Here’s a fun fact I’ve learned: being on the cover of a magazine gets you invited to lots of cool parties. Shortly after I debuted on the cover of Esquire, I started attending a number of events in the Chicago area. I soon found out that Gary Sinise is also from the area, and before long he and I started to notice that we were crossing paths on a regular basis. We started to greet each other like old pals.
He’d wave. “Hey, how’re you doin’?”
I’d nod. “What’s goin’ on?”
Neither of us knew that thousands of miles away, gears were turning. One of the producers of CSI: NY had seen my magazine cover, and the photo had given him an idea for an episode. After the WGA writers’ strike ended, he returned to his office and saw the copy of Esquire still sitting on his desk, and that got him writing again. When he was finished, he called me up. “I wrote an episode with a part in it for you. Think you can do it?”
“Of course I can!” Then I asked him, “Does Gary know about this?”
“No. Why?”
“Well, ’cause we’re actually kind of friends.”
“Ah . . . Let me go tell him.”
The next day I got a call from Gary.
“Hey, man, what’s up? I hear you’re coming out to L.A.!”
“Yup, sure am.”
“That’s awesome. We’re gonna have a good time. We should schedule a lunch.”
Everything happened so swiftly that I could barely keep up. I spent eleven days in Los Angeles, hanging out with Gary in his trailer during the day. While I was there I gave him a framed picture of me and him that was taken during his visit to Walter Reed, and which I’d signed for him. He seemed to like it, and I thought that was pretty cool.
After I had the CSI gig under my belt, I landed a bit part on the HBO series The Wire, another in the Mickey Rourke feature film The Wrestler, and I even got to hang out on the set of The Dark Knight and watch them film the stunt in which a tractor trailer gets flipped upside down. I still loved the idea of doing stunts, but once I’d tried acting, I knew I wouldn’t be satisfied working in the shadows anymore. I wanted to be a star.
That’s another funny thing about dreams: they evolve. If you work at them and make them come true, they surprise you by getting bigger. It’s as if you’ve reached the peak of a mountain, and only once you’re standing on its summit are you able to see a higher crest that you weren’t even aware of before that moment—and having seen it, you now want nothing more than to climb it and plant your flag there.
The more dreams I make come true, the more I realize that I don’t have to limit myself to only one at a time. These days, I have my eyes on many prizes: I want to be an author, an extreme athlete, and an advocate for veterans and the disabled. Who knows? If I ever get tired of trying to change the system from the outside, maybe I’ll run for office. Anything is possible.
What’s particularly ironic about my story, of course, is that after I was blown up, most people assumed that the loss of my legs and left arm would limit my possibilities and restrict my options from that day forward. Instead, the opposite happened: getting wounded in Iraq and surviving as a triple amputee gave me notoriety, which led to media visibility. That led me to the cover of Esquire, which helped me land a guest spot on CSI: NY and so on.
I have been to so many places and done so many amazing things that would never have been possible had I come home uninjured from Iraq. If I had escaped the blast that day in Baghdad, and come home with all my limbs and fingers and toes . . . who would have noticed me? I wouldn’t have been treated like a celebrity. There would have been no homecoming parades. No magazine covers. No acting jobs. No nothing. I’d be just another “lucky” guy who made it home from the war without too many visible scars—the ones that people notice most.
My point is that whether the things that happen to you are lucky or not depends entirely on how you think about them and what you make of the opportunities you’re given.
Of course, I still daydream of having a whole body again. I look forward to the day when I can be like Steve Austin on The Six Million Dollar Man and run around on bionic legs. Until that day comes, though, I will keep making the most of the body I have.
There are days when I feel as if I have attention deficit disorder. I bounce through life like a pinball flying off bumpers. I need to have something to do. I can’t just sit still. That’s what pushes me forward, even now. Someday, when I am ready to kick back and enjoy the good life, I want to be proud of the way I’ve spent my time. Until then, I intend to chase my dreams, no matter where they take me—and that’s exactly what I want you to do as well.
You see, dreams are like muscles. If you don’t exercise them and make them grow, they will wither and waste away. So keep hope alive. Keep working to make your dreams a reality. Each small step you take will lead to another that is closer to your goal. Push yourself a little bit further each time, and never stop moving until you turn your dream into your reality.
No matter what roadblocks life throws in your way, you can find a way to keep going.
It might mean compromising on the definition of your dream; for instance, I can’t run a marathon on prosthetic legs, but I could walk one if it was important to me.
It might mean asking for help. Check with your local or state government, or with private charities. You might find one that can help you acquire the tools you need to succeed. What matters is that you never surrender your dream, not even if you have to take really long, strange detours to reach your destination. Satisfy your hunger for life.
Once you do, you’ll see that what your parents and teachers said was true: anything is possible if you are willing to commit yourself to it, mind and body, and do the work. Nobody believes this until they figure it out for themselves, and the reason why is that one can’t be told the secret of success—each of us needs to learn it for him or herself.
Most important, don’t listen to anyone who tells you that your dream is out of reach. Nothing is ever out of reach as long as you keep trying.
