Iraq War veteran Rory Dunn says life sometimes feels like a “never ending uphill climb.”

Every day is recovery for the 26-year-old Benson Hill resident who left Fallujah in 2004 with his eyes and frontal skull missing, a crushed cheek, torn shoulder nerves and dead ears. The daisy-chained bombs that blew up the unarmored Humvee in which he and three other soldiers were riding left Dunn in a coma that lasted nearly six weeks. He wasn’t expected to survive.

But five years later, Specialist Dunn — Iron Man to the intensive care nurses at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. — says he’s recovering well.

Especially in comparison to other traumatic brain injury victims, many who suffer seizures or are addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Dunn planned to spend the past three days with some of those survivors, at the Fifth Annual Road to Recovery Conference & Tribute, which runs until Thursday (Dec. 11) at the Walt Disney World Swan Resort in Orlando. The conference is an all-expense-paid event that gives wounded soldiers and their families and caregivers information about services including benefits, career and other counseling, employment opportunities, financial support, healthcare and insurance.

Dunn has been to the conference before. It featured “some good perks,” he says. Some good speakers.

“Overall it’s a pretty beneficial thing,” he says.

He hoped to use his five years of recovery to help fellow soldiers and get some guidance himself.

Because although it has been five years, Dunn is classified 100 percent disabled by the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs. He received a Purple Heart for his

service. Trained in air defense, Dunn volunteered to go to Iraq in February 2004. The explosion was in May, the day before his 22nd birthday.

Of the four soldiers in Dunn’s Iraq Humvee on that day, only two survived. Dunn’s best friend was killed in the explosion. The other survivor was paralyzed from the neck down.

Four pieces of shrapnel are lodged in Dunn’s brain, and the damage to his brain’s right frontal lobe means he can get mad quick. But he gets by — with one eye, a hearing aid and contact lens.

Dunn was profiled in an article in the Renton Reporter in February.

“I’m doing pretty well,” Dunn says. “I’m healing and getting back to so-called normal.”

“So-called normal” for Dunn is trying to keep his Benson Hill condo clean and make ends meet. And trying to stay patient with the government, who he says he has to “ask and ask and ask” for anything.

He gets disability money at least, and a gym membership’s in the mail. He doesn’t have a job, but he wants to start culinary school at Renton Technical College, then start his own restaurant.

In the meantime he’s trying to enjoy life in his Benson Hill condo. He plans to donate toys and jackets to the needy this Christmas.

But first he planned to enjoy a Disney World vacation. He and the other veterans attending the conference and tribute received a day pass to the “happiest place on earth.”

“Who doesn’t like Disneyland or Disney World?” Dunn says. “… I’m way past Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, but I can’t believe the smile that place can bring me. I wish my whole life could be Disneyland, cotton candy, marshmallow…”