From Wounded Warrior to World Champion

Melissa Stockwell was just 24 years old in April of 2004, commissioned as a 2d Lieutenant from ROTC in Colorado and assigned as a second lieutenant platoon leader in the Army’s transportation corps to Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. She’d been in country three weeks, and was already becoming accustomed to the heat and the dust, the long straight desert roads over which she led convoys of trucks.

The morning of the day her life would change forever began as every other morning did in the sandbox “I woke up in the morning- we had a convoy into central…