LEWISTON – Spc. James Kuritz figures he lost 50 percent of his hearing when an Iraqi bomb exploded above his M-1 tank, blowing off the hatch and booming in his ears.

Though it’s been months since the blast, the 21-year-old soldier’s ears still bleed sometimes.

Yet, he believes the Army will return him to Iraq.

“I don’t want to go back,” said Kuritz, who grew up in Norway and Hebron. “I’m sure I will be. They need everybody they can get.”

Given his choice, the 2004 graduate of Oxford Hills Comprehensive High School in Paris would attend college in New York City, earn a degree and go to work for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

His contract with the Army ends Sept. 14.

However, the return order is likely to come before that, engaging the military’s stop-loss rule and keeping him in the Army until the deployment ends.

“Every day I wake up and hope that we announce a pullout,” he said. “But I don’t think it’s going to happen, at least until we get a new president.”

The policy now seems to be more troops.

“Neither the generals or the president want to admit their mistakes,” Kuritz said in a phone interview from his post at Fort Hood, Texas. “Even the dumbest people are realizing that there’s nothing over there that we can do. It’s a civil war.”

The sadness with the war has spread to Kuritz’s dad, Paul Kuritz, a theater professor at Bates College.

“You’d think they would have learned from Vietnam,” Paul Kuritz said. As with that war, U.S. soldiers are being asked to fight an enemy without any hope in sight of a war-ending surrender, he said.

“I’m all in favor of the military, “as long as the military gets to be the military.”

A soldier needs an attainable goal, Paul Kuritz explained.

He’s proud of his son’s awards: the Army Commendation Medal, the Cavalryman Order of the Spur and the Combat Action Badge

He’s puzzled by the likelihood that his son may again see combat, despite his hearing loss.

“It doesn’t make sense,” he said.

Too much about the Army lacks sense, the younger Kuritz said.

He joined up in May of 2005 because he was bored, working around Oxford Hills for a contractor who fixed up apartments for rent.

He figured he’d likely be sent to Iraq, and that seemed all right with him.

“I guess I knew,” he said. “I wanted to see some of the world.”

The Army made him a tank driver, putting him at the controls of a 67-ton M1 Abrams. He arrived in Iraq seven months after his induction. Almost immediately, his job changed.

He was sent to the city of Taji, about 20 miles north of Baghdad, and spent most of his time in Humvees.

His missions included patrols and searches. He worked a rigorous pace of four days on and one half-day off. Alerts would sometimes extend the work for one to two weeks without rest.

“Every day was contact with the enemy of some sort,” he said. Sniper fire and IEDs, or improvised explosive devices, were commonplace.

However, the snipers were becoming better shots and the explosives less improvised. Guard members returning to Maine have talked of laser detonators. Kuritz described shaped explosives meant to focus a blast and rip through the heaviest armor.

Kuritz said he felt unprotected, especially in the Humvee.

“You go out and hope you don’t get hit,” he said.

He was in a tank when an IED wounded him.

“It blew the hatch open,” he said. Of his crew, he was the only one hurt. “I was bleeding out of my eardrums.”

For six weeks, he heard nothing. Then, his hearing began to return.

He thought he was over the worst until a few weeks ago, when the blood returned.

“I thought it was my right ear, but it’s both ears,” he said.

He has seen doctors and scheduled more visits. As with his next mission, he waits for word about whether his hearing will ever return to normal.

He expects he’ll have to wait a while longer.

“When you’re in the Army, your life is on hold,” Kuritz said.