Warrior Games brings the fight back to a wounded Marine

As he puts it, he was “hookin’ and jabbin’ doing the best job in the world, pretty much being f—-n’ Superman. I was getting into firefights and doing all this supercool stuff.”

“And the next day I was laying in a hospital bed for three months.”

The Marine was on a night patrol in Helmand, the last of eight Marines moving single file through a recently plowed field. The group was just outside the compound of a high value Taliban target, but what they didn’t realize was the upturned ground masked a deep well. By the time it was Mathis’ turn to walk across; the earth gave way.

Mathis fell 80 feet and “everything from the hips down just kind of shattered,” he said. He landed with his left leg extended; the left femur broke in two places. It was so dark he didn’t know his head, neck and arm are badly hurt, too. As he fell, a firefight erupted between the Taliban and his unit; Mathis laid hurt in the well for the next four hours before parajumpers pulled him out.

On Thursday, sweaty lance corporal sat in his wheelchair at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Va., where he’d just run through hours of intense wheelchair basketball drills and scrimmaging with wounded Marines like himself prepping for the 2015 Warrior Games, which starts on Friday.

But if he had his way, he wouldn’t be here.

“To all of the sudden be in a wheelchair put me in a hard place,” Mathis said. “The Marines, we call it ‘going internal.’ ”

“I was really negative, I was extremely angry. Not about being hurt. But when I left, we were in a very kinetic area. It was very dangerous, lots of [roadside bombs], lots of gunfights. ”

Mathis was angry that his friends were still fighting, and he was no longer protecting them.

“I had a lot of friends that had just gotten married, or just had a kid, or just got engaged — and I was a single dude that had an ‘iffy’ girlfriend at best. So I always made sure that if something happened that I drew the fire. I was No. 1 man through the door. I was going to do everything I could to make sure they had a higher chance of coming home. Then to be sitting in a hospital bed and I couldn’t do that for them anymore? Sucked.”

In that first year, Mathis fought to keep his left leg, which was also iffy at best. By 2014, he was still in the hospital at Walter Reed medical center, being nasty to everyone except his doctors “because they had the drugs.”

“But everyone else, it was like, ‘don’t talk to me. Ever.’ ”

The Marines told him they were taking him to the 2014 Warrior Games. It was not a good time for Mathis; he had just learned that the doctors didn’t think he can keep his leg.

So Mathis said back, “No I’m not. I’m going to sit in my room and I’m going to do what I want to do. And they said, ‘You still belong to us. You’re going.’ ”

The reluctant warrior came out of it a changed man.

“To come to the games and see a quadruple amputee run track or see a dude with a traumatic brain injury throw a discus — or a dude that’s blind swim? Are you serious?”

Mathis looked at his leg, with a decision in hand: “This isn’t going to be so bad.”

“I was terrified of losing my leg, until I came here.”

Move forward a year, and Mathis is rolling on the court Thursday, shoving and dribbling and spinning on the wood past the Marine Corps’ seal on center court. His right leg is now amputated below the knee. The 2015 Warrior Games kicks off Friday at Quantico, and Mathis is one of the 270 athletes here to compete.

Here, he and the guys push each other relentlessly; there’s no coddling, just raw competitiveness. And under that atmosphere something once lost thrives.

“It doesn’t matter how bad your day is going. You look around and there’s dudes out here that are way more busted up than you, doing way cooler stuff than you. You can just feed off that energy. You make them work harder and they make you work harder. And you both get better.”

“The attitude here is ‘everybody’s injured, nobody gives a f–k.’ it’s just a bunch of dudes playing basketball.”