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War vet featured on Esquire

Iraq war veteran and triple amputee Sgt. Bryan Anderson cradles his Purple Heart on the January cover of Esquire magazine.

The theme of the issue is “the meaning of life,” and the soldier is one of several people who give their perspective.

Anderson, 25, also was featured in Army Times in the Nov. 20 Back Talk, “Wounded, still warriors at heart.”

On Oct. 23, 2005, he had about two months left in Iraq before 411th Military Police Company was slated to return to Fort Hood, Texas.

That day, one he has since been told to call his “alive day,” a bomb exploded underneath his vehicle.

Anderson told Esquire his smoking habit saved his right hand.

“I’d be a quadruple amputee if I wasn’t smoking. I’d normally have my hands on the steering wheel, but I was smoking, so I had just my left hand on the steering wheel. My hand still got messed up, but if I had my hand down there, I would have been done.”

His comments are primarily colored by humor, rather than self-pity.

“I’m still me,” he says in the article. “I’m just 75 percent off. Get a great deal on Bryan Anderson this week.”

He would like to become a stuntman, Anderson told the magazine.

“I could be on prosthetics, and they could blow my legs off,” he said.

Still, Anderson admits he has occasional periods of dark thoughts, when he feels extremely self-conscious and mourns that he wouldn’t be able to pick up his children if he ever marries and starts a family.

In November, Anderson left Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he had been undergoing rehabilitation, and returned to his parents’ home in Rolling Meadows, Ill., a suburb of Chicago. The home was renovated to accommodate their son’s new circumstances.

His twin brother, Bobby, is still serving in the Army. Anderson’s prosthetic left hand was molded from his brother’s real hand.