FORWARD OPERATING BASE SALERNO, Afghanistan - Spc. George Perez stepped off the ramp of the Chinook twin-rotor helicopter, planting his $45,000 carbon fiber leg back in the combat zone.

Waiting at the edge of the concrete pad Saturday was his legally blind first sergeant, Colin Rich. They embraced, and then Rich threw a mock punch at the much taller Perez.

"Hey, you've lost some of that weight," Rich said.

Eagle Eye and Stumpy were back in the fight again, this time together.

Individually, they are legends in the 82nd Airborne Division.

Perez, 22, is that guy who lost the leg to a bomb in Iraq --- the guy soldiers see running all the time, the guy who started parachuting again, the guy who swore he would return to combat.

Rich, 42, is the guy who suffered a modest head wound in a 1994 training accident, then in 2002 was shot squarely in back of the skull in Afghanistan. He not only returned to duty but to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan again.

The story that hasn't gotten around is the pair of them, two guys helping each other as they fight not only the effects of their wounds, but to be deployed again.

Perez used to be with another unit. Not long after he returned to duty, someone told Rich about him, about how the highly motivated soldier was going to waste answering the phone.

"They asked me would I take him on, and me having been injured, I said yeah," Rich said. The Army transferred Perez into Rich's company.

At Fort Bragg, Perez would drive Rich to work each day, his high-tech leg working the clutch of his hot-rodded Honda Civic.

It was Rich who dubbed Perez "Stumpy," and Perez has embraced it. He plans to buy a personalized license plate that reads "tocon," Spanish for stump. Rich, meanwhile, has been tagged "Eagle Eye" around their headquarters unit.

They're in Afghanistan. But they're not done.

Rich wants to shoot for the ultimate rank for Army noncommissioned officers: sergeant major. Perez is still searching for a job that will help him stay in.

"Let's be honest," Rich said. "A guy with one-and-a-half legs can't be an infantryman. But the Army has lots of jobs, lots of them, and there's plenty he can do."

For now, Rich has made Perez the unit's armorer. He'll make sure other soldiers' weapons are properly maintained. But Perez loves cars and is good with his hands. Back home, he races the Honda. And the armorer's job isn't a full-time gig, so Rich is going to put Perez with the mechanics, maybe a couple of days a week, and see whether that works out.

Determined to see

Rich was wounded first, when a tribesman supposedly working with the United States shot him in the back of the head.

The pain was somehow both sharp and dull, and he fell on his face as a firefight cranked up.

"I remember grabbing a guy and asking if there was blood in my eyes, and he said no," Rich said. "Then I knew I was blind."

What saved his life was his Kevlar helmet, which slowed the bullet just enough. The bullet pierced the back of the helmet, deflected, turned right and smashed a silver-dollar-sized hole through his skull.

By the time its energy was spent, five pieces of the bullet were in his brain. One was so deeply embedded that the surgeons left it. The scars almost look like a cross, a vertical four-inch slash flanked by the entrance and exit holes.

He was taken to Germany, then Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington for nearly 20 days before being released.

It was six months before the surgeons patched his skull with a plastic plate, months where he had to be wary of any blow to the back of his head.

"My kids joked that they could see my heart beat," he said. "You could see it pulse."

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