The mantlepiece clock is ticking off the seconds as Kevin Blanchard talks about how he's getting along.

"It gets easier every day, or at least each week. And I can really tell the difference month to month," he says cheerily as he crosses his right leg over his left knee.

It's the kind of casual pose a person ordinarily wouldn't notice, but Blanchard's right leg is encased in a bulky metal and plastic cage held in place by pins that stick through his skin down to the bone.

As he discovered when he went out to eat with friends last week, people will stare. That's when he has some fun. Sitting in his wheelchair, the lanky 22-year-old reaches down, tugs at his left calf, grabs his left shoe and pulls. Out of his pants comes the shiny metal prosthesis that replaces the half of the leg the Marine lance corporal left in Iraq.

Blanchard laughs as he recalls the startled reactions of his fellow diners at Logan's Roadhouse. He's determined, he said, that "I'll not let this get me down at all."

His optimism was hard won, however.

Kristin Polverino, Blanchard's girlfriend of three years, said, "It's taken a while for him to get to that point." But, "he's an amazing person who says 'I can do this, I can get through it.'"

Polverino has been going to Washington, D.C., every weekend since Blanchard began his recuperation in government hospitals on July 5. He finished his first visit home Sunday when he returned to Walter Reed Army Medical Center for his next round of treatment - including a bone graft. He expects to be back for good in four or five weeks.

Sitting in his parents' rural Troutville home, overlooking fields populated with horses and emus, Blanchard last week described what life has been like since it changed forever on June 30.

On a routine patrol in western Iraq, the Humvee Blanchard was driving struck an IED - improvised explosive device. Shrapnel ripped through the vehicle in a blast that burst the eardrums of every occupant except Blanchard.

"I looked down and saw my shoe with part of my ankle sticking out of the top of it, then a gap and then my knee.

"I thought, 'Oh, this is bad.'"

His right leg was horribly mangled as well. "There was blood everywhere. A huge pool of it."

Blanchard tried to lift the stump and move himself.

"My instinct was to fight. I thought we were under attack. I didn't think of the leg, I was trying not to die."

Among the passengers was "a doc" - a medical corpsman. He started attending Blanchard, who was the most seriously wounded man on the vehicle, giving him morphine and applying tourniquets to both legs.

Heavily sedated, Blanchard was evacuated out of Iraq, arriving July 5 at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., for treatment. On Aug. 2, he was transferred to Walter Reed to continue his rehabilitation with a prosthesis.

The Army medical center's amputee unit is considered one of the most advanced in the world and has treated dozens of patients wounded in Iraq. Blanchard is still working on toughening up the stump where his prosthesis fits, and eventually will have seven "legs" specialized for various tasks, including sports.

"We view these patients as world-class athletes,'' Col. Jonathan Jaffin, then-commander of the Walter Reed Health Care System, told The Associated Press last year. "Our goal is to restore them to world-class status, and that means that we're going to make sure we get them the very best in terms of prosthetics."

There have now been almost 1,900 U.S. military deaths in Iraq, but often forgotten are the more than 14,400 injuries. The Department of Defense now says that IEDs are responsible for more dead and wounded than any other source.

Many of those wounded, such as Blanchard, suffer multiple injuries.

The last piece of shrapnel was recently removed from his right leg, just below his knee. Swelling in his calf required the doctors to split the skin, then use grafts taken from his thigh to cover the wounds caused by that and the shrapnel. His thigh is still raw and tender, and must be blown with a hair dryer periodically each day to control "weeping."

Blanchard said he hasn't been in much pain since his earliest days at Bethesda - "The doc says I have less pain receptors in my brain than others." He is, however, taking methadone now as he weans himself from the ultra-potent narcotics used to control pain right after the life-threatening injuries.

The Marine concedes his attitude got a tremendous boost just by coming home, where he was inundated with calls and visits by friends, as well as "at least five cards every day from somebody" at Hollins Road Baptist Church, which he's attended since birth.

"I've gotten more religious," he said. "This is definitely a time of need of God. ... Sometimes it feels like the whole country is praying for me. It's helped a lot. I'm sure of that."

Blanchard is also complimentary of the care and support he's gotten from the Marines. So far, his only complaints have been that his personal items from Iraq, such as his digital camera, still haven't shown up, and that his parents were mistakenly billed $1,500 by United Airlines to travel to see him.

The Marines paid for his parents, Ronnie and Gail Blanchard, to fly to Washington to visit him the day after his arrival at Bethesda. The airline also billed his parents' Visa card. Three months later, the Blanchards are still waiting to get that charge removed. A United spokeswoman said Friday that company records show the charges were voided the same day they were made, but the Blanchards said they have not been removed yet.

Kevin Blanchard plans to attend Virginia Tech and probably seek the business degree he always thought he'd get. But his experiences could change that, he says, so that he might pursue some kind of medical training or even become a prosthetist.

What he knows for sure is that he wants to travel back to Bethesda and Walter Reed frequently to help other amputees.

"Somebody can come in, like the psychologist" and offer the assurance that things are going to get better, Blanchard said, "but that doesn't really help."

"I can't explain the mental suffering, the pain. You feel like you can't go on, but you can. I've felt like that." Talking to other amputees who've gotten their lives back to normal made the difference in his frame of mind.

Among his main concerns now is how to regain - in muscle - the 25 pounds he's lost since beginning his recuperation.

"I do face some challenges I have to overcome, a lot I never thought I'd have to face. Fortunately, most of those won't last forever.

"I'm confident in myself. I know what I have to do."