How could he take the constant and sometimes agonizing pain? The immobility? The blur of surgery after surgery, skin grafts and physical therapy sessions?

And how could he accept a world that was so thoroughly altered last December in Iraq, when the blast from a roadside bomb hurled him from his Humvee, tearing through his back, torso, legs and hand?

"I couldn't do it," Bryant Jacobs says. "There would be no way."

Jacobs returned to his home in Sandy on Friday evening following seven months of extensive medical care and rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

But the battle to reclaim his body is not over. His left calf is a spidery pink web of grafted skin. His right thigh is deeply pitted where muscle has been torn out. His colostomy cannot be reversed until he is able to bend at both knees, which he cannot yet do.

The least of the 24-year-old soldier's concerns, at this point, is the wound he noticed first as he lay on his stomach on a asphalt road south of Kirkuk: His left index finger had been torn off at the first knuckle.

Jacobs didn't know, at that moment, that he had been one of the lucky ones. Spc. David Mahlenbrock, a New Jersey native who had recently become the father of a baby girl, was killed in the same attack.

The young combat engineer's name falls about three quarters of the way through a list of the 1,665 U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq, as reported by the Defense Department.

The Pentagon does not keep a similarly detailed list of those injured, though it estimates that more than 12,860 have been wounded in hostile action since the war began and that about half of those injuries were the result of roadside bombs.

For Jacobs, the days following the explosion have been lost in the haze of travel, sedation and surgery. His damaged body was sent to the Ivory Combat Clinic in Kirkuk, Iraq, then to Kuwait, then to Germany. Finally, Jacobs arrived at Walter Reed.

His mother, Sherry Scheiding, was there when he opened his swollen eyes. "You can't even imagine what it was like to see him like that," she says.

But past the tubes, bandages, braces and blood, her son was alive - and having been told to prepare for the worst, Scheiding was content with that.

The California woman quit her job and remained at her son's side for three months.

"You rearrange your priorities in quite a hurry," she explains. "Things that were important before don't seem to matter a bit anymore."

She wasn't the first to change her life to help Jacobs adjust to the changing of his. As he healed, more family members came - several took up work in the Walter Reed mailroom so they could be close at all hours.

Christmas was postponed until a time when Jacobs could come home. Friends saved money and rearranged work schedules so they could afford the cross country trip.

Though his body had grown stronger and his wounds had been healing over, Jacobs was nervous about welcoming Alycia Haslam into his hospital room. "I was nervous about what she would think when she looked at me," he says.

And Haslam was nervous to see Jacobs, though not for the same reasons. She didn't want his state to affect the feelings that had been stirring since his last two weeks of leave, five months earlier.

But what they found, during the visit, was simple and unconditional love.

Haslam was waiting as Jacobs - whose plane was welcomed by airport police and firefighters, with lights and sirens blazing - wheeled up the jetway and into the concourse at Salt Lake City International Airport on Friday. And she intends to wait as long as it takes for him to complete his therapy at Walter Reed, where he will return next month.

The young soldier is yet uncertain how long it will take. He only knows that his life has been changed - and that his family's love has not.

mlaplante@sltrib.com