Army Vet, Hockey Player Puts Iraq War Injuries ‘On Ice’

[wackychick]

Retired Army reservist Joseph L. Bowser was 9 years old when he first experienced the thrill of skating and using his hockey stick to whack a rubber puck across the ice on a frozen pond in his birthplace of Toledo, Ohio.

Today, the 48-year-old Iraq veteran still plays ice hockey, despite the loss of the lower portion of his right leg four years ago during a rocket attack on Camp Anaconda, in Balad, Iraq.

Bowser, then a truck driver with 283rd Transportation Company based in Fairfield, Conn., recalled that the enemy attack occurred on April 12, 2004, soon after he returned to Camp Anaconda after delivering a 5,000-gallon load of jet fuel.

Bowser credits Connecticut Army National Guard Maj. Michael McMahon, a physician ***istant, for saving his life. McMahon, he said, used his fingers to slow the bleeding from a gashed artery on Bowser’s injured right leg. “He reached up on my leg to clamp off my artery so I wouldn’t ‘bleed out,’” Bowser recalled.

McMahon, now 45, recalled during a recent phone interview from his home in Hamden, Conn., that his military training kicked in when he saw the stricken Bowser bleeding profusely. “You just react,” McMahon said. “We took care of him and got him stabilized. There was a combat surgical hospital in Balad.

Check out the rest of this story and see a picture of this awesome individual in action on the ice!