No Turning Back

by Bryan Anderson

  Part of what holds people back, I think, is the failure to really accept what has happened to them. At first, I wasn’t able to accept the change that had been inflicted on me. I was aware of it, I acknowledged it, and I thought this was enough. It wasn’t. On some fundamental level, deep inside, I was still fighting against the truth. I was angry at what had happened, and part of me wasn’t ready to let go of the life I’d had before being blown up.

  Learning to accept things was a lesson I learned from another triple amputee, a guy named Joey Bozik. He had been hit one year and four days before I was. He had already endured everything I was just starting to experience—waking up at Walter Reed, learning what had happened to him, slogging through rehab, you name it. So, I started asking him questions. When I first met him, he wasn’t yet walking on his own, but he was getting close to doing it, and he was definitely a lot further along in the process than I was.

  I met Bozik only after I had begun my rehab program because when I first arrived at Walter Reed, he was away on leave. During my first few weeks in rehab, I felt kind of lost. All the exercises seemed pointless. But after Bozik returned to Walter Reed and we got a chance to talk, he helped me by telling me something no one else could: “Once you accept it”—meaning my whole situation, getting blown up and having to rebuild my life—“once you own what has happened to you, only then will you be able to move on. If you want to heal, you need to accept it.”

  “I have.” I waved off his advice as if I knew what I was talking about, but I really didn’t understand what he was trying to tell me. I think I just wasn’t ready at that moment to understand what “accepting it” really meant. It wasn’t as simple as acknowledging the facts of what had happened. It wasn’t about realizing that my life had been changed and could never again be the way it had been. It was deeper than that. What Bozik was trying to teach me was that I would never be able to be whole again until I found a way to work through my anger, my sense of loss, and be okay with who I’d become. I needed to let go of my longing for the man I used to be and learn to be happy being the man I am.

  My epiphany didn’t happen all at once, but I know where the breakthrough began.

  Walter Reed can be a very inspiring place to visit. It’s really uplifting to walk through there and see so many of the soldiers’ great attitudes. But after spending months living there and seeing the sheer volume of patients that flows through that place week after week, it began to depress me. It made me realize I needed to experience real life again. One day I reached my breaking point. I said, “Mom, I’m going crazy! I need to get out of here! Let’s go somewhere.”

  “Where do you want to go?”

  “Vegas!”

  An hour later, she had us on a plane to Las Vegas, which was great because my best friend Sarah lives there.

  For one weekend, I stopped obsessing over my life and my rehab, and I just had fun. I did what I wanted to do, and I tried new things. I started living again.

  My mom, Sarah, and I walked the Strip, went shopping, and gambled. I like craps and blackjack, so those are mostly what I played. I rented a scooter so I could get around on my own. It had a captain’s chair with two armrests. The handlebars were a single lever. If you pushed on the right side, you’d go forward. Push on the left side and you’ll go backward. Simple, right?

  When visiting the craps tables, I had been parking sideways, which takes up a lot of space and crowds out other players. I felt bad about that, so I thought, You know, the chair pivots on a dime. Let me see if I can back the scooter up to a table and then pivot to face the table so that I only have to take up one spot.

  I was parked at a craps table as I had this notion. Turning in my seat to look back, I saw another game in full swing right behind me. But as I turned my body, I accidentally pushed one of the armrests against the handlebar. The chair clicked into gear and shot forward with me riding sidesaddle and unable to reach the controls.

  Directly ahead of me, standing in the path of my runaway scooter, was an unsuspecting guy at another craps table. I slammed straight into him without so much as a “Look out!” The poor guy wound up pinned against his table, bent like a boomerang and howling like crazy, while the scooter burned rubber on the carpet like a hot rod being primed for a drag race.

  Between shouts of “Oh my God!” I tried to stop the scooter, but because the armrest was jammed forward, I couldn’t get the thing out of gear. Within seconds I was pushing this poor guy and an entire craps table across the casino floor.

