Editor’s note: The San Antonio Report is pleased to feature the weekly bigcitysmalltown podcast hosted by Robert Rivard, co-founder of the Report. We’ll be publishing a brief synopsis of the podcast each Tuesday.
Mario Lopez joined the U.S. Army after 9/11, fueled by the feeling that he needed to serve his country.
“Some people go to college. I went to war,” he told Robert Rivard in this week’s episode of Big City Small Town.
Lopez opened up to Rivard about a near-death experience that brought him closer to his faith. After a deployment to Iraq, Lopez was severely injured by a roadside bomb in Afghanistan. Fifty-four percent of his body was burned, and he sustained a head injury that caused double vision. He lost his right arm and fingers on his left hand.
Lopez said he remembers experiencing pain as noise while in a medically induced coma at Brooke Army Medical Center at Joint Base San Antonio-Fort Sam Houston.
“My body was just screaming in pain,” he said. “I could audibly hear it.”
Lopez and Rivard discussed his journey as a person of faith and as a self-taught artist who found therapy in painting.
“I just knew I had to keep it all together for my children and for the rest of my family,” he told Rivard.
Today, his painting of the American flag hangs at BAMC.
“My whole life experience can be explained through the Bible — everything I’ve experienced,” Lopez said. “So I wrote a book, ‘How I Know: A Story to Strengthen Your Faith,’ and it talks about everything I’ve been through.”
