In a Place of Pain and Recovery, Room to Romp

"It was hectic," Tyler said. "There was no place to do homework on the bed" while a sibling watched TV, another surfed the Internet and a third played video games.

Tougher to endure were their father's muscle spasms, nightmares and flashbacks. "Sometimes," Nathan said, "when you'd wake him up, he'd think you were an enemy." And then there was the time he stopped breathing.

"That caused a little bit of stress," Amy Bounds said. "But they couldn't express the tension," and, on the grounds, they had to be careful to respect the peace and quiet of the wounded.

To give them some relief and much-needed exercise, Amy Bounds said, she would stop at a park playground on their way back from school in Maryland. But negotiating the time was difficult, she said, in part because Ian, who suffers from attention-deficit disorder, needed to follow a finely tuned routine or he wouldn't sleep at night.

Yesterday, Ian handed his mother a toy sword and dived for the playground. Inside, Nathan was busy strapping Rebecca into swing to send her sailing.

Sgt. Ramon Padilla, 32, watched as his wife took turns pushing Ramon Jr., 2, and Emily, 3, on the swings. His head bears a red gash from the shrapnel wound in Afghanistan that carved out a piece of his skull, damaged his brain and blew off part of his left arm.

"It's very good therapy, being out here with the kids," he said. "It just brings it back to normal."

But he added, glancing at a plate loaded with hot dogs from the grill: "It's tough to be out here, eating with my family in the sun, when the other guys are still in Afghanistan."