I plan to be one of them—and I want you all standing by my side.
11
DREAM BIG
I’ve always been a little guy from a small town, but ever since I was a kid, I’ve had big dreams. After all, why dream small? Dreams are free.
My brother, Bobby, and I grew up racing from one dream to another so quickly that even we lost track. As little kids, we were always running circles around the apartment complex where we lived, pretending we were spies, FBI agents, or police officers. We always had Spy Tech toys. I was sure I’d grow up to be some kind of a James Bond secret agent or a Special Forces commando. All I wanted was to do cool stuff and play with cool things. That much hasn’t changed from then until now.
As Bobby and I got older, we turned our energy to sports. I played baseball from when I was around eight until I was about fourteen. Then, right before I started high school, I broke my leg sliding into third base. After the fracture healed, I looked around at my options. I’d already done baseball for six years, so I decided to try something new and went out for wrestling and gymnastics. Let’s give it a shot and see what happens, I figured.
It turned out that my brother and I were natural gymnasts. Fourteen is a pretty late age at which to start learning gymnastics, but Bobby and I competed in the Illinois state championships four years in a row. I was even considering trying out for a spot on the U.S. Olympic team.
Then my life took a detour.
Two weeks after graduation, my high school team was scheduled to compete in the nationals. I didn’t feel like spending those two weeks training, so I told the coaches, “I want two weeks to myself. We’ve been practicing for the last few months. Now it’s summer, and I want a two-week break.” They gave me my time off, and I came back two weeks later. I ran through my whole practice routine, and everything went fine. I felt ready to take on the world.
I was cooling down when my girlfriend came in. She said, “Teach me how to do that flip-trick you do.” The move she was talking about was a standing backflip followed by a front flip. The way it works is you do a standing backflip, but as soon as your feet hit the mat, you punch forward into a front flip so it’s one smooth, fluent motion—one-two, boom-boom!
“Okay,” I said. I hadn’t done one in a few weeks, so I was a little rusty, but I was sure I could do it. She watched me act out the move in slow motion. “This is how you do it: first, you have to throw your arms upward as you jump up and back.”
For some reason—perhaps because I was out of practice—as I did the trick to show her what I meant, I jumped higher than I normally did. When I rotated in the air and extended my legs to kick off the floor, the floor wasn’t there—I was still falling. So I kicked air and then hit. Hard.
Both my ankles rolled up into my shins.
I didn’t break anything or tear anything, but I stretched out all my ligaments, and goddamn, it hurt. The doctor who treated me looked at me and shrugged. “I don’t know,” he said. “You may or may not be able to keep doing gymnastics. But you’re going to have weak ankles for the rest of your life. And there’s nothing we can do to fix that.”
Just like that, my gymnastics career was over. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit disappointed, but on another level I was kind of relieved, because part of me was ready to move on to something new.
There are probably millions of people who have stories like that one. One moment they had gifts and dreams of where those talents might take them in life—and then, in the blink of an eye, they ended up with nothing. What separates life’s winners from its losers is what they do after that happens. The losers spend their time looking backward, mourning what they lost and marinating in self-pity. Winners bid farewell to the lost dream and set their sights on a new one.
I can understand the temptation to sit around and relive one’s glory days. It’s like listening to songs that take you back to a time when you were young, especially happy, or in love. Playing those memories over and over in your head can bring back a bit of the moments that felt so good, way back when. The problem is those snippets of time don’t last. No matter how good your memory, the glory dims and the cheering of the crowd fades away because those moments are in the past. When that happens, you have two choices. You can sit and mope and cry into your beer, or you can get up and start running down a new dream. I think you ought to get up and get going.
When you don’t have anything to look forward to, you’re not so much living as you are just existing. You’re just going through the motions of your life. There’s nothing wrong with that, if that’s all you want. People can be very happy just going to work every day so they can pay their bills and maybe take a week’s vacation at the beach. If that’s all you need in order to feel fulfilled, to feel as if you’ve lived up to your potential, then it’s a noble path. Where this can go wrong is if you’re in denial. I know of many people who said they were happy with their day-to-day life, but in truth, they weren’t. They just didn’t know it until they took a moment to ask themselves what it was they really wanted. Don’t fall into the trap of denying your dreams so often that you forget what they are. It’s your dreams that give you the drive to improve yourself and strive for a better life.
In my case, finding a new goal didn’t happen overnight. I had no idea what I wanted to do. All I knew for certain was that I wanted something easy. I didn’t want to go to college. My uncle hired me to work with his company, painting houses and doing exterior remodeling jobs. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that I hated this, but in the process I learned that I like working with my hands. I’m good at assembling complicated objects and machines—to me they’re like puzzles, fun games to be sorted out—and I have a knack for building things. There are worse things that you can learn about yourself.
Finally, I got a job with the American Airlines ground crew at O’Hare International Airport, and soon afterward I resigned myself to an ordinary life. Here’s my career, I decided. I can do this my whole life and make enough money to be just fine.