12
TALKING ABOUT IT
A big part of my job as the national spokesperson for Quantum Rehab is traveling the country, meeting people, and speaking to crowds. I tell hundreds of strangers at a time the story of how I got blown up in Iraq, and I confide in them about my rehab process. Anyone who knew me when I was a kid would find all this totally ironic, because I used to be shy. I was the quiet kid who kept to himself; I wouldn’t talk to girls or introduce myself to other people unless they reached out to me first. The last thing I ever wanted to do when I was growing up was walk into a crowd of people I didn’t know and start yakking away.
To be honest, this is still true, at least when I’m out and just minding my own business. I think of it as a personal issue, a matter of preference. Some people don’t want to talk about themselves, and I’m one of those people. I don’t like tooting my own horn because it makes me feel as if I’m bragging about how I’ve gotten to do all this cool shit, and that’s totally not how I want to come off to people I’ve just met. So I tend to leave things out or let things slide.
Let me give you an example. Not too long ago I was at a diner with my former roommate Sunshine. While we were eating, he pointed out a decoration on the wall. It was a poster of a rock band that had been signed by one of its members, who had inscribed it with the message “Greatest milk shake I’ve ever had!”
I nodded at Sunshine and said, “That’s cool,” even though I had never heard of the band. I went back to enjoying my cheeseburger and figured that was the end of it. But you know how the waiter always comes by the table to ask how things are just when you have a mouth full of food? Kind of like that, Sunshine took it upon himself to summon the restaurant’s manager just after a bunch of ketchup squished out of my burger into my lap. As I was trying to clean up, the manager walked up to the table. Sunshine pointed at the poster and then nodded at me as he said, “My friend ought to be up on your wall, too! He was on the cover of Esquire!�
�� Apparently, Sunshine didn’t realize that my glaring at him and shaking my head meant Shut up, you’re embarrassing me. And I have a lapful of ketchup.
It’s not that I’m ashamed of being on the cover of Esquire. The fact is, I’m really proud of it; it was a big moment in my life, one for which I’m grateful. But here’s the thing: I don’t run around crowing about it to strangers, because I figure it’s not important to them and they have enough shit to deal with in their lives without feeling as if they also need to cater to my ego. That’s not what I’m about. (In case you’re wondering, a few days later, I mailed a signed copy of the Esquire cover to the restaurant’s manager.)
Considering how much I hate being in the spotlight, it’s kind of ironic that ever since the end of my rehab, I’ve been treated like some kind of minor celebrity by the media. The day I came home to Chicago after being discharged from Walter Reed felt like a holiday. I flew home on American Airlines, and when my flight landed, they did for me what they do for retiring pilots on their last flight: fire trucks shot their water cannons over the plane as it taxied in to the gate. As I got off the plane, an airline employee put Illinois sod grass on the jet bridge so that the first thing I stepped onto was Illinois soil, and as I was pushed in my chair toward the terminal, I saw that the jet bridge was lined with members of my family. Inside the terminal, three hundred employees of American Airlines were waiting; when they saw me, they gave me a standing ovation.
All that would have been enough to blow my mind, but there was more.
I left the airport terminal in a limo. Roughly halfway home, we pulled over into a rest area, where we were met by three hundred people on motorcycles. I saw all this and wondered, What the hell is going on? I was lifted out of the limo and placed into a police motorcycle’s sidecar. Then we all moved out in one huge motorcade, down highways that had been closed all the way to my hometown of Rolling Meadows, where there was a huge parade in my honor. Afterward, we all ended up at some crazy bar. A few hours of drinking later, someone took my photo—after I was totally smashed and doing my best impression of Gomer Pyle. Naturally, that’s the photo that ended up on the front page of one of Chicago’s biggest newspapers.
I couldn’t believe it. I still don’t know what to say about that day except “Wow.”
That wasn’t my first brush with attention from the media, though. Rewind to a month or so before my homecoming blowout: as I was getting my affairs in order to leave Walter Reed, I was contacted by the producers of Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq, an HBO documentary featuring actor James Gandolfini, star of The Sopranos. They wanted to know if I would be willing to be interviewed on camera about the day I was wounded and my experiences in rehab.
At that time I felt pretty down about myself. I had no idea why anyone would want to interview me. I didn’t think I was that interesting. I just felt like a guy who’d been fucked up in Iraq. Ever since I’d come home, I’d been focused entirely on my recovery. In a way, I felt as if I was being selfish because I had shut everyone else out so that I could take care of myself. I had stopped going out of my way to help other people. I just worried about me, about getting myself back where I needed to be. The people around me—my family and therapists—kept saying to me, “You have such a great attitude, keep it up,” but I couldn’t stop feeling like a jerk.
With all those negative thoughts spinning around in my head, I wasn’t sure if I wanted the kind of exposure that the documentary would bring, but I remembered another of my mottoes: “Try anything once.” I agreed to the interview, and the producers made arrangements to bring me to New York City for the taping.
