His legs are red-rope licorice, the skin held in place by hundreds of staples.

Before the 5-gallon can of truck fuel exploded, they had been a normal, 22-year-old pair of limbs. Now they're an unnatural red, like someone slathered them in leftover fire-engine paint. Skin should not look like that which is concealed under Nick Hoffert's khaki pants.

Doctors told him the red means the skin is healing, that the grafts from his thighs are accepting their new homes farther south.

He wraps them in pressure dressings and has learned to walk again, albeit slowly. You look at Nick Hoffert, specialist in the National Guard's 957th Multi-Role Bridge Company, and you do not double-take. He looks like a healthy 20-something from Bismarck ought to.

But he rolls up his pants to his knees and tells you a story and you look at him differently. It goes like this:

Hoffert, a fuel specialist in his unit, was burning some refuse a month ago today at Camp Anaconda, outside of Baghdad. He was working with 5-gallon cans of JP-8 - basically diesel fuel without the oil, he said - when the metal on one of the cans got too hot.

"It blew up all over me," Hoffert said. "My legs were on fire for about 10 seconds. I hit the ground and don't remember much; it all happened so fast."

Fumes from the fuel leaked through Hoffert's clothing and burned the skin on his legs without making so much as a mark on the pants. Medics had him at the camp hospital within five minutes.

It took a couple of days, but they finally found a plane to take him to a hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. Hoffert spent three days there before being transferred to Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

He was there for three and a half weeks.

Surgeons took skin from Hoffert's thighs and transferred it to the areas covered in second- and third-degree burns. He didn't walk for 12 days.

His first day out of bed, he made it five steps.

Hoffert is still rehabilitating. He came home to Bismarck on Wednesday to a reception of about 30 friends and family members, including his parents - Duane and Debbie Hoffert - and grandparents Duane and Charlotte Stinar. He'll be home until November, then will go back to the burn center at Sam Houston. After that, Hoffert will be assigned to an Army base somewhere in the United States until the 957th comes back.

For now, he's happy to be home. It feels good, he said, to be among familiar surroundings. His parents' blue-and-white house. The tree-lined drive on north Third Street.

He will see his brother, Jared, today for the first time since February, when Hoffert's unit left Bismarck. Maybe the family will take a trip next week to Arizona to see his sister, Elizabeth. They'll do it if Hoffert's physical therapist can go with.

He's happy to be home, even though the circumstances are poor. He misses his unit. His immediate future is unclear.

"But at least he can walk and we can see him," his grandmother said.

(Reach Tony Spilde at 250-8260 or tspilde@ndonline.com.)