James Back was 24 when he walked into the U.S. Marine Corps office in Logan, sat down and asked a recruiter, "What can you do for me?"

Five months later, Back was headed to boot camp in San Diego. Five years later, Back returned from his second tour of duty in Iraq with a Purple Heart, the U.S. military medal honoring someone wounded in combat.

He feels lucky to be alive. As his wife said, "There was lots of angel overtime that deployment. There were a lot of miracles."

Back was near Mohammadiyah, 10 miles south of Baghdad, when his Humvee hit an artillery round planted by insurgents.

Back's buddy, one of seven others in the vehicle, saw where the shrapnel entered and left his friend's uniform. "I felt like I'd been hit with a sledgehammer," Back said.

A chunk of shrapnel had punched through the outer shell of the Humvee, shot through Back's seat, through his flak jacket and shattered the heavy armor plate that protects the man's chest and back. As it turned out, friction from the shrapnel on the man's back rubbed a first-degree burn on his skin. He still has a scar, the chunk of metal that caused it, and a memory of the attitude that helped him through other heart-stopping brushes with death during his tour.

"A lot of times I tried not to think about it. Sometimes we just made jokes. But in the back of your mind, you always knew, I might get blown up today."

Back expects he will return to the country 7,000 miles away sometime in 2007. He doesn't see an end to the conflict in Iraq soon.

"Iraq is the inevitable. There are so many people needed there," he said. "And I don't have a problem going back anytime soon."

So, the young man born in Sandy will have a perspective on this war that started almost with the first action.

When the United States launched Operation Iraqi Freedom in March 2003, Back was on board the USS Austin in the Persian Gulf. For three weeks, Back and hundreds of other Marines just waited. They watched satellite television mostly, trained a bit and waited. From up on deck, Back could look to the north and see Kuwait, and he knew Iraq and the war was just beyond.

Finally Back's unit was called on to land. They were in country for one month, doing foot patrols in a small town in central southern Iraq called Qalatsukar and hunting down members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party.

"We were going in there to liberate Iraq. It was a fairly simple plan, and we executed it."

Then his unit went home.

But Back is one who can speak firsthand to the change in the war's intensity during nearly three years. "It has become a lot more complicated," he said in an interview.