Ben Stansall/Reuters

Prince William, left, speaks to patients, including Lance-Corporal Martyn Compton (second from right), during a tour of the Help for Heroes Rehabilitation Complex in Surrey, England, in June 2010. Compton, who served alongside the prince in the Household Cavalry, will attend the royal wedding.

Mingling with the celebrities, royalty, politicians and sports stars who will attend the royal wedding Friday will be another special guest: an Afghan war veteran who was so severely burned in a 2006 ambush that he lost his ears and nose.

Lance-Corporal Martyn Compton is a friend of Prince William, who served beside him in the Household Cavalry. Burned over 70 percent of his body in the ambush, he was in a coma for three months. But despite his severe injuries, by July 2008 he was able to attend another important wedding: his own, to Michelle Clifford, a secondary-school teacher he met in 2006.

Compton had proposed to her just two weeks before his four-month stint in Helmand province, one of the most dangerous areas of Afghanistan. Five weeks into it, his convoy was ambushed by Taliban fighters and a rocket-powered grenade hit the vehicle Compton was driving. Engulfed in flames, he jumped from the vehicle, breaking one arm before managing to pull off his helmet and body armor with the other.

After putting out the flames by rolling in sand, he tried to crawl to cover but was shot in the leg by a Taliban fighter before his comrades, risking their lives, pulled him to safety in a tank. Compton "died" three times en route back to the British base, but was revived each time.

In May 2008, Prince William honored his friend at a special pageant in London. "Compo, you're more famous than me," the prince joked, according to the U.K. Daily Mail. "You're in the papers every day."

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

The president and first lady were dressed to the nines for a Kennedy Center Honorees Reception at the White House earlier this month -- but if the U.K. Daily Mail has it right, they won't need to break out their glad rags for Will and Kate's wedding.

The U.K. Daily Mail is reporting that President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama will not be invited to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton next April. The British tabloid cites "a senior courtier" as saying that "The guest list is still being drawn up and could change, but as things stand it’s right (to say Mr Obama will not be invited)."

The Mail claims that because William is not yet heir to the throne, the wedding is not an official state occasion and Will and Kate are more interested in having people who work for William's many charities and just plain folks among the 2,000 guests at their "people's wedding" than dignitaries and VIPs. However, the Mail says that French President Nicolas Sarkozy and wife Carla Bruni will likely be invited.

But state occasion or not, not inviting the Obamas would certainly be a break from tradition. In 1981, for example, President Ronald Reagan and wife Nancy were invited to the wedding of Charles and Diana (Nancy came, but the president, recovering from an assassination attempt, stayed home).

In assessing the credibility of the Mail's report, it should be noted that the tabloid has had to pay out hundreds of thousands of pounds in high-profile libel cases involving celebrities over the past decade alone. On the other hand, the newspaper has broken its share of scoops as well.