updated 2:41 p.m. ET July 4, 2006

BOISE, Idaho - The nearly 19,000 American soldiers wounded in Iraq since the start of the war in March 2003, including more than 500 amputees, are expected to help lead future U.S. Paralympic teams.

Soldiers returning from Iraq paralyzed or missing limbs are young, fit and fiercely competitive, making them ideal athletes.

Advocates for the disabled predict Iraq vets will account for 10 percent of the 500-member U.S. Paralympic team for the 2012 London Games, even though they'll make up far less than 1 percent of the total disabled population.

"This newest batch of veterans will be a tremendous boost to the Paralympic sport movement,'' said Kirk Bauer, director of Rockville, Md.-based Disabled Sports USA, who lost his left leg in 1969 to a North Vietnamese hand grenade. "It has energized it, in ways we haven't seen in years.''

They also have the Department of Defense behind them: The 14-year-old Army World Class Athlete Program at Fort Carson near Colorado Springs, Colo., which trains able-bodied service members for U.S. Olympic teams, now is considering disabled candidates to ready them for the next Paralympics.

"There's going to be a pulse, because there's so much interest in Iraq veterans,'' said Tom Iselin, director of the Sun Valley Adaptive Sports nonprofit group at the resort in central Idaho's Rocky Mountains, which offers sports instruction to disabled people including Iraq veterans. "We have a channel to become the athlete you've always dreamed you'd be.''

Staff Sgt. Josh Olson, a Spokane, Wash., native, lost his leg at the hip to a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq in 2003, but remains an active-duty marksmanship instructor in Fort Benning, Ga.

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In May, he went to Germany with the U.S. Disabled Shooting Team and this summer heads to Switzerland for the International Paralympics Committee World Championships on July 12-22 - all part of his dream to be a member of the 2008 Beijing team.

"When I was younger, I'd watch the Olympics,'' Olson said. "Now that I'm injured, I actually may have that opportunity to live that fantasy. I'd give it all back to have my leg back. But now, I'm going to make the best of it.''

If Olson gets into the program, officers say he'll be able to devote his life to making the U.S. team.

"While they're attached, their primary mission is to qualify for the Olympics,'' said Maj. Michael Hagen, director of the program. "We try to give them everything they need.''

In 1948, British neurologist Ludwig Guttman began using sports to rehabilitate wounded World War II veterans. The first official Paralympic Games - short for "Parallel Olympics,'' not "paraplegic'' - were in Rome in 1960, with the first Winter Games in 1976 in Sweden.

In America, disabled sports programs began with wheelchair basketball, getting a boost after the Vietnam War when activist American veterans with life-changing wounds pushed to expand sports to include skiing, cycling, judo and swimming.