Hazrat Khan was back in town the other day.

Once the face of Afghanistan for millions of Americans, he first came to Pittsburgh as a little boy in 1986 to have his shattered legs repaired after a Soviet helicopter decimated his village and killed his mother.

He testified before Congress about the plight of the Afghans, gave speeches and charmed Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office when, dressed in Afghan robes, he requested shoulder-fired ground-to-air Stinger missiles for the mujahideen, as the Afghan anti-Soviet fighters were then called.

He was even named an "honorary Pittsburgher" when he appeared before City Council in his wheelchair.

All of that was long ago -- before the Taliban, Osama bin Laden and another war.

The Soviet conflict has returned to American radar because of last year's film "Charlie Wilson's War," but between the Russian withdrawal in 1989 and the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks, Afghanistan had largely disappeared from the world stage.

It never left Hazrat's mind as he grew up in Virginia, where he still lives. How could it? He has a physical reminder -- he walks with a shambling gait and stands just 5-feet-5 because of damage to the growth plates in his legs.

He always vowed to go back, and now he has, twice returning since 2005 in support of the U.S. military and the Afghan National Army, most recently with one of the Pentagon's "human terrain" teams.

The units travel with soldiers to help them negotiate around Afghan tribal structure and cultural nuance.

It wasn't always smooth going -- he ended up leaving the program early, saying the military reneged on granting his request to visit his family in December. Still, he's proud of his service.

"We weren't there as 'door-knockers.' We don't want to make enemies," he said. "I was trying to talk to the villagers. The people were pretty happy, especially the small children. You're driving around in a Humvee and they are running up to you. Those kids are so innocent. "

Like he once was.

Now about 31 -- no one really knows because Afghans don't always keep birth records -- he wants to write a memoir about a life split between the globe's most forward-looking country and one so primitive that his father has to ride a donkey into Pakistan to find a phone.

"He has his feet in two different worlds," said Richard Clark, a retired Army colonel who helped raise Hazrat with his ex-wife, Karen McKay, former head of the Committee for a Free Afghanistan.

His family life illustrates the dilemma.

When he returned to his village in 2006 for the first time, his father had him married off to a local woman in an arranged marriage. Mr. Khan, a dutiful son, says he will bring her to America and raise children.

And yet he lives with an American woman in Virginia with whom he has been involved for eight years. It's one of many complications in a complicated life.

"I'm between Afghanistan and America," he said during a recent visit to the Kilbuck home of Dr. Timothy Janeway, the retired Shadyside Hospital doctor who rebuilt Hazrat's legs in the 1980s.

"I have love for both. I'm American. I owe this country a lot. I have blood running in me from Americans who donated to me."

But Afghanistan calls to him, as it seems to for so many Afghans.

"It's a beautiful country," he said. "All they want is a peaceful environment to raise their children.''

Mr. Khan's experience in America since his days as a "poster boy," as he puts it, has sometimes been difficult. But those who watched him grow up here think he can do whatever he sets his mind on.

"I have a lot of admiration for him. No one gave him anything," said Mr. Clark. "I think it's a remarkable thing what he's been able to do considering how his life started out."

On a spring day in 1985, 8-year-old Hazrat was playing outside his family's walled compound in Bakhshak, a village in the mountains of Wardak Province, when he heard a fearsome drone coming up the valley.

It was a squadron of Soviet Mi-24 helicopters. One fired rockets into the compound, a stronghold for mujahideen, as the Afghan warriors called themselves. A wall collapsed on Hazrat and crushed his legs.

The gunships left the village smoldering and Hazrat's mother dead in the rubble of his house.

His father found him under the wall, barely alive. He and a village medic stopped the bleeding, then loaded the boy onto a donkey for a five-day trek to a field hospital in Pakistan.

"If he'd stayed in the village he'd be dead. If he'd stayed in Pakistan, he'd be dead," said Dr. Janeway, who with his wife, Joyce, traveled to Afghanistan in those years to provide free medical care for the mujahideen.

The Committee for a Free Afghanistan arranged for Hazrat to be airlifted to the U.S. On the flight from Pakistan to New York, a doctor had to restart his heart.

"Things were primitive," recalled Ms. McKay. "We had to push that child on a gurney out of the airport, down the road to the domestic terminal and get him on a flight to Salt Lake City.

"At one point he woke up. He didn't cry, he didn't complain. He said, 'My daddy's a mujahideen and I'm going to go back and fight with him.' Then he passed out."

Hazrat moved from hospitals in Salt Lake City, Sacramento and Georgetown University Hospital in Washington, D.C.

Mr. Clark and Ms. McKay took him in, giving him a birth date of May 4 because that was the day he arrived in New York.

He couldn't walk, only scuttle on the floor "like a crab," Dr. Janeway said. But the doctor thought he could reconstruct Hazrat's legs and hips. It took six operations, all with donated time and equipment, and lots of rehab at D.T. Watson in Leet, but in the end Hazrat could walk.

He had endured 20 surgeries in all. He still calls himself the "$1 million boy."

While his body healed, Hazrat became an icon for those who wanted the U.S. to help the Afghans.

Chief among them were U.S. Rep. David Dreier, R-Calif., whose office practically adopted Hazrat, and former U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson, who was secretly arming the mujahideen with the help of CIA officer Gust L. Avrakotos, an Aliquippa native who died in 2005.

Mr. Dreier, who still keeps in touch, used to carry Hazrat on his shoulders to meetings with other lawmakers.

While living in Washington with Abdullah Abadi, his Afghan guardian, Hazrat embarked on a media blitz. He was poised and passionate -- perfect for what he called "the cause."

