Life is full of possibilities for boy who beat the odds.

By Ken Raymond

Published: April 17, 2005

Joe Webber takes batting practice with his father, Dan, in Oklahoma City. When you're 11 years old, anything seems possible. All doors stand wide open; it's just a matter of picking which one to step through.

Joe Webber might want to be a pilot, guiding an F/A-22 Raptor through the skies at something approaching warp speed; he's already practiced flying on a home video game and memorized details of most warplanes.

He might want to work with scary creatures, as they do on his favorite programs on "Animal Planet." Or he might want to do something else.

"I like to draw most of the time," he says. "I'm really good at it, especially birds and airplanes and stuff like that."

Joe is tall, lean and fast -- the latter a necessity in order to keep up with his three younger brothers. He's got a quick, almost sheepish smile and a way of ducking his head when embarrassed, but all that vanishes when he starts talking about something that interests him.

Then the words come tumbling out, pushing and shoving in their rush to be spoken.

"There's this show called 'Animal Face-Off,'" he says excitedly. "It's where they take two animals, say the gorilla and the leopard, who live in South America or Africa or stuff like that, and they build biomechanical beasts to do tests with them, and then they have virtual battles based on the tests they took. They see which one would win."

Only one foot showed
Ten years ago, Joe won his own battle.

He was 19 months old when the blast broke his jaw and left arm, smashing some of his teeth and rupturing his ear drums. Rubble rained down on him, burying him until nothing could be seen but one sneaker-clad foot.

Today, little remains of the ordeal but scar tissue on his upper left arm and a thin scar running down the left side of his face.

He knows little about events
When other kids at school ask him how he got the scars, Joe offers a simple explanation.

"I just tell them I was in a building blown up by a man named Timothy McVeigh," he says. "Then they remember."

In fact, Joe says, that's about all he can tell them. He doesn't know who Terry Nichols is. He was too young to remember the explosion, and so far, the details of it are far less important to him than Harry Potter or "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow."

On March 30, Joe learned more about the bombing than he'd ever been told before. During an interview with The Oklahoman, his father -- former U.S. Attorney Dan Webber -- told Joe how he looked when he was carried from the wreckage by Oklahoma City police Detective Don Hull.

"My wife kept saying, 'That's him,' and I was saying, 'No, it's not,' because you had black tennis shoes on, kind of like your old ones," Webber said. "Little black tennis shoes. They were covered. I said, 'No, that's not him. Look at his shoes.' She said, 'I know that's him.' Your shoes were covered in gray powder.

"I've told this story before, but I don't know if Joe's ever heard it or how much of it he's heard. Does it make you sad to hear it?"

Joe nodded his head slightly. "A little. ... It's like all the movies I've seen where the buildings blow up. I just can't believe that I was one of them."

He's right. Seeing Joe -- so smart, so vibrant, so interesting -- it's impossible to think of him as a victim.

"Sometimes my friends talk about, 'Wow, you got to take your picture with the president. You're lucky,'" Joe says.

His friends don't know the half of it.