  Finally, I pulled back the armrest and backed up off the dude, but by then the pit boss had come over to see what the hell was going on. “I’m so sorry,” I said, over and over again.

  Word must have spread about my big crash, because I swear the rest of the weekend no one came with ten feet of me, like I was driving a bumper car in a china factory. Maybe I should have put a “student driver” sign on the back of my scooter.

  Another first for me during that trip was a visit to an oxygen bar. The notion of paying to breathe something that’s free everywhere you go seemed weird to me, but I was curious, so I checked it out. The place I went to had different flavors of oxygen. Yes, flavors . Anyway, I sat down and strapped a respirator tube under my nose. For ten minutes I camped out and savored a noseful of really expensive air. Every few minutes the bartender came back and asked me if I wanted to try a different flavor. Then she put this spiderlike metal device on my head, and it started massaging my scalp while she rolled a ball-bearing massage bar across my back.

  I never thought I’d enjoy paying for air while wearing a steel spider on my head, but I have to admit, it was kind of fun.

  When I went back to my hotel room, I jumped into a Jacuzzi that’s bigger than most New York apartments, filled it, and treated myself to a hot soak. Leaning back, surrounded by warm froth, I admitted to myself, Yeah . . . this is all right. I can do this, no problem.

  My mom and I returned to Walter Reed the following Monday. That was the first time since being blown up that I really felt as if I was able to put things right in my head. Sitting by the reflecting pool outside the Malone House, I thought, If I had fun while I was in Vegas, and for just a little while I was able to stop thinking about what happened to me, why not just have fun all the time?

  That was when I began to accept the new status quo in my life. I decided, This is it. I’m going to do everything in life that I possibly can. I want to be somebody.

  That three-day jaunt to Las Vegas had been the turning point for me, but the only thing that had changed was my outlook. I had gone from seeing my rehab as a chore that I needed to do so that I could adapt to the new life I had to lead, to seeing it as the first step on a journey to the life I wanted to live. Just by changing how I saw myself—by accepting who I was, inside and out—I discovered that I didn’t merely have to exist as a triple amputee, I could really live as one. It was a choice, and I made it.

  I chose life.

  When I think of people who are taking the wrong approach to surviving, I think of homeless veterans I see on the streets. I know this might sound harsh, but when I see a veteran wearing filthy rags, sitting on a sidewalk, and begging for change because he’s obviously a drunk or an addict, even if he’s an amputee, I think his situation is completely his own fault.

  Before you run me out of town with torches and pitchforks, let me explain.

  Maybe life dealt guys like this a lousy hand. They lost their job, the Veterans Administration wouldn’t help them, or they lost a loved one or got kicked out of their house. I know that these things happen, and they’re devastating. I’m sympathetic to that—but only up to a point.

  Once these veterans start living on the street, that’s a choice, and it’s a bad one. I don’t give money to people like that when I see them begging. “Go get a job,” I tell them. I don’t say it to be a jerk or because I’m selfish. I just want these people to help themselves first.

  Military experience is a great thing to have on your résum
é. Potential employers sit up and take notice of it. I’m not saying some ex-grunt can walk into a Fortune 500 company and become a CEO, but there’s no excuse for not seeking at least an entry-level job and working your way up. In some industries, like food service and retail, a military background can get you in the door at the assistant-manager level. There’s no shame in managing a fast-food joint or a knickknack shop in a mall. A job is a job. As long as you’re taking steps to better your life, you can do any job with pride.

  But when I see people wearing the tattered remains of their uniforms while sitting in their own filth, asking for pity, it makes me angry. I can’t respect someone who would rather scrape through each day looking for a drink or a fix to dull their pain than muster the discipline to fight through it and take back their own life.

  It makes me crazy when I see people who gave up after the military spent years trying to teach them to be self-sufficient and lead people. Even if you’re just a buck private, from day one you’re still being taught the basics of leadership. You never know who’s going to be called upon to lead in a combat situation, so everyone is expected to be ready if the duty falls upon them.

