At first glance, Christina Axtman, the 5-foot tall, 31-year-old former Army cook from Mullan, does not look like an Iraq war veteran.

Axtman is a 2000 graduate of Mullan High School and joined the Army two years later as a cook.

“I wanted to make a career out of it,” Axtman said.

But as the result of two near-death experiences that left the mother of two children disabled from the service, Axtman now works part-time at the Motherlode Bistro doing what she loves in her hometown.

“I don’t regret joining the service. I love my country,” she said.

“It wasn’t hard after September 11,” Axtman said of enlisting. “And I was already really good with a rifle.”

Her weapons of choice are an M4 assault rifle and .308 sniper rifle, which she said she can disassemble and reassemble in under 30 seconds.

Axtman is the second oldest of 11 brothers and sisters. The family grew up with their grandmother.

A hunter growing up, it was Axtman’s expert marksmanship that landed her a job in 2007 as a sentry at Camp Taji, a base in Iraq located roughly 20 miles north of the city of Baghdad.

Earlier that year, Axtman had been stationed at Camp Ederle in Italy where as a single mother she was told she would be located for several years.

But three months after the birth of her son, Brandon, who has dual citizenship in Italy and speaks the native tongue, Axtman was sent to Iraq with the 173rd Airborne Division in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

“They don’t have cooks over there,” Axtman said. “So I had to do something else.”

The first time Axtman had to shoot someone was three weeks into her deployment.

She said a woman came running up to Camp Taji with an explosive device and a crying baby strapped to her front. Axtman said she was given a direct order to shoot the woman, and after firing a warning shot, Axtman was forced to eliminate the approaching threat.

“After that I shut down,” Axtman said. “Every time I shut my eyes, I see that baby and think of my son who was the same age and I wonder how she could of done that.”

Today, Axtman has become so much closer to her two children. Her daughter Joslynne, 8, is a third-grader at John Mullan Elementary with her brother Brandon, who is now 5 and in first grade.

Joslynne, who Axtman said has Crohn’s disease and nearly died two months ago, is the reason her mother is still alive today.

On Dec. 3, 2010, Axtman was driving on a windy county road in Kansas with Brandon and Joslynne strapped in the back seat. She was traveling about 65 mph when a dog ran across the road in front of her.

Instead of braking, she hit the clutch because she was used to driving Humvees back in Iraq.

The car hit a culvert and launched into the air, rolling several times.

The driver’s side airbag deployed and Axtman said she was thrown through the windshield. Doctors later explained that her body was going at a trajectory speed of 70 mph before she landed in a cornfield beside the road.

Her daughter managed to pull her 2-year-old brother from the car before she found her mother’s phone in the field and dialed 911 while watching over her mother.

Joslynne and Brandon escaped without injury.

Axtman, who was airlifted from the field to a nearby hospital, sustained a collapsed lung, broken neck and each of her ribs and vertebrae shattered. She also lacerated her spleen and liver and somehow her spinal cord remained intact.

“If it wasn’t for [Joslynne], I would of bled to death,” Axtman said.

In her ensuing recovery, Axtman was placed in a wheelchair for six months and had to use a walker for the entire year after that before she learned to walk on her own again. Doctors, she said, told her she would never be able to use her legs again.

Her injuries were so severe that she said the Army honorably discharged her 20 days after the wreck because they thought she would not survive.

She endured three surgeries and 12 blood transfusions and doctors resuscitated her back to life on three separate occasions.

Two steel rods and 16 bolts are now in place near her spinal cord and little metal plates hold her ribs together. Her entire neck is metal, as well, and she said that sometimes when she turns her neck a bolt will scrape against her throat.

The metal in her body is slowly deteriorating her bones and doctors to this day don’t understand how she is alive.

“In 10 years, I will probably be paralyzed or in a wheelchair,” Axtman said. “I shouldn’t be here.”

As a part-time prep cook at the Motherlode Bistro, Axtman’s boss, Marla Hartman, has heard her employee’s story. The two women are able to speak the same Army lingo because Hartman was in the service beginning in the late 1970s.

“She doesn’t get to cook as much as she’d like,” Hartman said. “She’s way into it, she likes cooking. As far as her harsh experiences, she brings it up sometimes but she handles it. She’s friendly and personable and I’ve enjoyed having her help me.”

Hartman, 54, grew up in Spokane and after graduating from high school moved near a mountain in Idaho to learn how to ski. That’s when, as a 19-year-old, she joined the service.

Hartman said she received an Air Force Commendation Medal for being present at the base in Germany in February 1980 where the American hostages from Iran arrived before returning to the United States.

She said they all had large Eskimo coats on and each of them came up to her and gave her a hug.

While working for Hartman, Axtman said she is in pain. The physical damage she endured is dulled by pain medication, but she said she is off her PTSD medication and “doing so much better.”

“It’s so devastating what you see in Iraq,” Axtman said. “I remember walking through Baghdad in 120-degree heat during the day and then it would snow at night. The sand gets in everything, in your eyes, and you’re constantly cleaning your rifle.”

Toward the end of her 18-month deployment (roughly one month before she’d get to go home), Axtman was driving one of two Humvees. The convoy was traveling between two Forward Operating Bases in the “red zone” of Iraq.

Axtman’s Humvee ran over an improvised explosive device (IED), which sensed the heat of the vehicle, she said. The burst killed her sergeant in the passenger seat and flipped the Humvee.

“There was no way we could have seen it coming,” Axtman said.

The vulnerable group of soldiers then started taking enemy fire and so they laid down suppressive fire, Axtman said.

However, due to the presence of civilians in the area, Axtman, who was the highest-ranking non-commissioned officer, was given the order to cease fire.

“All I was thinking was that I had to keep them alive,” she said of the soldiers around her.

Disobeying the order, Axtman kept firing back.

But then she was shot, the bullet hitting her beneath the vest just inches from her heart.

“It’s hard to explain,” she said. “Your ears are ringing. Things are blowing up ... I remember it feeling like the wind got knocked out of me, everything around you is in slow motion. The only thing I could think about honestly was coming home.”

This happened two months prior to her car wreck in Kansas.

She received a bronze star for courage under fire and the punishment she originally received for disobeying the order was lifted.

“God was trying to tell me I need to do something else with my life,” Axtman said. “It was a chance to get to know my kids all over again — people tell me I over-spoil them.”

Aside from the Motherlode Bistro, Axtman said still shoots her rifle.

“It’s calming because out here nobody’s shooting back at you.”

She teaches her children, who have .22 caliber rifles, all about gun safety and continues her passion of cooking at work and home.

“Now I just want to be here with my kids,” she said. “I love to cook; being at the bistro keeps my mind off things.”