OXFORD,
Miss. – From his waist up, Aaron Rice may not stand out among his
classmates at the University of Mississippi School of Law; however, he
wears a distinct “badge of honor” below his salvaged left knee that he
is not ashamed to show.
The Hattiesburg native with a
prosthetic leg started law school in August and was selected for a
scholarship named after an UM law alumnus who was not only a veteran
but also suffered a nearly identical injury. Rice is one of three
first-year students selected for the Mitchell Scholarship in Law, named
for William P. “Pete” Mitchell, a 1937 law school graduate, and his
wife, Mary Annis.
After his freshman year of college and a stint as an intern on Haley Barbour’s first gubernatorial campaign, Rice enlisted in the Marine Corps Reserve and was deployed to Iraq in March 2005.
“His story is very similar to my father’s,” said Jane Leech, Mitchell’s daughter. “When I read Aaron’s personal statement (for the scholarship), I thought my father would appreciate him. This is not designed to be an academic scholarship; it’s given to someone who has desire in their heart.”
Leech’s father was named UM law alumnus of the year in 2002, a short time after the scholarship was established. Besides the first-year students who receive funds, the scholarship also supports two second-year students and two third-year students. Two ethics awards named for Mitchell also are given each year to second-year law students.
Mitchell practiced law in Tupelo his entire legal career. In 1944, he took leave from being a lawyer and joined the U.S. soldiers stationed in Europe during World War II. An intelligence officer in the Army’s 120th Infantry Regiment, he served as a liaison between infantry and artillery units in combat zones. He was in Germany in October 1944 when shrapnel hit his jeep and tore into his left leg, which was later amputated.
Some 60 years later, in the Al Anbar province of Iraq, Rice, then a 21-year-old Marine lance corporal, was deployed with the Jackson-based 2-14 Echo Battery. He learned to drive in the sandy terrain and spot potential IEDs in his first days there. When the time came, he was quick to volunteer for a new mobile assault platoon, an infantry unit of 15-18 men comprising Marines from Texas and Ohio.
On March 18, Rice was driving the third vehicle in his convoy when his Humvee’s left wheel hit an anti-tank landmine just outside the city of Haditha. The crippled vehicle’s dash pinned Rice, and the explosion mutilated his left leg below the knee. He had been in Iraq only two-and-a-half weeks.
“(My leg ends) somewhere down here,” Rice said pointing near the bottom of the Marine crest painted on his prosthesis. “But during the accident, I think I was somewhere around here,” he said pulling off his shoe and holding it sole up, toe out above his knee.
Rice also has a Purple Heart painted on the back of his prosthesis along with the numbers of his unit and campaign. The words “combat wounded” are painted above. In conversation, he only mentions the pain in passing, because “that goes away after a while,” he said.
Rice was put into a medically induced coma after his first surgery and was flown to National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where doctors operated several times on his injury. He would later need skin grafts. When he awoke, he reunited with his wife, Kelly, who learned of her husband’s injury two days before when Marines in dress uniform came to her apartment door in Starkville.
For Rice, the worst pain of his military service came later. It did not come in the six operations in which surgeons removed and reshaped the skin around his battered knee, nor did it come during excruciating physical therapy. His worst pain came May 7, 2005, when his former commander called with news that his unit had been ambushed. Seven of his friends were wounded, and three were dead.
Rice has not allowed being an amputee to define his life. In October 2005, six months after his amputation and against his doctors’ advice, he ran a 10-mile race for wounded veterans in Washington, D.C. Other amputees stopped at checkpoints to adjust their prosthetic limbs, but he ran on for fear he might not be able to start again. He had run barely a mile the previous day, and the pain was harrowing.
Three miles into the race, he said a switch in his brain must have turned slightly allowing endorphins to rush through him, pushing him past the pain and over the finish line. He did what doctors had said he could not do. He learned at the finish line that the race turned out to be closer to 11.4 miles because the final stretch was rerouted due to a bomb threat.
Rice and his wife returned to Mississippi in 2006 and finished college. Rice still races, skis and cycles and enjoys the outdoors. Wearing shorts is normal, and it sometimes takes him a moment to figure out why people glance at him in everyday situations. His prosthesis has become the new normal, and he sometimes forgets he has it on.
“Kids are the best,” he said. “They will crawl under the table and come up at – you know. When they ask what (my prosthesis) is, I just tell them it’s my pretend leg and that seems to register with them.”
Rice isn’t sure which area of law he wants to specialize in, but politics seem to have a special attraction for him. He describes it as a way people really get big things done. An active member of the Republican Party, Rice was a delegate to the 2008 Republican National Convention.
But the pull of public service is only one of many options for Rice. For the moment, he is rising to the challenge set forth by Marine Cpl. Stan Mayer years ago when the two men were still in Iraq. On a spring night the day before his injury, Rice and Mayer looked out as the day faded into night in the desert, and they let themselves think about what they would do if they were hit. When Rice said he did not think he could personally handle the loss of an arm or a leg, Mayer told him to forget it. Instead, Mayer said, if he should come out of Iraq maimed, he should wear it as a badge of honor.
For more information, visit http://www.law.olemiss.edu .