  So why would someone who has that kind of valuable training choose to just sit on the street and ask for charity? That’s not what a soldier is trained to do. A soldier is supposed to get up and find a way forward, no matter what.

  I want to tell each of those homeless vets this: It is not impossible to fix your life, but you won’t get any better, and your situation won’t improve, if you keep repeating the same broken pattern of behavior. Stop doing what doesn’t work and try something new. Visit a homeless shelter and get a shower. Go to the Salvation Army and get some clean clothes. Sign up with a temp agency and go on job interviews until someone hires you. Stay at the shelter until you save enough for an apartment. Step by step, take your life back.

  Bottom line: If you’re in a bad situation, you need to pick yourself up and do something about it. Don’t wait for solutions to come to you. Make your own answers.

  Giving yourself over to any kind of a crutch—whether it’s booze, drugs, pity, lashing out in anger, or whatever you might use to avoid accepting responsibility for your life—is the wrong approach to surviving. Taking that road, no matter how satisfying it might feel in the moment, will only make you weaker. It will make you less than you are, less than you deserve to be.

  There are ways of getting help so that you can start your life over again. So why don’t people take advantage of those opportunities? Pride, maybe. They’re afraid of being shamed in front of people they care about, or looking foolish in public. Either one is a lame excuse for not doing the right thing. If there are people who care about you, then you’re doing them more harm by not getting help, and your pride doesn’t matter. If all you’re afraid of is looking bad to people you don’t know, why do you care about the opinions of strangers in the first place?

  People who are dependent on booze or drugs or any other addiction let everything else fall away until that’s the only thing in their lives. Others might not be addicted, but they’ve lost their job or their wife or their legs, and they still spend the rest of their lives shrinking away from those problems. You can’t just live in a little hole in the center of your life. There’s so much out there when you live a full life instead of a life you allow to collapse around you. Don’t define your whole life by these incidents, don’t just exist from moment to moment. Break out of that corner you’ve painted yourself into. Look around at the whole wide world, not just the pain you’re feeling. No matter how bad your problems are, they’re small compared to your potential. Live large.

  I know it won’t be easy. There are all kinds of things standing in your way—pain, exhaustion, pride . . . but they all come down to one thing: fear. Fear of suffering, of failing, or being embarrassed, of never getting better. That barrier is there, and it’s very real.

  My point is, you need to push through it. Courage isn’t the opposite of fear; real courage is being afraid and doing what you need to do despite knowing that you’re scared. It doesn’t matter what you’re afraid of. Once you conquer it and come out on the other side, you’re going to feel so much better because that ordeal’s behind you, and because you can really feel like you’ve accomplished something. It’s an essential part of feeling like you’re moving on, and doing things, and becoming a functioning part of society.

  So stand up and find a way to live. You owe it to yourself.

  When you can do that, you’ll be a true survivor.

  9

  LIVE, LOVE, THRIVE

  There are very few events that I can truly say have changed my life. Getting blown up was one, and being on the cover of Esquire magazine was another, but kissing Caroline was the big one: that was the first time I really fell in love. I’d been with other women, but I’d never felt anything like that before. It turned out to be less than I hoped for and more than I expected. I don’t know if that makes sense, because I still don’t really understand what happened between us. But I know I loved her and that going through all those ups and downs taught me things that are still around even though she’s gone. I don’t regret it. It’s worth it, putting yourself out there.

  It started in early August 2005, when I was home on leave during my second tour of duty in Iraq. My family and I were on vacation in a little town in Wisconsin. We had a house there, right on Lake Michigan. One night we went out for dinner at a pizza place nearby. There were a lot of us, so we sat outdoors, at a long picnic table on the restaurant’s screened-in porch. My twin brother was sitting across from me.

  “Let’s get some beers,” I said.

