A federal contractor must pay for an artificial hip for an employee battered in a bar bet gone bad because it dispatched him to a place where he had to make his own fun -- a remote Pacific Ocean atoll used as a U.S. chemical and nuclear arms dump, a court ruled on Thursday.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit upheld disability payments to a Hawaii man hurt in a barroom incident involving U.S. soldiers on Johnston Atoll, a U.S. possession some 700 miles west of Hawaii.

The San Francisco-based court backed decisions by an administrative board and judge granting disability benefits to Michael Ilaszczat, who required hip surgery after crashing to the floor of a social club on the atoll after he bet soldiers $100 that one of them could not high-kick over his head without touching him. He won the bet but got kicked to the floor.

The appeals court agreed with the earlier ruling that the two-mile-long atoll is a "zone of special danger" because of its isolation and limited recreational opportunities.

"We agree that, under these circumstances, horseplay of the type that occurred here is a foreseeable incident of one's employment on the atoll," wrote Judge Barry Silverman.

Ilaszczat's former employer, Kalama Services Inc., and CIGNA Property and Casualty Insurance Co. contested the awarding of benefits.

Kalama had fired Ilaszczat, who had worked as a store manager for the company, after Johnston Atoll's U.S. military commander barred him from returning because of the barroom hijinks.

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