A picture hangs behind Heath Hobson’s desk at the Veterans Services Office in Foxboro, reminding him of what could have been.

Almost was.

In the picture, a young boy accepts a flag in honor of his father, a soldier who was killed in combat.

Hobson, a veteran of the Iraq War, knows that if a rocket flying through the Iraqi desert had taken a slightly different path, that young boy could have been his own son, Michael.

While deployed in Iraq in January 2007, then-Army Staff Sgt. Hobson was preparing to play a game of volleyball at his camp when he suffered a blast injury to his lower right leg from a rocket attack.

The blast severed his leg and took out 3 inches of his tibia. Doctors were able to save his life as well as his leg, but Hobson knows that if positions or paths had been altered by just a few feet, the outcome could have been radically different.

“It’s tough for me to look at that picture, but I’m glad it’s up there,” Hobson said. “Because that’s a boy receiving his father’s flag at a funeral, and I just think, if I didn’t get hit in the leg, if it hit me above the waist, that would be my son” …continue reading at TheSunChronicle.com.