A month and many surgeries after he was wounded while trying to disarm an improvised explosive device in Afghanistan, Air Force Staff Sgt. DJ Dutton walked into a Honolulu Airport baggage claim area and into the waiting arms of friends and family Sunday afternoon.

Dutton, a 30-year-old from Milton, Vt., is an explosive ordnance disposal technician with Pacific Air Forces’ 647th Civil Engineer Squadron. He suffered extensive back and leg injuries Sept. 14 when an IED exploded as he was trying to disarm it at an undisclosed location in Afghanistan.

He spent the past month at Brooke Army Medical Center in Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, where he underwent eight skin-graft surgeries.

Dutton, his right leg heavily bandaged, looked happy and healthy as his wife, Stacy, and their two children, 4-year-old Madison and 4-month-old Jackson, greeted him Sunday. Jackson was just a week old when Dutton left for his deployment. Walking with a slight limp into the baggage claim area, he seemed awed by the dozens of well-wishers waiting to greet him.

"It’s great to see him back here and reunited with these heroes at home — his immediate family," said Col. Dann Carlson, deputy Joint Base commander and 647th Air Base Group commander.

Carlson said he admired the work that technicians like Dutton perform on a daily basis.

"These guys are the most well trained in the our Air Force," Carlson said. "They’re carefully screened. There are very strict physical standards and intense technical training, and it’s because they have to be prepared to respond, whether it’s an IED or a World War II-era bomb sitting in the bottom of the ocean."

Dutton, who received a Purple Heart, and his family declined to speak with reporters.

Chief Master Sgt. Joe May, Pacific Air Forces EOD functional manager, said he was "ecstatic" to see Dutton back home.

"When we’re first notified, we don’t know if the person was injured or killed; we only know that there has been an incident," May said. "Your heart just sinks and you wonder who it is. There are only 900 of us, and every month we get word that someone has been injured or killed. So to find out that DJ was just wounded and that he was going to recover was a great relief."

Air Force personnel account for roughly half of the U.S. military’s explosive ordnance disposal technicians in Afghanistan, May said.

"It’s like a game of chess, only it isn’t a game," May said. "You have to be able to look at the landscape and know where someone would plant an IED. On the other side, they’re looking at the same landscape and trying to anticipate where you’re going to go. It’s not a job that everyone can do, and the washout rate is high. Lots just quit when they realize what the job is all about.

"It takes a special kind of person to do this work."