WASHINGTON - Three more seconds. Just three more, and Emanuel Pickett might be alive, and Michael Beck would not be facing a life of disability at age 20.

The two N.C. National Guardsmen were among a group that dashed into a concrete bunker when a mortar alert began shrieking at Forward Operating Base Rustamiyah in Baghdad on April 6.

The boyish Beck and Pickett, the older, widely respected staff sergeant whom Beck sometimes called "Dad," turned and stepped toward the door to close a thick Kevlar blanket designed to stop shrapnel. They hadn't even begun to raise their arms when the mortar shell exploded near the doorway.

"We were a little late," Beck said recently in his computerized bed at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, his soft drawl turning sharp and bitter on the "late."

To put it simply, Beck is torn up. It's almost more a question of what parts of him weren't injured. At hospital stops in Iraq, Germany and finally Walter Reed in Washington, doctors began work on a long list of damaged limbs and organs: colon, kidney, spleen, liver, left eye, right leg and left foot.

They removed the front half of his left foot. They clamped what was left of each lower leg in an external fixiator -- a framework of metal rods around the leg to support it and keep it stable. They did three days of surgery to gradually close the severe stomach wound that reached from his pubic bone to the bottom of his chest. They used Gore-Tex mesh that acted like a shoelace drawn gradually tighter.

All told, Beck's family estimates, he has more than 100 wounds large and small where shrapnel tore and burned his body.

At first, doctors operated on him every other day. The cutting and cleaning and stitching has slowed only a little. His mother, Lynn Beck, has lost track of the total, but knows there have been more than a dozen operations.

Beck is among nearly 30,000 U.S. military personnel wounded in Iraq so far, including more than 800 from North Carolina, according to icasualties.org. That's why he wanted to tell his story. He doesn't want people to forget the troops still in Iraq, the thousands who have been wounded or those like Pickett who didn't make it home alive. In their 120-soldier unit, the Rocky Mount-based 1132nd Military Police Company, four were killed and many more wounded this spring.

"On the news ... they go through a short story of what's going on in the war, but they totally forget about all the soldiers, not just the ones who are injured," he said. "The ones who are injured, you really don't hear much about them. And everyone forgets about the soldiers over there still fighting, still fighting this war."

Like father and son

When the mortar shell exploded, Beck was thrown upward and back and came to rest atop Pickett's shattered body. He doesn't like to talk about that.

As National Guard soldiers, both men had civilian lives and civilian jobs. Beck had just started working as a security guard at a manufacturing plant in Rocky Mount when the 1132nd learned it would be going to Iraq. Pickett, 34, was a police captain in Wallace, N.C., and had already been to Iraq once.

Back in Duplin County, Pickett, 34, was one of those people who quietly hold their communities together without seeking the spotlight, coaching youth sports, starting a mentoring program for children with no dads.

Beck, meanwhile, hadn't had a father in his life since childhood. His father left the family when Beck was 4 years old, Lynn Beck said. In Iraq, the older soldier had looked out for the younger one.

Some nights in Baghdad, before the soldiers went back to their tiny prefabricated housing units, Beck would call out to Pickett.

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