Limbs Lost to Enemy Fire, Women Forge a New Reality

She retired from the Army as a captain -- a tough choice only four years out of West Point, but one she made as she tried to imagine fitting back into military culture. Without her arm, she could no longer do push-ups, tie her combat boots, tuck her hair neatly under a beret.

She still has friends in Iraq, although one was killed in December. But the Bronze Star that she was awarded last year for her role at the Diyala police station is tucked away in a box. That day, she was in charge of 32 soldiers during the sustained firefight, taking a position on the roof with a grenade launcher, then quelling a jail riot.

Lately, she works at an office in Arlington, mostly as a consultant to the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. She has applied to graduate school in security studies, bought a condo in Adams Morgan and co-wrote a book proposal about postwar recovery.

To get to this new place, Halfaker has made all sorts of adjustments. She types on a computer one-handed. Drives a car with a push-button ignition. Uses her knees to hold steady a peanut butter jar she wants to open. To write a note or a letter, she learned to use her left hand, practicing nightly at Walter Reed as she penned her thoughts in a journal.

"You don't think about how many times you have a lot of things in your hands, like for me just carrying my coffee from the cafe downstairs up to my office on the seventh floor is a total battle every day," she said. She has to hold the coffee cup, scan her identification badge, open doors, press elevator buttons. Sometimes she spills. Sometimes the coffee burns her.

In her apartment, Halfaker bends and stretches into yoga poses, her artificial arm lying beside the mirror. More functional prosthetics did little good for her type of injury, she found. So she persuaded prosthetic artists at Walter Reed to make this one -- lightweight and natural-looking, easier on her body, allowing her to blend in with the outside world.

Halfaker goes without a prosthetic when she is exercising, jogging through the streets of Washington or snowboarding in Colorado or lobbing tennis balls around a court.

"I never really wanted to hide the fact that I was an amputee," she said, "but I never wanted it to be the central focus of my life." For some men, she said, it seems a badge of honor that they do not mind showing. "For a woman, at least for me, it's not at all. . . . The fact that I only have one arm, I'm okay with that, but I want to be able to walk around and look like everyone else and not attract attention to myself."

Last year, a guy she met on the Metro asked her out, saying that he thought she was pretty. She agreed to meet him for lunch but felt nervous about mentioning her missing limb. It turned out that he was no less interested, she said. In the fall, she started dating an Army anesthesiologist, to whom she has become close. He is deployed in Iraq.

As a woman in her twenties, "I want to look as good as I can look," she acknowledged. "I think that's very much a female perspective, based on the roles that society has put men and women in."

Even more, she said, "I don't want to be known for being one-armed. I want to be known for whatever it is I do in my life."