SAN ANTONIO — Thomas More than a twelvemonth after marcher Alejandro Albarran lost portion of his right leg to a blast in Iraq, he still hasn't decided whether he'll remain in the Army.
"Right now, I'm leaning against it," Albarran said, looking ahead with antipathy to a possible desk job.
But whatever he decides, Spc. Albarran, 20, won't be leaving Army life behind now that his married woman enlisted to take his topographic point among the ranks.
"After everything he's gone through — and helium loves the Army — he sort of divine me," Janay Albarran said. "I made him a promise that I would complete what he started."
So, while he underwent five-day-a-week rehab to retrieve his balance and strength on a prosthetic leg at an Army rehabilitation installation here, she learned to hit a rifle and base in formation in boot encampment at Garrison Jackson, S.C.
Mrs. Albarran became Pvt. Albarran on Friday. The couple's 2-year-old girl is staying with a grandma in Arizona.
Across the Army, roughly 24,000 soldiers, roughly 9 percentage of the force, are married to other soldiers. There are no statistics on how many fall in after a partner or household member is badly wounded in combat, but Maj. Anne Edgecomb, an Army spokeswoman, said she's heard of sibs joining after the hurt or decease of a soldier and at least one adult female who joined after her hubby was killed in combat.
"The courageousness of our soldiers and their households is remarkable," she said.
Janay Albarran, 19, wasn't always thrilled with the prospect of Army life. She met her hubby at a high school football game game in Yuma, Ariz., near where they grew up.
She learned later from an online profile he already had signed up for the Army.
"I was like, 'Well, I met person and he's about to leave.' I was a small upset," Janay Albarran said. "I knew he was joining the Army and we're at war."
The couple married in February 2006, and he deployed to Republic Of Iraq six calendar months later.
He was in a Humvee escorting a unit of measurement that was sent to the scene of a detonated bomb in November 2006 when a 2nd blast hit. The vehicle reared up and slammed to the ground. Alejandro Albarran only retrieves flashes: a medick over him, the helicopter.
A 5 a.m. telephone phone call told Janay Albarran her hubby was ache and she should have got a bag packed.
She met him at Bruno Walter Reed Army Checkup Center in American Capital respective years later, and they traveled to Rupert Brooke Army Checkup Center in San Antonio, where some of the most severely wounded are treated.
It quickly became clear that attempts to salvage Alejandro Albarran's less right leg were failing. When the hurting became too great, he told his married woman to allow the docs amputate.
At first, Janay Albarran had to assist her hubby frock and acquire out his wheelchair.
"She had to be my memory. My short term memory is bad," said Alejandro Albarran, who also suffered a caput hurt in the blast.
But as he got more than mobile, the teen married woman who was afraid of guns decided to take her husband's topographic point in the ranks.
Janay Albarran will not, strictly speaking, be replacing her hubby in the Army. He was an infantryman, a place not unfastened to women. (But he observes with humiliation that she outscored him on her basic preparation rifle test.)
She anticipates to acquire a human resources assignment, one less likely to take to deployment in Iraq.
"It's just another job," Alejandro Albarran said, taking a interruption between weight lifting sets at the big amputee rehab installation here.
But a safe duty assignment isn't guaranteed.
Janay Albarran said she worries about possible deployment when she believes about their daughter, Iliana.
"That's the lone thing that panics me. He's already been hurt," she said. "If I make acquire deployed, I'm going to lose him so much. But it's nothing I can't handle."
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