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As the scale of his injuries sank in, his heart tightened. One arm was a stump and his remaining hand had only two fingers. Later, his big toe was grafted on in place of a thumb. One eye was blind and milky, as if melted, and his ears had been burnt away. The top of his skull had been removed and inserted by doctors into the fatty tissue inside his torso to keep it viable and moist for future use. He was a mess.
Renee received the news that he had been blown up from his mother and father, who asked her to come over. They didn’t dare tell her until she reached their house. The next morning, on Christmas Eve, they flew together to the Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas and set up a vigil at his bedside. “He was a strange charcoal colour, but Ty still looked like himself,” says his mother, Becky. By the time his burnt flesh had been removed, he didn’t.
“I don’t remember saying it to Renee, but I’d have understood if she’d said, ‘Yeah, I’m out of here,’” Ty says.
He had seen other badly wounded soldiers and marines get dumped by their girlfriends in hospital. Sometimes they would be cruel to their girlfriends and chuck them pre-emptively to spare themselves hurt. But quietly and with little fuss, Ty, 24, and Renee, 21, resolved to stick it out.
They were married in October, in their home town of Metamora, Illinois, a small farming community in the Midwest. Friends, family and marines were present: it was as if the whole town had turned out. The wedding was planned to the last exquisite detail by Renee and her mother, Donna, who spoke regularly on the phone because Ty was still undergoing operations in Texas.
“I did the male part of the wedding planning,” says Ty. “They’d ask me questions, but I always gave the wrong answer, so eventually they stopped asking me about it.”
Renee felt sick with nerves before going up the aisle, but she had no second thoughts. She looked radiant in a white dress. “You’re beautiful,” Ty told her. He wore his combat medals and a Purple Heart for being wounded in action.
Donna had been shocked when she found out the extent of Ty’s injuries, but she told her daughter she simply had to “follow her heart, and that we’d make it work, if she wanted it”. Today she is convinced that they will never part.
Ty was on his second tour of duty in Iraq and had been patrolling the streets in a truck with six marines around al-Qaim, an entry point for foreign fighters on the Syrian border. He had been there for five months, and the mission had become routine. “Mostly we just rode around and came back. The atmosphere was not particularly menacing. They weren’t shooting guns at us any more.”
Suddenly a suicide bomber blew himself up by his truck. “It felt like somebody just blasted me in the face really hard,” Ty recalls. “I was rolling around on the bed of a truck, yelling the whole time I was conscious. The guy next to me kept putting me out – I guess I kept relighting.”
He was put in a helicopter and his clothes were cut off.
“I kept saying I was cold, and they put a poncho liner on me.” He continued to shiver under the flimsy covering.
Rachel Campbell-Johnston at Tate Britain for the new Hogarth exhibition
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