Improved body and vehicle armor, as well as battlefield medical advances, mean catastrophic injuries that once would have been fatal now can be treated. Once survivors are stabilized, it's important to offer them new athletic goals, said John Melia, director of the Roanoke, Va.-based Wounded Warrior Project.

"Athletic feats on the field of battle, when people are shooting at you, are much more feats of athleticism than those on a sterile track,'' said Melia, whose group put on 62 sporting events for disabled veterans last year. "We certainly think several of our Wounded Warrior Project folks may become Paralympians.''

There were no Iraq or Afghanistan veterans among U.S. disabled athletes in Athens in 2004 or Turin earlier this year.

"It takes a while for them to be competitive,'' said Joe Walsh, managing director of U.S. Paralympics in Colorado Springs. "It may be six months from now, we'll see a greater amount of participation.''

Melissa Stockwell lost her right leg in a roadside bomb explosion in April 2004 while delivering water and meals to troops near Baghdad. She hopes to make the 2008 U.S. Paralympic team in swimming, though she said it won't be easy - the competition is intense, and many of her competitors have been disabled all their lives.

"I need to catch up quick,'' said Stockwell, now a student in the prosthetics program at Century College in Minneapolis. "I want to prove losing a leg is not going to stop me.''

To help, Sun Valley Adaptive Sports in Idaho hosted four Iraq veterans for a week, teaching them Alpine skiing, Nordic skiing, snowboarding and sled hockey. For athletes that show promise, Iselin said, the group will help pay their expenses to come to the resort to train.

There are similar camps elsewhere, including Challenge Aspen at that Colorado resort. That's where Heath Calhoun, a retired Army staff sergeant who lost both legs in a November 2003 Iraqi rocket attack, learned to mono-ski.

Dangling Paralympic dreams in front of wounded vets such as Calhoun gives them new goals, he said.

"You take a guy or a girl, laying in a hospital bed, and they think life is over,'' Calhoun said. "And then they can get up, take part in an activity, sometimes something they've never done before they were wounded. It makes people smile again.''