No hands? No problem: Marine shoots again with custom rifle

Amy Bennett Williams | The (Fort Myers, Fla.) News-Press

Show Caption Hide Caption No hands? No problem. Marine shoots again with new gun Combat-wounded veteran Marcus Burleson, who lost both hands to a bomb in Afghanistan, tries out a new custom rifle made especially for him and his bionic hands.

Corrections & Clarifications: This story has been updated to more accurately present the timeline of events regarding Burleson's marriage.

FORT MYERS, Fla. — Explosions have shattered much of Marcus Burleson’s adult life.

The Twin Towers. The Afghan bomb that blew up in the young Marine’s face. His marriage.

But this week came an explosion Burleson, 34, had been craving for years: the crack and kick of his new M40A3 rifle, custom-made by LaBelle, Fla., gunsmith Buck Holly to be shot by a man with no hands.

Sweat shining on his scarred cheeks, Burleson cocked his head and curled his black bionic finger around the trigger of a weapon designed similarly to a Marine Corps sniper rifle used since the 1960s. With the faintest of mechanical whirs, he squeezed, then fired.

"Hit!"

Burleson laughed. And kept laughing.

“How’s that?” Holly exclaimed. “230 yards. First-round hit.”

Still grinning, Burleson said, "Like a tuning fork."

Beyond the impressive marksmanship, this shot is another step on Burleson’s journey to the kind of life he wants. Though technically disabled, he works to raise money and awareness for other injured veterans, difficulties be damned.

"I live every moment of every day in excruciating pain, centered mostly on my left shoulder. I feel like my arm is frozen in the moment of time when the blast hit it. I feel like there’s a car parked on my arm, like it’s on fire, like it’s plugged into electricity. It never goes away."

He just bulls through it.

“I could sit on the couch and go woe is me, but that wouldn’t do me or anyone else any good," Burleson said.

"Embrace today; take on the challenges of tomorrow. Everything else in the world means nothing. And this,” he said, looking at his rifle, “is definitely a piece of that. ... It doesn’t matter that I’ve got limitations. It doesn’t matter that some of the things I cherished about my previous life aren’t there for me anymore. I’ve still got things to cherish about today and tomorrow.”

A west Texas kid who grew up hunting deer and squirrels, Burleson became a skilled shooter in the service, but hadn’t held a rifle since the 2011 blast. Among other things, it cost him his hands, seared his face, broke his neck, cracked his jaw and blinded his left eye.

Defusing bombs is what Burleson discovered he most wanted to do after he enlisted.

He’d been a third-year college student on the way to becoming a history teacher, but he signed up the afternoon of Sept. 11.

“I remember I drove into the college parking lot, but I couldn’t get out of the truck,” he said. “It felt pointless. So instead of going to class, I drove to the mall and went and talked to the recruiters.”

Starting as a supply clerk, Burleson volunteered for every deployment available.

“I was constantly in the office telling them, ‘Hey I want to go. I want to go — this is why I’m here. Finally, in 2007, they threw me as an individual log man onto a deployment to Iraq.”

While he was there, he got to see explosive ordnance disposal teams clearing bombs. “Just watching the way they worked and interacted, it was something unique. I’d been in the military seven years and I hadn’t seen anything like it. They were legitimately like a family. And I loved that. I had to be a part of it.”

After training as a bomb disposal expert, Burleson deployed to Afghanistan. Three months into his tour, he was clearing a path out of a village and discovered an improvised explosive device made of pallet planks and foam. “Last memory I have is my knife sliding into the ground looking for wire.”

He woke up a month later in Maryland’s Walter Reed Hospital.

With severe brain and nerve damage, Burleson spent more than two years regaining his ability to stand, walk and speak. Along the way, he'd become much-decorated, earning numerous citations, medals and ribbons, including a Purple Heart for the terrible injuries he suffered during his final day as an active duty Marine.

During his recovery, his marriage ended.

He lost custody of his three kids. "That was when I started free-falling into depression. I had no direction. I had no purpose. No reason to get to the next day at that point."

Nights, he'd wander.

"I’d break out of the hospital and just sneak out and walk up to the parking garages because they were all unsecured and all very tall. I could go up to the roof and I could stand there and I could look down. Do I step? Do I not step? What have I got to work for? But even though my family wasn’t there, my kids were my strength. They were what kept me from taking that step off the building.”

So Burleson started adapting to his new life with new tools, including two bionic hands.

One is a pincer-grip workhorse. "I abuse it," he said, "but it’s the cheapest, it works the best, it’s the most durable and it’s got the most strength. I can do anything that I want to in my day with this thing.”

Then there’s Burleson's complicated, fragile i-limb ultra , equipped with four delicately jointed fingers, a thumb and a programmable internal computer.

"Some guys have presets for drinking… so they don’t accidentally drop a beer," he said. "And a lot of guys will program a middle finger extension into it so they can express their feelings to the rest of the world."

But what Burleson saw in the hand was a way to pull a trigger.

"Shooting has always been a passion for me. ... I’ve been shooting for as long as I can remember, always hunting — whatever was moving."

He learned about Holly and his company, C&H Precision Weapons, from a friend who'd been an Army sniper.

"I really wanted to get back into shooting and I wanted to do it right,” Burleson said. That meant a rifle he’d be able to use with minimal help. For the last six months, he and Holly have called and emailed each other as the company fashioned Burleson's custom rifle.

After his first few shots with it, Burleson was visibly elated. So was Holly.

“The difference between this rifle project and all of our other ones is our connection as Marines,” Holly said. “My partner Dave and I are both former Marines. Veterans Day is this week, the Marine Corps birthday is this week and having Marcus here now to deliver this rifle to makes it extra special.”

Listen to Burleson talk about his injury in his own words in the audio player below: