MERIDIAN, Idaho — Veterans Day is a time to honor those who served and the sacrifices that can stay with them long after their service ends.
WATCH Blinded in Iraq, Army veteran Joe Bogart fought his way back to duty
As Meridian neighbors gather to honor veterans, I sat down with Joe Bogart, a U.S. Army veteran who was serving overseas in Iraq in 2006.
Joe's team had a dangerous assignment during that deployment.
"Our job was literally just go up and down the roads really slow, looking for roadside bombs," he said.
On what he said was his team's last scheduled mission of the deployment, they hit a secondary device.
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"The force of the blast threw me into my Blue Force Tracker device map ... that caused blunt force trauma to my left eye and facial fractures, nose fractures," Joe explained.
"My gunner was signaling. My driver was calling on the radio, 'LT's hurt. LT's hurt,'" he recounted.
The shrapnel got behind his eye protection and destroyed his right eye. The blast also seriously damaged his left eye and left him completely blind.
About a week later, Joe's wife, Christine, got a knock on the door.
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"I went to the front door and I wouldn't let him on the front porch. I'm like, 'You tell me right now,'" Christine remembered. "And that's when they said, 'He's been wounded ... he's lost an eye, but he's alive.'"
Joe would later be recommended for medical retirement — an outcome he refused to accept.
"I did not like that answer," he said.
He felt he wasn't finished serving, so he fought to stay in the Army.
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"We'd been discussing it for a while. When he first got wounded, he kept on saying, 'I want to stay in. I want to stay in,'" Christine told me.
After countless surgeries and training, Joe was once again cleared to return to active service, carrying a pistol and an American flag on his artificial eye as a symbol of his strength and a reminder of who he was fighting for.
When I asked him what it felt like when he was approved to go back, his answer was simple: "Relief."
"It proved to me that ... I got another shot to get over there to show myself that they didn't get me ... they didn't get the real me," he breathed.
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By August 2008, Joe was back on the ground in Iraq.
"It gave me the opportunity to prove that a blind person can do just as good a job in any scenario as anybody else," he said proudly.
Joe Bogart's story is a reminder of the sacrifices that continue long after service ends.
This story was initially reported by a journalist and has been, in part, converted to this platform with the assistance of AI. Our editorial team verifies all reporting on all platforms for fairness and accuracy.
