Master Bombardier Bounyarat Tahaphon Makthepharak knows he's lucky to be alive, and has the scars to prove it.

"The shrapnel exploded somewhere behind my back and went through my lungs and heart," he told CTV News in an exclusive interview on Tuesday, showing the stitches that mark his chest and stomach.

Known best as Mak, Makthepharak was one of 10 people injured in a tent at the Kandahar airbase in Afghanistan when a Taliban rocket struck on the evening of June 30.

"Everything is so smoky, I remember," he said. "I think I remember saying I was hit."

Makthepharak underwent surgery by a medical team at Kandahar airfield and was later flown to a U.S. military hospital in Germany for further treatment. While on the operating table, the 30-year-old reservist almost died.

"I was clinically dead for a while," he said. "They had to open up my ribs and massage my heart to get me stabilized."

When he woke up, he had no memory of the incident and asked the American nurse what had happened.

The nurse told him 'you got hit by a rocket,'" Makthpharak recounted to Canada AM Thursday.

However, his recovery has been nothing short of miraculous. "I was very happy to come back alive, for sure," he said.

Makthepharak flew home last week and is now out of hospital and walking again -- albeit slowly.

"Hopefully within a month I should be able to do a light jog or maybe just like a pushup here and there."

The 30 Field Regiment Ottawa, his home unit, welcomed him back as a hero. "Glad to see you in ...," one soldier tells him. "One piece?" Makthepharak says, finishing the sentence. "Yeah, it's pretty cool."

Long before he was scarred by conflict in Afghanistan, Mak was scarred by war in his native Laos.

His father, Boutone Makthepharak, was the commander-in-chief of the Laotian army in the 1970s.

The communists jailed Boutone Makthepharak, and eventually executed him in 1980. In the early 1980s, Makthepharak escaped with his mother to a refugee camp in Thailand when he was 10.

There, Mak met the men who would become his role models: UN peacekeepers. "The boys in the blue helmet, so on, stuff like that, serving, helping other people who need. I thought that was a cool thing to do," he said.

They came to Canada in 1986 after being accepted as political refugees. Makthepharak joined the reserves in 1997 and served three missions abroad. "It's something small to give to humanity, I guess I would say, but I like doing what I do," he said.

Despite his brush with death -- and protests from his friends -- Makthepharak is thinking about going back to Afghanistan.

"I just told them it's something that I always wanted to do."

With a report from CTV's Roger Smith