By SETH SLABAUGH
seths@muncie.gannett.com

MUNCIE — Army Master Sgt. Jeff Mittman had his nose, teeth, lips and trigger finger blown off when a roadside bomb exploded outside his armored Humvee in Baghdad on July 7, 2005. He also lost most of his vision.
During a Veterans Day ceremony on Wednesday at Lucina Hall at Ball State University, Mittman, now a graduate student at BSU, explained why he considers himself lucky.

“I didn’t have to pay the ultimate price,” he said. “I’ll still get to grow old with my wife and see my kids grow up — not well, but I’ll still get to watch them grow up.”

After the explosion, Mittman remained unconscious for a month, awaking at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., with his wife Christy at his side. His first memory was hearing her loving voice and feeling her holding his hand.

He couldn’t speak. Believing he was still in Iraq, he thought to himself, “What is she doing in Baghdad?”

Mittman’s story of his years of recovery made all of the three dozen people attending Tuesday’s ceremony laugh — and some cry.

“She slowly picked me up and carried me down the road to recovery,” Mittman said of his wife. “I was too weak.”

Trying to calm him, the doctors at Walter Reed put headphones on the unconscious Mittman and played music. When his wife found out they were playing Britney Spears, she objected. “What are you trying to do, kill him?” she asked. “Get some Rolling Stones.”

After regaining consciousness, Mittman learned one of his best friends had died in the war in Iraq.

His doctors informed him that his left eye had been destroyed, and the central vision was gone in his right eye. He would undergo more than 40 operations, including reconstructive surgery on his face.

One of the surgeries was to repair an anterior cruciate ligament injury in his knee. When the doctor who was to perform that surgery asked if it would bother him that the surgery would leave a visible scar on his knee, Mittman asked, “What, are you blind?” His face is crossed by scars, one running from his right ear to the top of his head.

Mittman’s two daughters, then ages 8 and 3, were shown before and after photographs of their father before being allowed to see him in the hospital. “I still see daddy,” the oldest daughter, Jamie, said of the photo of her disfigured father.

He wasn’t sure how they’d react the first time they saw him. The girls immediately hopped on his lap and hugged and kissed him.

“They loved me no matter what I looked like,” he said. “I think I began to heal at that moment.”

His wife and daughters weren’t the only people who helped Mittman recover.

The warmth and expertise of the doctors, medic and others who treated him “allowed me to take another step down the road to recovery,” he said. The American physicians who treated him in Baghdad were the most experienced trauma doctors in the world, he said. And some of the best orthopedic, oral, eye and plastic surgeons in the country operated on him after his return home.

“I was just afraid they would have a proctologist do my lips,” he said.

Mittman, who has spoken to groups throughout the country about his recovery, said his comeback would not have been complete without the support of a blinded veterans association, through which he met vets who have been blinded since World War II.

Blinded vets have become lawyers, teachers and politicians.

“Your service doesn’t end when you take off the uniform,” said Mittman, who is seeking a master’s degree from Ball State in executive development.

Asked what he planned to do with the degree, Mittman said he wasn’t certain, because he is still transitioning from short-term goals to long-term goals.