Dana Bowman
Dana Bowman says he's an ordinary guy.

Sure he is, if you consider ordinary a guy with no legs who jumps out of perfectly good airplanes. A guy who skydived six months after losing his legs in a midair collision. A guy who convinced Army brass he should become the first double amputee to re-enlist.

Meet Dana Bowman, Wheelin Sportmen's spokesman.

He graduated in 1981 from Ohio's North Ridgeville High School, where he excelled at fistfights and fire alarm pranks but failed miserably in academics. He and his friends dug horses and Harley Davidsons. An adrenaline junkie, he became an Army Ranger and received the Bronze Star for valor during the U.S. invasion of Panama.

On Feb. 6, 1994, Bowman was practicing the "Diamond Track" maneuver as a member of the Army's elite Golden Knights Parachuting Team. He and Sgt. José Aguillon, his friend and mentor, planned to crisscross in the sky, a stunt they had performed flawlessly at least 50 times before. They collided, streaking through the air at a combined 300 mph. Sgt. Aguillon died instantly.

"I saw distress in his eyes for two seconds," Bowman recalls. "I ducked my head down, and he stuck his arm out to veer off to the side. His arm caught both my legs, shearing them off, one above the knee, one below."

Sgt. Aguillon wore an automatic activation device, a small computer that monitors the altitude and activates the reserve chute. Bowman did not, but for reasons he cannot explain, his parachute opened.

"I landed on my head, unconscious, without my legs, in a hard parking lot and woke up two days later in Phoenix," said Bowman.

The next day, from his bed at Walter Reed Hospital, Bowman told his parents he planned to jump again.

"We didn't take him seriously at first, but when he began designing his own legs, I knew he wasn't kidding," his mother, Donna, recalls.

Spending only two days in ICU, Bowman left the hospital to help bury his friend. After doctors told him he'd use crutches and a wheelchair for at least six months, he walked unassisted in just seven days.

On Aug. 13, six months after the accident, he jumped from 13,000 feet above Raeford, N.C. The next day, he joined a skydiving wedding for a Golden Knights teammate. Three months later, he re-enlisted in the Army. A videotape of his jump proved visually what he could not say in words.

"I rolled up my pant legs so the boys at Walter Reed could see," Bowman said. "I looked just like anybody else. The doctors took my video to the interns, to high-ranking doctors and to the general of the hospital," Bowman recalls. "It eventually made it up to the Pentagon and to the undersecretary of the Army."

All doubts disappeared, when military brass watched him run two miles and complete the Army's physical fitness test.

After jumping nine times a day for six weeks, Bowman returned to the Golden Knights and became the team's lead speaker and recruiting commander.

Since his accident, Bowman has jumped more than 1,000 times, visited amputees injured in Iraq and Afghanistan, and talked to students nationwide. During 200-plus speeches a year, he spreads a powerful message: "It's not the disability, it's the ability."

Bowman retired from the Army in 1996 and received his bachelor's degree in commercial aviation at the University of North Dakota four years later. His computer-assisted prosthetics allow him to fly planes, helicopters and hot air balloons without handicap controls. He is the world's only double amputee helicopter flight instructor.

He also likes to run, water-ski and scuba dive. Depending on the sport, he changes feet like some women change shoes. His right prosthesis is equipped with a minicomputer that adjusts his gait as he walks.

So what's left for this ordinary guy?

He wants to break the record for the world's highest stratosphere jump, performed Aug. 16, 1960, by Joe Kittinger, who jumped from a helium balloon at 102,800 feet, almost 20 miles above earth. The fall took four minutes, 36 seconds.

More important, perhaps, Bowman will continue to battle the barriers facing physically impaired people.

"The triumph of the human spirit lies in all of us," Bowman said. "We are all disabled in one way or another when we think we can't live out our dreams."