‘The Lucky Ones’: 11,285 Americans Wounded in Iraq

-- SHOT BETWEEN THE EYES: Jim Batchelor, 24, Copperas Cove, TX

-- WHAT’S FAIR GOT TO DO WITH IT?: Joey Bozik, 26, Wilmington, NC (now at Walter Reed Medical Center, near Wash., D.C.)

-- ‘IT’S THE BODY IMAGE ISSUE’: Therese Frentz, 25, Tallahassee, FL (now at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, TX)

New York – In any other war, the 11,285 Americans wounded in Iraq might be dead. “In World War II, one in three wounded soldiers died; in Vietnam, one in four. In the Iraq war, the rate is one in eight,” writes TIME editor-at-large Nancy Gibbs. “You have to stand a ways back, but from a certain angle, these look like the lucky ones,” Gibbs writes.

Friday, March 18th marks the second anniversary of the war. Just over 1,500 U.S. soldiers have died in Iraq. Estimates of Iraqi deaths range from 15,000 to 100,000 and no one has tried to guess the number of wounded, according to TIME.

TIME profiles three wounded soldiers, photographed by James Nachtwey: a burn victim, a triple amputee, and one who suffers with posttraumatic stress disorder. “It is so much easier, of course, to call the U.S. wounded unlucky, the double and triple amputees maimed in a war that has not always gone as planned,” Gibbs writes. “If Kevlar and ceramic plates are the great life-savers of modern warfare, along with quick clotting powders and ultrasound units that fit in backpacks, how many more lives and limbs might have been saved if the humvees that were meant for transport in noncombat zones had been equipped with the armor necessary for a guerrilla war that has no front lines, no safe havens?”

Three profiles reported by Amanda Bower and Cathy Booth-Thomas for TIME:

SHOT BETWEEN THE EYES: Jim Batchelor, 24, of Copperas Cove, Texas: “When he first got back he literally told me that my husband had died in Iraq and this new person was here,” says his wife Kristy. “It’s true.” Jim is moving out of the house. “He feels nothing—not even when his wife, a uterine-cancer survivor, talks about the baby she lost, five months into a high-risk pregnancy, when she found out Batchelor had been shot,” writes TIME’s Amanda Bower.

Batchelor, who suffered a bullet wound between the eyes while in Iraq, has been diagnosed with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and experiences nightmares, flashbacks, estrangement, emotional numbness; difficulty sleeping and concentrating and outbursts of anger. Every night, Batchelor fights sleep, knowing it will bring a replay of April 4, 2004, when his unit was sent to rescue a platoon that had been ambushed in Sadr City and fell into a ferocious firefight, reports TIME.

“It was like the entire city was shooting at us,” Batchelor says, pacing around the room. “I saw the guy shooting at me. He was on a rooftop and I saw the muzzle flash. It sounds weird, but I saw the bullet. Then it hit me in the head and snapped my head back. It made me really mad.”

A specialist machine-gunner, Batchelor shot back at his would-be assassin and watched him topple to his death before crumpling to the ground himself. The bullet that had hit Batchelor pierced his helmet and lodged in his skull, miraculously stopping before it hit his brain. “Even knowing the way things turned out, I wouldn’t change a day of it,” says Batchelor. “When you put on that uniform, you’re part of something a lot bigger than yourself.”

WHAT’S FAIR GOT TO DO WITH IT?: Sergeant Joey Bozik, 26, of Wilmington, NC: An antitank mine ripped his body apart, and Joey Bozik lost lost both legs and his right arm. Emerging from a coma and grasping the extent of his injuries at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Bozik told his fiancé, Jayme Peters, 25, a gymnast and exercise physiology student, “Things you would be able to do with a regular man I wasn’t going to be able to do anymore,” he says. “I told her, ‘There won’t be any hard feelings, I will completely understand.’”

“I loved him for who he was in his heart, and he still had that, and I loved him for what he had in his mind, and he still had that,” she says now. “He had everything that I loved about him, and the arms and legs were not necessary for my love.” On New Year’s Eve, just eight weeks after he became a triple amputee, they were married. During his first two weeks at Walter Reed, psychiatrists and psychologists offered a shoulder to cry on, but he has convinced them he does not need them. “Why would I bother thinking life is unfair?” he says. “I’ve already been set back in life with the loss of my limbs. Why would I want to hurt myself more?”

His mother has set up a trust fund for donor contributions, and he’s thinking of ways to serve, like social work in a military hospital. “Even knowing that I would lose three limbs, I would sign up again,” he says. “After Sept. 11, I remember being scared and thinking, ‘My God, they could put something in the water and kill a million people.’ That’s a fear I never want my family to have to feel again.”

SCARS ON A WOMAN: Therese Frentz, 25, of Tallahassee, FL. Therese Frentz, 25, a member of the Air Force’s FBI-like Office of Special Investigations, had chiseled her body with bench presses and squats into a taut 145 pounds on a 5’8” frame. In Iraq, the guys jokingly called her “Lara Croft”. She was known as a fearless driver in convoys.

Frentz was sitting at a cafe with two fellow agents in Baghdad’s Green Zone last October when a bomb went off less than 10 feet away. She was blown into the air, the force literally ripping off her clothes, scorching her upper body. She remembers thinking, “Wrong place, wrong time.” She woke up at the burn center at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, TX. Her chest was burned. There was an ugly red scar from her breast to her belly button where surgeons at the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany had opened her up twice to check the lacerations to her liver and kidney. “It stinks really bad. It’s hard to accept. Why me?” “I’m just pissed.”

“I don’t have posttraumatic stress like the others. For me, it’s the body-image issue,” she says. “You can look at a guy with a scar and some people think it’s sexy. It’s never sexy on a woman…My whole arm, my palms, just don’t look normal.” She wonders if guys will find her attractive ever again. “If a guy doesn’t like me because of this, that’s their problem,” she says. She has a mantra she repeats to herself and others. “It will be O.K. one day, but right now is the hard part.” Frentz plans to stay in the Air Force.

Contacts: Diana Pearson, 212-522-0833; Jennifer Zawadzinski, 212-522-9046