With the pas­sage of time, the ques­tion of whether Gabe Mar­tinez lost his legs from an IED explo­sion in Afghanistan on Thanks­giv­ing Day of 2010 or the next day has become a mat­ter of dark humor for him and his wife.

It was ear­ly on the morn­ing of Fri­day, Nov. 26, in the Tal­iban strong­hold of Mar­jah when he stepped on a buried glass jar packed with an esti­mat­ed 25 pounds of explo­sives and was blown into the air. For his wife in Lake­wood, though, it was still Thurs­day night.

“I tell my wife it sounds cool­er to say I was hit on Thanks­giv­ing,” said Mar­tinez, a retired Marine who grew up in West­min­ster. “She’s like, ‘It was black Fri­day, which is equal­ly as cool.’ ”

Today, Mar­tinez works for Home­land Secu­ri­ty fight­ing a dif­fer­ent kind of war, using dig­i­tal foren­sics “to com­bat the pan­dem­ic of child exploita­tion,” as he puts it. As a father of three, he takes those crimes personally.

“The whole point is to put child preda­tors behind bars,” said Mar­tinez, who lives near Park­er. “It’s real, it’s prob­a­bly worse than peo­ple real­ize, and it’s a war here on our home­front that needs to be fought. There’s peo­ple out there who are prey­ing on our most vul­ner­a­ble every sin­gle day.”

He traces his war­rior men­tal­i­ty to the day of the 9/11 attacks in 2001 when he was in sev­enth grade. He remem­bers the blank look on his father’s face on the dri­ve to school that day, and how his teach­ers wore the same look. It was the day he learned what ter­ror­ism was.

“It did kind of spark a fire that devel­oped over my years as a teenag­er,” said Mar­tinez, 32. He want­ed to join the fight against ter­ror­ism, and he enlist­ed dur­ing his senior year at Faith Chris­t­ian High School, leav­ing for boot camp two months after grad­u­a­tion in 2007.

Before he was deployed, knew it was going to be a dan­ger­ous one because it would be his job to sweep for buried explo­sives with a met­al detec­tor at a time when IEDs were fill­ing America’s mil­i­tary hos­pi­tals with maimed ser­vice mem­bers. He told his fam­i­ly he’d rather die than come back with­out his legs.

That sen­ti­ment changed instant­ly, just 48 days into his deploy­ment and four months after his wed­ding, when the IED blew him into the air so high he could look down on vehi­cles parked nearby.

“I remem­ber as soon as I land­ed on the ground, it was like this moment of silence, and I felt like the deci­sion was mine if I want­ed to live,” Mar­tinez said. “I heard God’s voice say, ‘Do you want to live?’ With no hes­i­ta­tion I said yes. As soon as I said yes, it was like, ‘Here’s your real­i­ty.’ My right leg was on my chest, my left leg was kind of dan­gling off to the side.”

On the Black­hawk heli­copter that evac­u­at­ed him, he was placed next to his best friend, who also lost both legs while attempt­ing to come to Mar­tinez’ aid. In the first surgery fol­low­ing his wound­ing, Mar­tinez flat­lined on the oper­at­ing table.

He was flown to Wal­ter Reed Nation­al Mil­i­tary Med­ical Cen­ter in Bethes­da, Md., where he and his wife would spend their first Christ­mas as a mar­ried cou­ple. He had lost his right leg above the knee, left leg below the knee.

After a month at Wal­ter Reed, he was trans­ferred to the Bal­boa Naval Med­ical Cen­ter in San Diego on New Years Even for reha­bil­i­ta­tion. Soon into his recov­ery, he decid­ed he want­ed to pur­sue dis­abled sports. Even­tu­al­ly, he would com­pete in sev­er­al marathons via hand-cycles. He learned to ski and rock climb, and com­pet­ed in track meets as a sprint­er. Today, his ath­let­ic endeav­ors are focused on intro­duc­ing his chil­dren — ages 8, 3 and 1 — to the love of Colorado’s moun­tains. He wants to teach them to ski.

As the 10th anniver­sary of his com­bat injuries approach­es, Mar­tinez remains effu­sive in thanks­giv­ing for the Sem­per Fi Fund, a non-prof­it orga­ni­za­tion that pro­vides finan­cial assis­tance and sup­port to Marines wound­ed in com­bat. It helped him in numer­ous ways through his recov­ery, includ­ing com­pen­sat­ing his wife for lost income when she rushed to Wal­ter Reed. It helped him acquire adap­tive sports equip­ment when he was pur­su­ing Par­a­lympic sports and sup­port­ed him dur­ing an unpaid intern­ship he served while prepar­ing for the job he now has. Since he was wound­ed, the Sem­per Fi Fund expand­ed to sup­port mem­bers of oth­er ser­vices under the name America’s Fund.

“I went 22 years with my nat­ur­al-born legs,” Mar­tinez said. “All of a sud­den, in a mil­lisec­ond, they’re gone. I thought my life was com­plete­ly over. I thought I was going to be this dis­abled per­son who need­ed to depend on oth­er peo­ple for any­thing and every­thing for the rest of my life. Well, besides the doc­tors patch­ing me up and doing all the med­ical­ly nec­es­sary stuff, I attribute most of my recov­ery to Sem­per Fi Fund. They were able to show me my con­cep­tion was a mis­con­cep­tion. I was not going to be what I thought was going to be my life.”

Thanks­giv­ing will always have spe­cial mean­ing for Mar­tinez and his wife, Kay­la, but espe­cial­ly this one mark­ing 10 years since he lost his legs.

“Some­times we for­get what we’ve gone through in the last 10 years, how dif­fer­ent our Thanks­giv­ing could be,” Kay­la said. “It’s kind of an inter­est­ing hol­i­day to all of a sud­den have a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent rea­son to be thank­ful every year, and to reflect on what that day was for us.”