By Daniel Hartill,Staff Writer
A Turner Marine is healing from wounds he suffered in Iraq

Eight months after a bomb exploded beside Thomas Lilley’s vehicle – burning his face and slashing his head and hand – the 19-year-old lance corporal looks perfectly healthy.

The Marine’s short brown hair hides a scar on his head. He wears glasses, a reminder of a scratch to his right eye, and a half-inch pink scar marks his right cheek.

If only his hand worked better.

Half of his right hand remains numb all these months later. Doctors at the Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, tell him the nerves may have been permanently damaged from the blast.

“I’m lucky,” the quiet Marine said. “I’ve seen a lot worse.”

Lilley, a 2004 graduate of Leavitt Area High School, had been in Iraq for only a month when the accident occurred.

He was just beginning to understand his duties, driving an amphibious assault vehicle back to camp after a 12-hour patrol of the city of Fallujah.

The Turner man was passing a row of cars when one stuck its front end into his lane. As he swerved to miss it, it pulled out, crashing into his vehicle and exploding.

He still recalls the sounds, first the explosion and then the screams of the gunner above. He remembers his own wounds and the blood that filled his vision.

The first days were the worst. Doctors covered his damaged right eye and warned him that he might never see from it. The burns on his face were healing but peeling painfully.

Nurses tried to show him his reflection in a mirror, but he refused.

“I didn’t want to see myself,” he said.

Army medical workers shipped him to Germany and then to San Antonio, to the 450-bed hospital at Fort Sam Houston.

There, he saw soldiers in far worse shape.

This teaching hospital is the primary destination for soldiers and Marines with burns from Iraq. It also has an amputee-care center.

Lilley has seen wards of soldiers with third-degree wounds or missing limbs. Soft-spoken and earnest, he said he’s doing extraordinarily well by comparison.

For most of 2006, he has lived across the street from the hospital, in a barracks set up for military outpatients.

“I want to get healthy,” he said. His hand, however, may keep him from ever returning to regular duty.

In the coming weeks, he expects to sit down with Marine Corps officials, who will decide whether he’s able to rejoin his unit, now stationed at Camp Lejeune, N.C. If not, he will be given a medical discharge and possible disability.

For Lilley, who turned 18 while in boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., his aim is to return to Maine for good. He wants to go to college and pick up his civilian life.

And the war? He worries about what his returning to Iraq would do to his family. His parents and older sister, Missy, live in the Lewiston-Auburn area.

“I know how hard it was the first time on them,” he said. “I don’t want to do that to them again.”