ROANOKE TIMES 
                      Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times

DATE: Tuesday, November 5, 1996              TAG: 9611050063
SECTION: VIRGINIA                 PAGE: C-4  EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY 
DATELINE: HAMPTON
SOURCE: Associated Press

BACK FROM SAUDI - OR IS HE?

BOMB SURVIVOR'S RECOVERY is an uphill struggle, and doctors say he may never make it all the way.

Paul A. Blais survived the terrorist bombing in Saudi Arabia, but he may never fully recover.

``He doesn't walk, he's got an awful lot of brain damage. His legs are still oozing,'' said his grandmother, Elizabeth Blais of Orlando, Fla.

Maria and Curtis Taylor rejoiced when they learned that their son, an Air Force senior airman, had not died as they first thought in the June 25 bombing of the Khobar Towers military housing complex in Saudi Arabia. Blais, in a coma in a Dhahran hospital, was mistakenly identified as another airman.

Blais suffered severe brain damage when a fuel truck filled with explosives detonated outside his dormitory, shearing off the face of the building and killing 19 airmen. ``He impacted a wall pretty much headlong,'' said his birth father, Paul Blais Sr., of Orlando.

Four months later, the younger Blais cannot walk or eat by himself; he must be fed through a stomach tube.

Blais had been a disc jockey before joining the Air Force and becoming a radio operator aboard C-130 cargo planes. Now, the 26-year-old speaks in a monotone and with difficulty, his father said.

It could be more than two years before doctors know how badly Blais was injured, his father said.

After the blast, Blais was flown from Dhahran to an American hospital in Germany, then to Walter Reed Army Hospital near Washington.

After about a month at Walter Reed, he was moved to the Veterans Affairs hospital in Tampa, Fla., which specializes in brain trauma. He was discharged last week and is staying with his mother and stepfather, who moved from Hampton to Tampa to be with him.

``His mother sleeps on the floor by his bed because he wakes up and he doesn't know where he is,'' Elizabeth Blais said. ``The poor kid didn't ask for any of this.''

Once it became evident Blais may never fully recover, the Air Force medically retired him but will provide him with a pension, his father said.

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