To my surprise, my brother abandoned gymnastics and came with me to work at American Airlines, even though he hadn’t been injured. It just goes to show you how close we are, and how competitive: Bobby figured if he wasn’t going to be able to outperform me (As if he could! . . . Just kidding, bro), there was no point in competing at all.
I earned promotions quickly, and before long I was the youngest person ever to serve as a ground-crew chief at O’Hare International. All things considered, it was a really good job. For me, though, it wasn’t enough. After three years there, I wanted more of everything—money, excitement, you name it. Living an ordinary life had been the fastest way for me to learn that I wanted to do anything but live an ordinary life. Unfortunately, I still had no idea what it was that I wanted.
I considered a lot of options before I hit upon the idea of joining the military. One thing that attracted me to the armed services was that I was curious about police work as a career. I’d always thought about being a cop, ever since I was a kid, and I realized that serving in the Army would let me try it without necessarily committing myself to it forever. I’d get on-the-job training, and I’d have a chance to travel and see different parts of the world. That sounded exactly like the life I wanted to be living.
Two years later, I was an MP deployed on my second tour of duty in Iraq. I’d learned a lot about myself in the Army. One insight was that I didn’t like being a cop. At all. Another was that I was an adrenaline junkie, and that was what led me to my epiphany.
I had been keeping a journal while I was in Iraq. In it, I had been writing down all the different careers I might like to explore when I returned to civilian life. One night, me and my buddies were in one of the base’s rec rooms, watching Titanic on DVD. During the final sequence of the ship’s sinking, when it goes completely vertical and a man falls from a railing and pinwheels off the ship’s propeller, one of my friends nudged me and said, “You know, that shot was an accident. The stu
ntman actually broke his leg when he hit the propeller. Cool, huh?”
Bing-bing-bing! The moment I heard that, I made up my mind. “Aw, dude, that’s awesome,” I said. “I’m gonna be a stuntman!” From that moment on, that was what I thought about whenever I had a free second to myself. It just felt right. Being a stuntman was a job that would combine everything I loved—I’d be able to work on movies and television shows, get a daily adrenaline rush from real danger, and do hands-on, physical work. Most of all, it was the first job I’d ever considered that sounded truly fun.
All I had to do was finish my hitch in the service, get my honorable discharge, and figure out how to get started. It was a perfectly simple plan.
Then, of course, I got blown up. That was not part of my plan. (And later I found out that my friend had been wrong . . . that shot was CGI. I was inspired to become a stuntman by a computer-animated character!)
After I got back stateside, I was told that the Veterans Administration was going to give me a certain amount of money every month for the rest of my life. Because of the extent of my injuries, I receive a pretty generous pension. If I had wanted to, I could have kicked back and lived a simple, nothing-fancy kind of life. I could have retired at the age of twenty-five.
I won’t lie to you. For a while I considered it. Wouldn’t you?
Once I finished rehab, I went home to Illinois to enjoy my retirement. I had thought I would enjoy the luxury of sleeping late every day and playing video games until my thumbs cramped. It didn’t work out that way. For the first few weeks that I was home, I was bored. That’s when I knew there was no way in hell that I’d be able to stand being retired.
I felt a need to stay active, to push myself to accomplish things. I wanted to be a player in the game of life, not just a spectator. I wanted to feel as if I had done something meaningful, useful, and, I hoped, also fun with my life.
Fortunately, I had started laying the groundwork for a new career while I was still in rehab. It didn’t take me long to find an upside to my combat injuries. “Check it out,” I said to my mom. “I’ll make an even better stuntman now than I would’ve before!” I pointed out that a film crew could rig me with fake legs and a fake arm and blow them off—it would look awesome and completely realistic. Plus, I have a twin brother—that’s always a plus for working in film and television, because it saves a ton of cash that would’ve been spent on special effects.
I still had no idea how I was actually going to break into the business, of course, but then I caught a lucky break. In what has become a common refrain in my life after the explosion, I was in the right place at the right time.
Walter Reed Hospital is visited frequently by a variety of celebrities. Some are politicians. Now and then, the soldiers there get to meet athletes. I recall one day during my rehab when I met three or four players from the Oakland Raiders football team. One of the other veterans handed them a football and they signed it. Things like that happened fairly often.
One afternoon I was in the clinic, practicing walking around on a new set of prosthetic legs, when a guest arrived. It was the actor Gary Sinise, who most people know from the television series CSI: NY, but whom all disabled vets know as the bilateral-amputee veteran Lieutenant Dan Taylor from the movie Forrest Gump.
I wanted to say hello, so I tried to walk toward him in a bit of a hurry. When I was still a few paces away from him, I tripped, lost my balance, and landed on his shoulder. He helped me up, and I stood back and flashed a big smile. “Sorry about that.”
He looked back at me with wide eyes. “Holy shit! The real Lieutenant Dan!”
“No, no.” I shook my head. “You’ll always be Lieutenant Dan.”
