WASHINGTON — Staff Sgt. Spencer Stone of the Air Force was driving to work on a stormy morning a few days ago when a White House aide phoned with an invitation to join the first lady on Tuesday for President Obama’s last State of the Union address to Congress.

He told the aide to call back later: “I didn’t want to crash and die in the bad weather.”

Sergeant Stone, 23, was understandably cautious, having come close to death twice in recent months.

His first brush with mortality — as one of those who subdued a gunman in August on a Paris-bound train in France — earned him an invitation to sit in the House gallery for Mr. Obama’s nationally televised speech. The second near-death experience was in October, when he was stabbed repeatedly outside a Sacramento bar after intervening in a dispute between a man and a woman.

Still nursing wounds from both episodes, but back to work at Travis Air Force Base in California, Sergeant Stone will fly to Washington as one of about two dozen people chosen to be Michelle Obama’s guests because they personify — as the White House put it — “who we are as Americans: inclusive and compassionate, innovative and courageous.”