Petty Officer Third Class Dustin E. Kirby, a Navy corpsman whose efforts to save a wounded marine in Iraq and his own wounding by a sniper on Christmas were covered by The New York Times, has returned home to Georgia and expects a nearly full recovery, he and his family said.

He returned escorted by a police honor guard early this month, after his discharge from the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., and four operations during five weeks of care.

Petty Officer Kirby, 23, was struck by a bullet in the left side of the face while near a bunker on the roof of Outpost Omar, a Marine position in Karma, a city in Anbar Province.

His injury mixed the worst of luck with an uncanny stroke of good fortune.

The bullet, which he said was an armor-piercing 7.62 millimeter round fired from a Dragunov’style sniper rifle at a range of 400 to 600 yards, passed through his head and exited at the side of his mouth. In traveling this path, it did not strike his brain, spinal column or major veins or arteries, he said.

Immediately after the bullet’s impact, Petty Officer Kirby remained conscious and could walk. He communicated by writing notes. But his condition deteriorated, he and officers in his battalion said, from blood loss and trauma to the roof of his mouth and the base of his skull.

Although officers in the unit to which he was assigned, Second Battalion, Eighth Marines, initially thought he had lost his ability to speak, since undergoing the operations he has recovered a voice that is only slightly slurred.

“I-m doing a lot better than most people would expect,” he said by telephone from Hiram, Ga.

Petty Officer Kirby had been assigned as a trauma medic to the battalion’s weapons company. In early November he was the subject of an article that described his work and prayers to save the life of his friend, Lance Cpl. Colin Smith, a machine gunner in the vehicle’s turret who was shot through the skull by a sniper in Karma in late October.

Lance Corporal Smith, 19, survived, and is undergoing treatment and full days of intensive therapy at the Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Minneapolis. His father, Bob Smith, said by telephone that while his prognosis is unclear he has made significant progress.

The bullet, the same type that struck Petty Officer Kirby, destroyed the top regions of both frontal lobes of Lance Corporal Smith’s brain. But since being medically stabilized and beginning a range of therapies, he has begun to walk with assistance and a four-pronged cane, to smile and to mimic sounds and repeat words he hears, his father said.

Mr. Smith also said his son recognized relatives and was in very good spirits, often laughing, acting playfully and twinkling his eyes.

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