CENTRAL CITY, Iowa -- The war was over. Twenty-two-year-old Raymond Young's battalion was ordered to pull out, and the new father was headed home to see his baby for the first time.

He stepped on the land mine on the way out of Iraq.

His convoy stopped for a meal March 9, and Private Young conscientiously climbed out of his armored personnel carrier to inspect the vehicle and check the oil. Dozens of soldiers were milling about, but his boot hit the mine, buried in the sand like a scorpion with a venom of shrapnel.

As he fell, he saw most of his right foot was gone. "I thought, why me?" he said.

In Iowa, the warm May breezes tease the ready farmlands with the perfume of coming summer, and the question no longer haunts Private Young.

"It happened. It's done. No sense in worrying about it," said the tall, thin young man.

He flew home to Cedar Rapids and a hero's welcome two weeks ago. He came out of the plane on crutches. He figures that is a turn of fate with two sides: It could have been someone else, or it could have been even worse for him.

"The first guys to get to me thought my face was pretty bad. But then they cleaned off the blood, and it was only one piece of shrapnel that cut my lip," he said. "I got extremely lucky. I could have messed my face up, my eyes. . . ."

According to the Pentagon, 357 U.S. servicemen and women were wounded in the Persian Gulf conflict. Many will recover fully. Others, like Private Young, will be reminded every day of the price they paid.

"I'm not bitter. I can see the job had to be done," he said. He would go again, given the same choices. Soldiers follow orders.

But he muses over the reasons for those orders. "This war was for oil. I am kind of wondering if it was worth it," he said.

His mother, Pat Bridge, is more conflicted. "The war was for the people over there. They asked for help, and we couldn't refuse. Raymond signed up for the Army, so he had to do what they sent him to do," she said.

But tears rim her eyes when she sees her son hobbling in pain. Was it worth it? "No," she snaps, quickly.

He is doing better than the doctors predicted, Private Young said. He can walk without crutches for short distances on what is left of his feet. With cotton stuffed into his sneakers, he looks normal, except for his slow, wobbly limp. Next month, military doctors in Georgia will fit one or both feet with prostheses.

But the pain is there.

"There are nights when I finally settle down and start to relax, and the pain comes back, and the muscle spasms start. I can't sleep. If the pain pills aren't helping, the only thing I can do is live with it."

He hopes now, with a future in the military no longer possible, to go to college and get a business degree to support his family.

From the porch of his parents' A-frame house, beyond the small stable with horses Pecos and Tom, Private Young can watch the dusk settle on gentle hills. He and his family used to spend days hunting in those hills -- his mother is a national archery champion.

"I really like the outdoors a lot," he said. "I'm worried that this [injury] will stop me from doing the kinds of things I used to."

It was the outdoors that helped lead him into the military. Field exercises somehow seemed to fit with the life in a small, rural place like Central City, 25 miles north of Cedar Rapids. Raymond signed up with the reserves as a junior in high school.

He liked the weekend training and the summer exercises, but when he got out of high school, other matters absorbed him: college at night, working days at a pizza parlor. There he met Leslie, a pretty blonde from nearby Marion. In a few years he had a wife, a new son, an associate degree in graphic arts and a job that did not pay enough -- designing telephone book advertisements.

"One day on the way home from work I swung by the recruiter, and I found out I could make $400 to $500 a month more by going on active duty," he said. "I needed it to support my family. I didn't have enough education to find a decent-paying job. An associate degree just doesn't cut it any more." He signed up for four years.

"I was all for it," said Leslie Young. "Getting away from home, starting fresh, starting new. I never in a million years thought of war."

Raymond Young reported to his first duty base in Fort Benning, Ga., last June, as part of a mechanized infantry unit. Leslie and son Cody, then 1 1/2 , moved down Aug. 8. Six days earlier, Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. Eight days later, Private Young left with orders to go to the Middle East.

Leslie cursed the timing. Raymond had a different reaction.

"It may sound crazy, but I was looking forward to it," he said, somewhat sheepishly. "I had to admit it. It was curiosity. . . . I guess I wondered what it would actually be like."

What it was like was hot. And boring. It was sweltering when he arrived in Saudi Arabia -- at 3 in the morning. In the desert during the long buildup, the days of monotonous training dragged slow.

Pregnant Leslie soon knew he would not be back for the birth of their second child. She had moved back to Iowa to be with her parents. She wrote him letters, sometimes hot with frustration.

Courtney was born Feb. 18 as her father and a half-million troops in Saudi Arabia tensed in anticipation of a fight.

The ground war, when it finally came, was for Private Young a blur of sleepless nights, a racing plunge into Iraq, tracer shells and explosions to the left and right but never in front of his unit, of surrendering enemy soldiers and then a cease-fire without his having ever fired.

"When the cease-fire came, I thought I had made it through," Private Young said.

Three weeks later, Leslie got a call from her husband. She thought he was phoning to tell her when his unit would get home. "I've had a little accident . . .," he began.

The front of his right foot was gone. Doctors thought they could save his left toes. But after he passed through two field medical units and hospital stops in Saudi Arabia and Germany and at Andrews Air Force Base, doctors at Fort Gordon, Ga., said they had to amputate.

"That was a pretty rough night," Private Young said of his mood.

But for most of his treatment, he has remained determinedly upbeat. He pushed his rehabilitation program, pestering doctors let him abandon the wheelchair and disdaining crutches for as long as he could take the pain to stand on his own bandaged feet.

After 10 or 15 minutes he must sit down, but the periods are getting longer.

He saw other wounded soldiers locked in depression. And many soldiers in the wards felt their homecoming was slighted, that the Pentagon wanted to avoid publicity about the downside of war.

"You see on TV the guys walking off the plane coming home. They don't show the guys like Raymond coming into the 'D hospital," said Mrs. Bridge.

He will be discharged from the Army and given disability pay. Until he knows when that will happen -- and how much income he will receive -- Private Young can make few plans. He has applied to several colleges to get a business degree. But the uncertainties of when and whether he will be able to go to school are frustrating.

"I want to get our life started again, find out where we are going to live and get our family settled," said Mrs. Young.

But brooding seems a waste of time, Private Young has concluded.

"The doctors say after I heal up, I'll be getting around fine," he said. "I can't keep up with Cody, and that bothers me a little bit," he said, eyeing his rambunctious son. "I'd like to be able to . . . run around with him. But right now, I can't."

He tries nearly everything else. He has bought fishing gear and is making plans to take his son to a lake. If he has trouble negotiating the terrain, he will get down on his rear and slide, he said with a big grin.

He is not embarrassed and does not hide his disability. He has gone limping to seek out old chums and teachers and plans to visit an elementary class that wrote him letters overseas. And mail keeps coming in from strangers who have heard about his wounds.

4 Private Young knows the attention will diminish.

"It's nice when someone comes up to you and says you did a good job over there. There's a little pride. It peps you up a little," he said.

By the time the attention slackens, he said hopes to be well on his way to recovery.

"When this stuff finally dies off, I expect I'll be healed," he said.

"There will be a few times when I come across something I have a problem doing, and it will bother me for a while. But then I'll find a way around it, and keep going.

"You have to keep going."