  Bobby waved over our waitress. She was a bit taller than me, with blue eyes and a lean, athletic figure. Her dirty-blond hair had red and white ribbons braided into it. The moment I saw her, all I could think was, Wow—she is unbelievably hot.

  Her name was Caroline.

  My family and I ordered a round of drinks. Caroline came back a few minutes later, carrying them on a tray. I couldn’t stop looking at her as she handed them out, one by one. Then she stepped behind me, picked up my beer, and tried to reach over and around me. The glass slipped from her fingers and landed upright on the floor behind me. Its contents erupted in a cold wet blast right up my back, under my shirt.

  I jumped up. “Holy shit!”

  Caroline looked almost as surprised as I felt. “Oh my God,” she said, struggling to clean and apologize at the same time. “I’m so sorry! That never happens to me. I don’t know what happened!” Her face was red with embarrassment as she wiped spilled beer from the floor and my part of the picnic bench. “I never drop beers. Never, I swear.”

  It might seem like a strange way to break the ice, but she and I spent the rest of the night flirting with each other—trading smiles and little jokes, that kind of thing. I knew there was something special happening between us, so I asked when she would be working again.

  That week, I went back to the restaurant . . . Five times.

  I made a few of those return visits with friends, but I also went by myself a couple of times, and those were the times when I really got to talk with Caroline and learn a bit about her. One thing I learned was that she liked horseshoes. I didn’t think to ask why. I was just so excited to have discovered something personal about her that I went out and bought us each a horseshoe charm on a chain. Mine was plain silver and hers was encrusted with tiny jewels. At least they looked like jewels. I didn’t spend a ton of money, but I just wanted to give her something, even without any special occasion. It had only been a week, but I was falling hard and fast. When you feel like that, you don’t always think about if the other person is in the same place you are, you just go for it.

  After I gave her the charm, I invited her to a party I was throwing at my family’s vacation house that Friday night. “Yes,” she said, “I’ll come! I’ll be there. I just have to go to this other thing first at a bar on the other side of town.”

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sp; I nodded and played it cool. “Okay. Just swing by after you’re done there.”

  Friday night, everyone was having fun at the party, and I lost track of time. Around midnight, I noticed that Caroline hadn’t shown up yet. I was really bummed out. She’s not here! She’s not coming! I couldn’t believe she would blow off my party, especially because I was leaving the next day—I was going to meet my best friend for a week in Las Vegas before my leave was over, and then I was going back to Baghdad. That night was my last chance to see her, so I wasn’t going to give up that easily. I made my friend Robi drive me over to the bar because I had been drinking and was in no shape to get behind the wheel. The place was only three minutes away, but I knew better than to drive in my condition.

  Robi drove me to the bar and waited while I got clumsily out of his car. I guess I’d had a bit more beer than I realized. He got out, circled around, and steadied me—I don’t know if it was just about the beer or also about being all wound up about Caroline standing me up. I slapped a hand on his shoulder. “All right, man, listen: if I’m not back out in fifteen minutes, you can leave without me.”

  Robi nodded. “You got it.” He gave me a hug, slapped my back, and gave me a helpful push toward the door. “Go get ’er.”

  I staggered inside the bar and looked around for Caroline. At first I didn’t see her anywhere, and I started to get worried. Taking my time, I pushed through the crowd to the back of the bar, but still I didn’t see her, so I started working my way back toward the front door. By the time I got there, I had concluded that Caroline either hadn’t been there, or had left earlier and I’d missed her. I was one foot out the door when I glanced to my right and saw her standing there. I shouted, “Caroline!” She looked right at me, her jaw slack with surprise.

  Then she smiled. “What’re you doing here?”

  “You’ve gotta come to my party!”

  “Why not stay here? We can get a few beers.” That’s when I finally realized that maybe the whole thing wasn’t quite as special for her as it was for me. At least not yet. I had to get her back to my place somehow, get some private time with her.