Three Roads Back

By Amanda Bower, Walter Reed, Cathy Booth Thomas/San Antonio, Copperas Cove

o SERGEANT JOEY BOZIK

What's Fair Got to Do with It?

Weeks after an anititank mine ripped his body apart, Sergeant Joey Bozik, 26, emerged from a coma to find himself surrounded by relatives and friends at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. As soon as he grasped the extent of his injuries, Bozik asked everyone but his fiance to leave the room. Although he and Jayme Peters had spent only a few weeks in each other's presence--they met via e-mail while Bozik was stationed in Afghanistan--they had made plans for a life together filled with travel and outdoor activities. A gymnast and exercise-physiology student, Peters, 25, had a full, active life ahead of her. Bozik, on the other hand, had just lost both legs and his right arm. So he invited her to walk away. "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.'"

Peters wanted no such deal. "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. On New Year's Eve, just eight weeks after he became a triple amputee, Bozik left his hospital bed in a tuxedo and wheeled down to the flower- and family-filled hospital chapel to marry his Texan bride.

Bozik, a native of Wilmington, N.C., was on patrol south of Baghdad looking for roadside bombs when his humvee rolled over a mine. "Why would I bother thinking life is unfair?" he says, in reply to a question. "I've already been set back in life with the loss of my limbs. Why would I want to hurt myself more?" In his first two weeks at Walter Reed, psychiatrists and psychologists poured through Bozik's door, offering a sympathetic ear. They don't stop by anymore; Bozik has convinced them that he doesn't need them.

Dosed with morphine three times a day, Bozik has long red scars from more than 20 surgeries, is making slow progress with his prostheses, often falls asleep at 3 p.m. because of his agonizing and exhausting physical therapy, and won't be able to leave Walter Reed for many more months. He has pins and plates in all three stumps and in his remaining left arm, plus a lifelong elevated risk of arthritis, back and heart problems. But he's alive and thanks God every day for that.

Bozik attributes a big part of his relentlessly upbeat attitude to his new wife, but some of it is constitutional. "Even as a child growing up, Joey never ever threw a tantrum, never cursed," says his mother Gail, who raised three boys alone after her husband died of a heart attack when Joey was 2. Her youngest son joined the Army in early 2001 because money was tight and he wanted to study criminology and become a law-enforcement officer. His commitment to the military only grew stronger after 9/11. "Even knowing that I would lose three limbs, I would sign up again," he says. "After Sept. 11, I remember 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."

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

o 1ST LIEUT. THERESE FRENTZ

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 cafe 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 cafe 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."

Frentz is not negative by nature. Six years ago, she was queen of the prom, valedictorian and the student voted most likely to succeed at Wakulla County High School outside Tallahassee, Fla. At the University of Florida, she signed up for ROTC and discovered she enjoyed the regimen of the military. She joined the Air Force after graduation in 2002.

Since the attack, Frentz has shown remarkable physical progress. She still has open wounds in her right hand and elbow, but with the hole in her knee filled with matrix, a collagen product, it now bends almost perfectly. She has lost count of the number of times doctors have harvested skin from her thighs to graft onto her burned torso and arm. She's had five operations on her elbow alone and must wear a full bodysuit--"my black catsuit," she calls it--to prevent further scarring. She had to learn how to walk through her pain after surgeons took the tough skin from the sole of her left foot to remake her right palm.

The damage to her self-image from the burns has been harder to repair, however. "I don't have posttraumatic stress like the others. For me it's the body-image issue," she says, calmly analyzing herself. She can't bear to look at herself in the mirror. "You can look at a guy with a scar, and some people think it's sexy. It's never sexy on a woman," she says. "My whole arm, my palms just don't look normal." She wonders if guys will ever find her attractive again. "If a guy doesn't like me because of this, that's their problem," she says, trying hard not to cry, then giving in. "I'm sorry I'm crying," she whispers, then straightens up. She has a mantra she repeats to herself and others. "It will be O.K. one day," she says, "but right now is the hard part."

