In the year since the explosion, Shockley had come to know people throughout Walter Reed, including the military doctors upstairs who had operated on him so many times and who sometimes wondered about the lives they were now able to save. Advances in combat medicine were keeping alive soldiers and Marines who would have bled out on the battlefield only a few years earlier. Some were surviving with three and even four missing limbs. In Afghanistan, the doctors had debated whether they should even be saving these troops. What kind of lives could they lead?

Today, these doctors ask different questions: How will these veterans cope when pressure sores force them back into their wheelchairs? What will happen to their battered bodies as they age? Will they grow depressed or despondent?

In the small VA office, Shockley offered one answer. “I always think it could be worse,” he said.

His list of wounds now done, Shockley rattled off a list of blessings and accomplishments. “I came to terms with what happened to me early on,” he said. He had served three tours of Iraq and Afghanistan and had been promoted faster than many of his peers. Most important, he had made it home alive. “That’s one thing I’m glad of,” he said. “I’m glad I didn’t die in that hell.”

Washburn finished up the last of Shockley’s paperwork as Shockley talked about some of the things he hoped to do in the years ahead: Get married. Go back to school. Maybe he’d find a career in the private sector and retire at 50 to an island in the Caribbean. “That’s where I want to be,” he said.

Washburn nodded and then began telling Shockley about the benefits he would be receiving. He would almost certainly be judged 100 percent disabled, entitling him to a minimum monthly payment of $2,858. He’d also receive special monthly compensation. “That’s something we pay above the basic monthly rates because of your amputations,” Washburn said.