A Fighting Spirit

Marcus Kuboy doesn’t remember the explosion that nearly killed him.

A National Guard medic deployed to Iraq, Kuboy was riding in the backseat of an armored Hummer when the vehicle tripped a roadside bomb. The blast tossed his truck 30 feet into the air, killed the driver and ejected Kuboy and one other soldier from the vehicle.

Kuboy was unconscious when support arrived moments later. The first soldiers who arrived on the scene took one look at his broken body, he said, and pronounced him dead. But then a squad leader, looking for signs of life, kicked the New Hope native.

“I groaned, and he said, ‘He’s alive, get on him,” said Kuboy.

Kuboy, now 33, attends class at , lives in Woodbury and walks with his shoulders hunched—an after-effect of the bomb blast, which broke his back, shattered his jaw and teeth, sliced through his right foot and left him with head trauma.

Instead of dwelling on his close call with death, the former soldier wants to become a counselor or advocate for wounded soldiers or veterans who have had trouble adapting to civilian life after the rigors of military service.

“He’s a true inspiration to me, and whenever I hear him tell his story, I get emotional about it,” said Sue Flannigan, a veteran services coordinator at Inver Hills. “He was given a second chance, he was absolutely near death. It takes a certain person to be where he’s at in life, and how he perceives life.”

A Long Recovery

Kuboy’s own recovery was nearly two years in the making. After an emergency surgery in Iraq that saved both his legs from amputation, he was transported to an American military hospital in Germany, where he awoke from a medically induced coma days after the bomb detonation.

Kuboy, suffering from complete amnesia, was told at the hospital that several of the other people in the Hummer with him were injured. The fourth, Staff Sgt. Greg Riewer, was killed.

“I don’t remember the blast at all; I remember being on patrol and then waking up,” said Kuboy. “I was told that I realistically shouldn’t have survived that.”

In Germany, a spinal surgeon repaired his back and doctors inserted pins and braces into his broken legs.

Kuboy made it back to the United States on April 1, 2007, where he spent four months in the trauma ward at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

“That was probably the first time I actually cried in a number of years, because I felt so confused,” Kuboy remembered. “I felt so grateful to be back on American soil, but I felt an amount of grief for the guys who weren’t going to make it back.”

Early in his recovery, Kuboy had a dream that he was floating over the hospital beds.

“I remember looking at one person and thinking, ‘Wow, I‘m thankful that’s not me, because that body is broken, it’s busted up,’” Kuboy said. “And then I had an overwhelming feeling that everything was going to be OK.”

From that point on, Kuboy took a step-by-step approach to healing, focusing on small, immediate goals.

“When I woke up, my first goal was to get the tube out of my throat, then the next goal was to lean up in bed,” Kuboy said. “From the time my head cleared, I never had any expectations, except that I knew things were going to be good.”

Moving On

After six months of outpatient care and plenty of physical rehabilitation, Kuboy started walking again. He returned to Minnesota on Dec. 23, 2007, and following more treatment at the VA Hospital in Minneapolis, started moving on with his life.

“I had four goals when I was in Iraq, and they stayed the same when I got back,” Kuboy said. “Those were to get a dog, get a truck, buy a house and go to school.”

More than four years after the bomb blast that nearly killed him, Kuboy has met the majority of those goals.

Thanks to a grant from the Department of Veterans Affairs and a helpful nonprofit organization, he owns a truck and his own home. Next year he plans to graduate with a bachelor’s degree, and hopes to pursue a master’s degree in social work at the University of Minnesota.

Motivated in part by the suicide of one of the soldiers in his company, Kuboy wants to use his experience to help other veterans.

“I just think it’s so tragic when people survive so much and either kill themselves or wither away,” Kuboy said. “If I can help anybody in that spot, then I’m all for it.”

“People that do get injured, and are blown up, or see their buddy get killed in action, there are a lot of emotions there, but they bottle those emotions up and wont talk about them,” Flannigan said. “But hearing someone with a similar story breaks down those barriers.”

“I have no doubt that he will save lives,” Flannigan said.