She will not comment on her politics, but when asked whether she regrets going to Iraq, there is a long silence, with no answer. For Frentz, religion hasn't been the solace it is for her mother Jill and her fraternal twin Tara. "People go through life not realizing what they have, and I didn't. I just didn't need this lesson," she says. "I've been, at times, very mad with God for letting this happen to me."

Frentz, now 28, plans to stay in the Air Force, re-upping when her stint expires at the end of May 2006. She's been promised a job at the Air Force base in Aviano, Italy, once she heals, possibly as early as this summer. She wonders whether her scars might actually serve her in a new assignment. In the military, she says, the guys always ask first how a woman soldier looks, not how well she does her job. "I will have the scars to show what I've been through, and no one will be able to doubt me. I have a lot of credibility now. This happened to me, and it stinks real bad, but I've got to use it," she says. "I always felt there was something missing in me--a confidence. I thought you had to be born with it. Now I think it's latent in me, and I look forward to my career." --By Cathy Booth Thomas/ San Antonio. With reporting by Michael Peltier/ Tallahassee

o SPECIALIST JIM BATCHELOR

Shot Between the Eyes

Jim Batchelor sits in his darkened living room and tells an infantryman's tales of bugs and snakes, leaky gas masks and indestructible humvees. Since he returned from Iraq, he hasn't been able to sit still, so as he talks, his hand constantly worries at the filmy floral curtains, twisting and turning the fabric. His wife Kristy, laughing along with his stories, quietly reaches out, frees the curtains from his grasp and places his hand back on the couch. Twist, reach, release. Twist, reach, release. Finally, Kristy gently rests her hand on her husband's and leaves it there to calm him. It's a gesture that would be unremarkable in its tenderness if not for one thing: Jim's bags are packed, and he's moving out of the house.

Since Batchelor, 24, returned last April to his home in Copperas Cove, Texas, with a bullet wound between the eyes, his marriage has been stripped of intimacy. The couple puts on a good show in the company of others, the two say, but when alone they're either silent or arguing. Once giddy newlyweds desperate to have a family, they now rarely share a bed. "I went through the motions a few times, but I didn't feel anything," says Batchelor. "I just don't care."

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. "When he first got back, he literally told me that my husband had died in Iraq and this new person was here," says Kristy. "It's true." She hopes they will reconcile but is no longer sure they're a match.

Psychiatrists divide symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder into three categories. Batchelor, found to have the disorder, fits every bill, including: nightmares and flashbacks; estrangement and emotional numbness; irritability and difficulty sleeping. Every night he fights sleep, knowing it will bring a replay of the day his unit was sent to rescue a patrol that had been ambushed in Sadr City, Baghdad, and fell into a ferocious firefight. "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 and watched his would-be assassin topple to his death before crumpling to the ground himself. The bullet that hit Batchelor pierced his helmet and lodged in his skull, miraculously stopping before it reached his brain. It was April 4, 2004, and Batchelor had been in Baghdad for four days. He now hates the number four.

A year later, the only visible evidence of Batchelor's wound is a couple of small, chicken pox--like scars. But mentally he's a mess. He has 14 different bottles of medications to help him control his temper, his migraines, his depression and more. Still, he often flies into inexplicable fits of rage. He has cursed out commanding officers, hit his father, pushed Kristy and pinned her down.

Batchelor's fury does not extend to the Iraqi people, or the U.S. Army, or the government that sent him to war. "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."

It was to gain "life experience" that Batchelor joined the Army in August 2001, dropping out of the branch of Texas A&M University in Commerce, Texas. He had spent three years working toward a degree in criminal justice, and now hopes to find a way to complete it without having to sit in classrooms full of people, a prospect he can't bear. He walked out on a job answering phones for a credit-card company last month and spends his days on his father's farm in Kemp, Texas, working on his car.

"I got no job, my wife has left me, and I need to see a shrink," Batchelor says, chuckling. "I laugh about it because, hell, it can't get much worse." --By Amanda Bower/ Copperas Cove

With reporting by Michael Peltier/ Tallahassee