Rita Maldonado remembers the sensation of flying through the air.

“It was slow motion, like the movie ‘The Matrix’ slow motion. I remember thinking ‘If the sides of the truck hold up, I’ll live. If the sides get crushed, we’ll die.’”

Maldonado, 27, is a river guide in Haines. Last October she was an Army sergeant traveling in a convoy 17 miles south of Kabul, Afghanistan where U.S. forces had taken a highway from the…