The meeting he remembers best is the one in the Oval Office, where he told President Reagan not to trust Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and asked for Stingers to shoot down the Mi-24s.

It was all heady stuff for a boy, but some also saw it as disturbing.

"Hazrat became a political football," said Ms. McKay, whom he regards as his American mother. "He was being jerked every which way. Everyone wanted a piece of him because he was famous."

The celebrity didn't last. When the Soviets withdrew, America lost interest in Afghanistan. No longer a symbol, Hazrat reverted to what he was -- a lost boy trying to adjust to a new country.

There were efforts to help him. Mr. Clark and Ms. McKay sent him to live with Mr. Abadi, in part because they felt he needed to stay connected to his Afghan roots.

There were struggles in school. Papers sent home to Mr. Abadi in the middle school years indicate he was disruptive, "condescending" to his peers and the target of abuse because of his disabilities.

The district also considered him learning disabled, although the real problem was that his hearing had been damaged in the attack. A hearing aid helped.

In time his physical ability also improved. After his crutch was broken in a fight with another Afghan in Virginia, he started walking on his own. He gained enough strength and confidence to excel at wrestling and gymnastics in high school in Fairfax County, Va.

Yet the school district passed him along instead of teaching him, friends say, and his home life was far from stable.

"Life in America was not easy for him. He had to acclimate to a new culture in very difficult circumstances. His whole childhood was one of neglect, in my view" said Vince Randazzo, a former staffer for Mr. Dreier and a mentor to Hazrat. "After the war ended, the [Committee for a Free Afghanistan] disbanded. He was pretty much on his own. One day when he was 17, Abdullah [Abadi] said, 'Would you adopt him?' I said 'Are you crazy?' But that's when I realized he had been neglected."

After high school, Hazrat moved in with a former mujahideen he called "the commander" and attended community college. He eventually worked his way through George Washington University, graduating with a political science and international affairs degree in 2005, a year after he became a U.S. citizen.

Throughout his education in America, he remained outspoken about the suffering in Afghanistan.

On conservative radio programs such as Oliver North's, he criticized the Clinton administration for ignoring the Afghan civil war. Later, he raised the same concerns during the rise of the Taliban, although he was careful not to openly criticize the radical group.

"He had family there and realized they could be in danger, but he said America needed to be more involved," said Mr. Randazzo.

"It was kind of frustrating," Mr. Khan said. "They were so preoccupied with other parts of the world. It took the attacks of 9/11 to bring the attention back to Afghanistan."

When he was little, one of Hazrat's heroes was Sylvester Stallone in "Rambo III." The 1988 movie features John Rambo, an alienated ex-Green Beret fighting with the mujahideen in Afghanistan.

"He watched it over and over," said Ms. McKay.

For a lonely boy with war-damaged legs, the film was inspiring. Maybe, he fantasized, he could do something similar someday.

He got his chance in 2005 with the real Green Berets. Working for Worldwide Language, an Army contractor, he shipped off to Afghanistan to help the U.S. war effort.

Much of the work Mr. Khan did there is classified; he mostly served as an interpreter and earned praise for his skills.

"I worked with up to 12 different interpreters over the period and Mr. Khan had the best command of the Farsi, Dari and Pashto language," wrote Tim Ochsner, the commander at Camp Victory in Herat.

He felt somewhat isolated on base, but he did get out with the team. He was particularly gratified when a commander said he admired him for being able to keep pace with the soldiers in climbing a small mountain.

But the highlight of the trip was a meeting with his father in Kabul in 2005 and the return to his village in September 2006.

"You could see the tears in their eyes," he said. "Kids were born over there that I never saw -- 23 years had passed. People had died and people had been born. My sister was just getting married [when the attack happened] and now she had kids who were ready to get married."

There was an 11-day party. Mr. Khan slaughtered a bull in a traditional ritual and got married. The village was largely the same. There were no phones, no computers, and no electricity beyond a few generators.

When it was time to go, he said, "it was probably one of the hardest things to leave my family again."

Back in America, a second opportunity presented itself to return. Now working for BAE Systems, another military contractor, Mr. Khan signed on with the human terrain program.

He took part in Operation Khyber and other initiatives with the 82nd Airborne Division. With combat largely over, the work was not particularly dramatic or harrowing. He spent most of his time talking to villagers to find out what they needed -- school repairs, roads, medical care.

In one case, a village medic didn't want the military medical team setting up in the local clinic because the doctor had to be seen as neutral, not a part of the U.S. operation. No problem.

"We just let it go," said Mr. Khan. "We went and set it up in a local school."

Mr. Khan said he respects the troops with whom he served but regrets that his term ended prematurely. His supervisor had agreed to let him take a vacation to visit with family for a Dec. 19 holiday, but, he said, someone else in the chain of command later told him he couldn't go.

He ended up quitting and coming home later that month.

"We did a lot of good things," he said. "It's just unfortunate that it didn't work out. I think it could have been handled a little better."

The military refused to discuss his departure, saying it was a "personnel" matter.

The experience didn't sour Mr. Khan on the human terrain program. He said it's worthwhile and the Pentagon agrees, having recently expanded the original six teams to 30 in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But it's all temporary. Mr. Khan said he fears that once the U.S. pulls out, the Taliban will regain a toehold.

The longer-term problem is widespread government corruption and the economic struggle of the farmers, the backbone of Afghan society, many of whom feel forced to grow opium instead of crops to generate income, he said.

In the end, he said, Afghans will have to help themselves.

"The U.S. troops in Afghanistan are trying to do good. But the U.S. can only guide Afghanistan."