When my turn in front of the cameras arrived, my Army training kicked in. I had committed to do this, so I gave it my all. My fear vanished, and I let myself open up about everything: my wounding, my fear, my pain, and how I felt about the whole situation. The more I talked, the easier it got. I started dredging up details I hadn’t shared with anyone before that moment. It was as if I was purging all this dark stuff from my soul, and it felt great. Best of all, I didn’t care how I sounded or what anyone thought of me. I was just being honest. If they like what I have to say, I decided, that’s great. If they don’t, they don’t. It is what it is.
It turns out that the producers had been kind of impressed by me. I learned later that they had interviewed thirty soldiers from different branches of the armed services, but they were only going to use ten of those interviews. When I found out that mine was going to be the first one shown in the finished film, it felt great; I was proud just to be a part of that project.
My role in this film helped me realize something important: talking about what had happened to me in Iraq was important not just because it helped me feel better about my life post-rehab but because it had the potential to help other people, too. By sharing what I had learned, I might be sparing someone else from the same fate, or serving as an example to someone going through the same kind of pain. I began to see that even though I had come home disabled, I could still be useful to others. My life could still have meaning.
After I was featured on the cover of Esquire, played a guest role on CSI: NY, and turned in a cameo for The Wire, my next opportunity to act in front of the camera put me somewhere I’d never expected to be: on a daytime soap opera. Along with two other soldiers who had been interviewed for Alive Day Memories, I was cast as part of an Iraq veterans’ talk-therapy group on the daytime serial All My Children. It was an actual episode, scripted to fit into the show’s ongoing story lines, but it was staged like a group interview. The producers asked us all to give natural answers, because we were all playing ourselves. We all got our turn in the spotlight, so to speak, but I noticed that the crew seemed to pay a lot more attention to me than to the other soldiers. That was when I realized that of all the veterans they’d recruited, I was the only one with real acting experience. I’m not saying that this made me any more genuine or my story any more compelling, because neither is true; the difference, I think, was simply that I felt more at ease being on camera and playing my part.
For whatever reason, I’ve never had a problem talking about what happened to me in Iraq. It’s just part of my story, part of my life. I never had nightmares or flashbacks about being wounded. For me, talking about my experiences has always felt completely natural. I had accepted what had happened to me, and after I’d really opened up in the documentary, everything else seemed easy. I was moving forward with my life and felt proud of every new accomplishment.
I’ve also learned that I’m better at talking in front of a camera, or on a stage with lights in my eyes, than I am at speaking to a group of people I can see. In the first kind of setting, I no longer think about all the people who are watching and listening to me; instead, I focus on telling my story as if I’m speaking to one person. That focus makes it seem more personal, more like you’re just telling a friend. When you’re in front of a group, it’s kind of artificial. I mean, how many people get up in front of a crowd to talk about their lives?
These days, when I sit for interviews, I put all my attention on the interviewer. He or she asks me questions, and I answer as if we’re just shooting the breeze over a few drinks in a bar. As I’ve become more experienced, I’ve started answering questions a little bit more elaborately.
The funny thing is, in real life I’m still not comfortable being the center of attention. I hate getting awards, or making toasts, or being recognized when I’m just trying to enjoy myself. When I meet people who think I’m interesting, it takes a lot of effort for me to not look at them like they’re out of their minds. I guess that’s the fine line between talking about something and living with it, between enjoying the limelight and living with fame.
I don’t regret my decision to take up acting, though—not for one second. When I was in rehab, I always said that I had no interest in going to talk therapy. Back then, I didn’t feel as if I had anything to gain. It all seemed so touchy-feely, and I just didn’t see the point. Clearly, tho
ugh, there was a lot brewing inside me that needed to get out. I had things to say, I just had no idea how I wanted to say them—until I discovered how much I loved acting. What’s weird, though, is that my acting career started with two things that weren’t acting at all: the interviews by Esquire and with James Gandolfini for Alive Day Memories. Opening up and talking about my experiences paved the way for me to try acting, and acting has helped me put enough emotional distance between myself and my experiences that I can now talk about them on a regular basis. I don’t have to feel like I’m being all sorry for myself and whining to a therapist, but I can still get those feelings out in the open, and in a way that it can help or entertain other people.
But one thing I always worry about is that after hearing my story, my audience will go away thinking that’s all I am—that being blown up and going through rehab is all there is to know about my life. I usually don’t have time during my speaking engagements to get into all the fun stuff that I’ve done, such as acting or taking up skateboarding and quad riding, so if there’s one thing that I want people to keep in mind after they meet me or see me speak, it’s that the story of my life didn’t begin or end on the day I was blown up or when I finished rehab. I was a person before I went to Iraq, and I like to think I’m a better person since I came home. My life can’t be defined by an explosion or the fact that I survived it.
The day I was wounded in Iraq and the months I spent in rehab at Walter Reed are just middle chapters in my story—one whose best chapters, I believe, have yet to be written. You don’t need something as big as getting blown up to feel this way. We all have our setbacks. Bad shit happens to people, and you need to dust yourself off and get back in the game. If not, you’re just settling for the way things are. Some people never recover from this kind of stuff, and that’s sad. Here I am, I’ve gotten to do some really cool things in spite of—and because of—something horrible that happened to me. And I just keep looking forward to even more amazing things in my future. That’s what everyone needs to do.
No Turning Back Page 15
