackers followed with bursts of machine gun fire. “You could watch the hood of the Humvee pop, because somebody was shooting bullets at it.”

He was aboard a helicopter within half an hour. Fifteen minutes later, he was in an operating room at Camp Anaconda. “I was wheeled in and there were probably 20 doctors in there.”

In the days that followed, he was moved to Landstuhl, Germany, and then to the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio from the end of July until October 2004. More medical attention followed at Fort Riley, Kan.

It took him three weeks to get up on crutches. That’s also when he got his first shower.

“I hated the hospitals, but I guess you’ve got to make the best of it.

“That’s what Mom and Dad told me when they talked to me on the phone.”

The low point was Fort Riley. “That’s where I didn’t think the care was good at all,” he said.

Along the way, he lost 40 pounds and his leg got infected.

“What happened happened,” he said of his treatment at Fort Riley. “It could have been avoided.”

As he sees it, “they didn’t do a good enough job of following up on” the medical attention he got in San Antonio.

Back in Lincoln, a major purpose for his daily outpatient visits to BryanLGH Medical Center East was undoing the damage of that earlier infection by suctioning the wound.

“I think the military doctors do it to get it fixed,” he said. “As far as the civilian hospitals, I think they work a lot harder to make sure it gets back as best they can.”

More than seven years after his enlistment and more than four years since his injury, Stineman remains in the National Guard. He’s a full-time diesel mechanic in the motor pool.

At times, he thinks about going back to Iraq. After all, he only did half his deployment.

“I don’t want to stay home and have all my buddies go. … Sometimes I feel I need to finish my duty over there.”

A father’s view

Veteran school teachers John and Carmen Stineman took their son to the airport on a Friday in July 2004 so he could fly back to Iraq after a two-week stay at home in Utica.

Two days later, at 3 p.m., the phone rang.

“And he said, ‘Dad, has anybody from the Army contacted you?’ And I said, ‘No, why?’ And he said, ‘Well, I’ve got a big hole in my leg.’”

Then Mike Stineman handed his cell phone to the doctor at a military hospital in Germany.

“Not more than an hour or an hour and half later, here came the Army guys to our home,” the elder Stineman said. “They just pulled up — two chaplains and some other guy.”

The  father described the less than timely arrival of military’s notification team in a cheerful voice.

“Mike was kind of upset about that. I was, to an extent, but I understand.

“It’s a big bureaucracy that they’re dealing with and a nine-hour time differential. I was more happy that they’d gotten him out of there and got him to Germany.”

It helps that four years have passed and that Mike Stineman feels good about his recovery and about his job.

What about more surgery, almost four years later?

“From my perspective, it’s not a lack of care on the Army’s part,” said the elder Stineman. “I guess, when you have a compound fracture like he had, of the femur, it’s pretty common that you lose part of the bone. It just blows out of there when the break occurs.”

The rest of the bone had to be rebroken and reset much later because it healed at an angle that caused Mike’s knee to swell every time he’d indulge his appetite for exercising.

The leg infection went back to all the dirt and debris that got in open wounds as he was dragged away from the burning Humvee.

“The military is good,” John Stineman said of a recovery regimen that began in San Antonio. “Aside from the fact that he was injured, they’ve taken care of all the medical bills.”

John Stineman acknowledged conversations in which his son has talked of returning to Iraq.

“He’s mentioned it. Of course, I and his mother don’t want him to go. Of course, that’s up to him.”

Just because he was wounded once doesn’t mean it will happen again.

“He was fairly safe, as much as you can be out of harm’s way. But I think that ambush was a circumstance. He was in that place at that time and that’s what happened.”

He would normally have gone back to his unit in a supply truck. As it turned out, Turango-Griess and Fischer were headed back that way in a Humvee.

“It was air conditioned and it was about 123 degrees then.”

By next summer, John and Carmen Stineman hope their son will be able to get back to two of his favorite forms of recreation — wake boarding at the lake and slow-pitch softball.

“His mother and I are very proud of him. It hasn’t soured our outlook at all on the military. It happened. Those types of things happen. We’re really sorry for the other two families, but we’re thankful our son came through this. He is about back to normal.”