Six weeks after James Fair, a 22-year-old combat engineer, began serving in Iraq in the fall of 2003, he detonated a homemade bomb while walking away from a barbed wire fence he had just erected near Falluja. He lost his eyesight and both arms below the elbows, and sustained brain injuries.
Seven months later, when he was released from a military hospital — the blue scars from the powder burns on his face still visible — he moved in with his then wife in Kansas but left after two months, because, he said recently, she “couldn’t take care of me.” After that, he returned home to Western Pennsylvania to live with his mother, Lonnie Mosco, and her new husband, Scott, in a small two-story house they had moved to in his absence.
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