That made him smile. He sat down with me and we talked for about ten minutes. It wasn’t a heavy conversation. We just shot the breeze and talked about . . . well, I don’t really remember. I just know that it felt good to be seen as a regular guy by someone whose work I had admired and respected so much. Then one of his handlers tapped his watch, signaling Gary that it was time to go. He said a quick farewell, and then he was gone.
I didn’t know it then, but I had just made a really important connection.
My next big opportunity was a phone call from an editor at Esquire.
“We’re looking to do a story on a soldier,” he said. “Can we do a story on you?”
“Sure. Why not?”
They sent a photographer and a writer to profile me for Esquire magazine’s January 2007 “The Meaning of Life” issue. The writer and I talked for a few hours, and the photographer snapped a few shots of me, and that was it. After they left, I didn’t give it another thought. I figured the article about me would probably get cut, anyway. Really, I think of myself as just another guy, and back then I was not a celebrity in any way. No one knew my name or who I was other than my friends and family and the people at Walter Reed.
Two weeks before the issue came out, I got another phone call from the editor.
“How ya doing?”
“I’m great. What’s up?”
“The article came out great.”
“That’s nice. I don’t think I’m all that interesting, but I’m happy it works for you.”
“Awesome. Hey, we’re gonna go ahead and throw you on the cover, too, just FYI.”
“Huh? What? Whoa, wait a minute. I did some research on this special issue you’re doing. You’ve got George Clooney and Robert De Niro and Scarlett Johansson, and then me? Are you sure about this? Really, I’m not anybody.”
“No, trust us, it’s gonna be great.”
“All right,” I said with a shrug. “It’s your magazine.”
Two weeks later, me and my Purple Heart were on the cover of Esquire.
That whole experience was a huge confidence boost, and it opened a lot of doors for me. Just seeing myself on the cover of Esquire made me realize that all things are possible. Obviously there was some luck involved—sadly, there are a lot of wounded soldiers to pick from—but the important thing was that when I was called I said, “Yes.” Right then, I knew that whatever I wanted in life, I just had to go after it. After that cover hit the stands, I shed all the fears that had been holding me back: What if they don’t like me? What if I’m not good enough? What if I fail? I would have missed that chance if I had been worrying about this stuff, and really, do the answers to those questions even matter? So what if someone doesn’t like me or thinks I do something wrong. All you can give is your best effort and keep at it. Once I crossed that psychological line, I never asked those questions again. You can’t predict the answers, so why get hung up on the questions? Since then, my attitude has been “I’m going to do this. If it doesn’t work, I will do something else.” The key has been to keep moving—to go forward at all times, no matter what. How many times have you had the chance to do something new and passed it by for some reason? You’re busy, or you’re tired, or you’re just nervous about something you’ve never done before. There are doors waiting for you to open them, so don’t just walk by them like you’ve done every other day.
One of the first unexpected rewards of being on the cover of Esquire was that it landed me a new full-time job—one that I would never have thought to seek out for myself.
Dick McLane, the marketing director of Quantum Rehab, which manufactures manual and powered wheelchairs as well as other products for the disabled, had been searching for five years to find someone to serve as the company’s spokesperson. When he saw me on the cover of Esquire, he thought that I might be the person he’d been seeking, or at least a contender, so he Googled me. Among the top hits were articles about my homecoming; one of the links pointed to the Web site of a major Chicago newspaper. When Dick clicked through to the story, he saw a photo of me in my power wheelchair. He looked closer, and then he found my phone number and called me.
When I answered, he introduced himself and said, “I saw you on the cover of Esquire magazine. First off, I’d like to thank you for your service.”
“So, I’ll get right to the point: I saw a photo of you sitting on the Quantum 6000—”
“The what?”
“The power wheelchair.”
“Oh. Yeah, okay.”
There was a pause before he asked, “Well . . . how do you like it?”
He was being cautious. If I’d said that I hated it, he’d probably have shifted gears and started doing damage control. Luckily for us both, he didn’t have to. “I really like it,” I said. “My first power chair, at Walter Reed, was a rental, and it sucked. When I saw it, I was like, ‘Are you kidding me? That’s what I have to look forward to the rest of my life? Screw that.’ So my dad picked out a new chair for me, and when he came back he said, ‘Bryan, I got you the Mercedes of wheelchairs. It’s built like a tank. It has six wheels. You’re gonna love it.’ And I do.”
That was all Dick had needed to hear. “How would you like to be our spokesperson?”
“Huh?” It took me a second to realize I’d been offered a job. “Sure. Cool.”
“Great,” Dick said. “Welcome aboard!”
I had no idea what I was getting into, but I’m grateful every day for that call from Dick. Working as Quantum Rehab’s spokesperson has been an education for me. I’ve learned about accessibility issues and the latest advances in technology to assist the disabled. It’s given me the chance to travel and meet people. Best of all, it has given me a chance to be part of a company devoted to improving the lives of others and, in some cases, giving people their lives back.
For me, that’s what it’s all about. And it all started with my face on a magazine cover.
No Turning Back Page 14
