A very unusual story here about wounded and maimed GIs being recycled.

SAN ANTONIO (AP) — In the blur of smoke and blood after a bomb blew up under his Humvee in Iraq, Sgt. Tawan Williamson looked down at his shredded leg and knew it couldn't be saved. His military career, though, pulled through.

Less than a year after the attack, Williams is running again with a high-tech prosthetic leg and plans to take up a new assignment, probably by the fall, as an Army job counselor and affirmative action officer in Okinawa, Japan.

In an about-face by the Pentagon, the military is putting many more amputees back on active duty — even back into combat, in some cases.

Williamson, a 30-year-old Chicago native who is missing his left leg below the knee and three toes on the other foot, acknowledged that some will be skeptical of a maimed soldier back in uniform.

"But I let my job show for itself," he said. "At this point, I'm done proving. I just get out there and do it."

SGT Williamson found the medical help to get back up on his foot, and learned to adapt to life with a prosthetic. Good for him. A thinking man could probably come up with two baskets full of clichés about this story, but it may well be that an Army stretched as this as ours is, and faced with decades of dangerous and deadly occupation duty in the hellhole of Iraq, needs every uniform it can front.

There are assignments a less-than-whole soldier can perform with skill, and the duty slot SGT Williamson is apparently scheduled for is well within his physical capabilities. It’s unlikely he would get much assistance through the VA until we’ve had a Democratic president and a Congress with a strong Dem majority for at east three years.

So far, the Army has treated nearly 600 service members who have come back from Iraq or Afghanistan without an arm, leg, hand or foot. Thirty-one have gone back to active duty, and no one who asked to remain in the service has been discharged, Arata said.

Most of those who return to active duty are assigned to instructor or desk jobs away from combat. Only a few — the Army doesn't keep track of exactly how many — have returned to the war zone, and only at their insistence, Arata said.

To go back into the war zone, they have to prove they can do the job without putting themselves or others at risk.

Going back into combat may be a step too far. (With the deepest apologies to all the soldiers with prosthetics. No insult intended.) No matter how remarkable a prosthetic is, it is only a replacement and the state of the art hasn’t reached the point of building COL Steve Austins.