Three Roads Back

(2 of 5)

Bozik has to work out how he's going to support the family he and Jayme want to have. His mother has set up a trust fund for donor contributions, and the Homes for Our Troops organization plans to help Joey and Jayme build a home--they're leaning toward settling in Colorado--with the wide doorways and specialized bathrooms that amputees require. But Bozik is the kind of man who will open a packet of chips with his teeth rather than ask for assistance. A law-enforcement career is now out of the question, but he's thinking of other ways he can serve his community, like social work in a military hospital. Relating to patients should be no problem. --By Amanda Bower/ Walter Reed

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Scars on a Woman

In Iraq the guys jokingly called her Lara Croft because she carried her 9-mm SIG Sauer pistol in a thigh holster and worked out constantly. She was known as a fearless driver in convoys, navigating around obstacles at 90 m.p.h. to ensure that Iraqi insurgents would have no opening to attack. "I'm kind of a timid person, but when I got behind the wheel, it was balls to the wall," she says. The Air Force first lieutenant had chiseled her body with bench presses and squats into a taut 145 lbs. on a 5-ft. 8-in. frame. "I had a workout log and a food journal where I'd write down what I ate--protein shake for breakfast, two Doritos, three breath mints, baked fish and green beans. That's it," she says, laughing, then grimacing. "I wish I could have seen myself in the full-length mirror just once to see how fit I was." She pauses, knowing she can never look like that again.

Therese Frentz, a member of the Air Force's FBI-like Office of Special Investigations, was sitting at a café in Baghdad's Green Zone last October when a bomb went off less than 10 ft. away. Frentz was blown into the air, the force literally ripping off her clothes and scorching her upper body. Shrapnel put a hole in her left leg the size of a tennis ball. Bits of the burgundy plastic café table and metal from the blast shot into her head, tearing her left ear 80% off. She remembers thinking, "Wrong place, wrong time."

Frentz, 24, woke up at the burn unit at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Texas, confused and not a little angry. Her chest was covered with burns. The charred skin on her right arm had been scraped away, leaving her muscles showing. Her jaw would not open. There was an ugly red scar from her breast to her belly button where surgeons had opened her up twice--once in Baghdad and again at the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, to check her lacerated liver and kidney. Sections of the scar still keep opening up in a cascading "buttonhole" effect: one hole opens, then heals; then another opens. One has been left open now so that pus can flow out of her body. "It stinks really bad. It's hard to accept. Why me?" asks Frentz, her emotions fluctuating by the moment between anger and depression. "Some people are just happy to be alive," she says, after working out in the physical-therapy room at Brooke along with a soldier who is missing both legs and another with burns so bad his eyelids and nose are raw red stubs. "I'm just pissed."