by Travis Mills
My two favorites were occupational therapist Josef Butkus and physical therapist Kerry Quinn. Joe hooked my longer arm to sensors, and as I flexed my muscles back and forth I learned to drive a car on a video screen. If I messed up, the car crashed into a wall and exploded. “Hey, Joe,” I said with a grin, after a crash. “Do I really need to blow up all over again?” We shared a laugh and he said, “Sorry, Travis, that’s just how the game works.” The idea was to learn how to use my remaining muscles to make new and different movements.
After four weeks in the hospital, I was fitted for a prosthetic arm for the first time. They put plaster on my arm and pulled it off to make a mold. When everything fit right, they made me a socket out of carbon fiber. Each remaining limb would shrink for about a full year after the injury, so they would need to make different sockets as the limbs grew smaller.
I learned that the advances made in prosthetic technology were breathtaking. At the end of the American Civil War, if you lost a limb you’d get a broomstick with a hook on the end. By the end of World War II, it was a plastic stick with a hook on it. Today, we have robotic arms with microprocessors in them and even the possibilities of hand transplants. The technology is only going to get more advanced from here on out, they told me. Scientists are working on being able to regrow limbs in a lab. They’re already able to regrow ears, some muscles, and some bones. New technology allows for spray-on skin cells.
Putting on my arm for the first time felt pretty cool. The arm was robotic and had a hand that could open and close when I used the same muscles I’d used to drive the car in the video game. At first I could only wear the arm for about an hour before it started to hurt. But I increased the duration an hour at a time and soon was wearing the arm all the time.
I started off learning basic tasks. How to stack blocks with the hand. How to stick a clothespin onto a plastic holder. How to mash one Lego block into the next. I graduated to learning tasks such as holding a toothbrush and picking up a bottle of Gatorade. I got better and better at using the hand, at making finer and more precise movements with it. The funniest thing to me was that I could rotate the hand at the wrist in a complete 360-degree circle. The motion wasn’t a wave, like a normal hand would do, but a roll. I could rotate the hand completely upside down and keep going like a car tire turning in circles at the end of an axle. I developed a favorite joke, shaking hands with an unsuspecting person while rotating my hand around at the same time. It always threw the person for a loop.
My parents and Kelsey stayed near the hospital at a place called the Fisher House. I got my first overnight pass, and my parents and Kelsey wheeled me over to the house. We had dinner together. It was lasagna, and I was able to feed myself for the first time with my new arm. That felt really good. I stayed with Kelsey at the Fisher House that night. That was even better.
I got another prosthetic arm made up, so now I had both a right and a left. The therapists worked with me to relearn any number of daily tasks. Grabbing a fork. Making a peanut butter sandwich. Putting a Hot Pocket in a microwave and heating it up. I got to where I could pick up a plastic baby spoon and feed Chloe her lunch. Every baby is a bit messy when eating, and I could even gently brush the sides of her face with the spoon to clean off dribbles. I bought a slushie machine so we could all make slushies in occupational therapy. All the other rehabilitation patients and I were pretty excited about that. I made two or three slushies, handed them out, then said, “Okay, if all the rest of you want one, you can make them yourselves.”
The prosthetics team was simply amazing—Dave, Pete, and Jaime. These guys work with amputees every day, helping to make our lives better. I went back to them again and got fitted for two legs. As a rule, I don’t like having my legs touched, particularly by dudes. Dave and Pete worked on my legs while Jaime worked on my arm, and they all worked on me so much that I grew to accept it before long.
Getting a prosthetic made up is a bizarre experience. There’s no parallel to it if you’re not an amputee. You go to a private room and strip down to your boxers and they put Saran wrap all over you. They take cast material and slather that on and hold it on your arms and legs while it hardens. They talk to you this whole time, and with legs they’ve got to get into intimate areas, and they’re always saying, “Oh, just relax. You’re doing great.” They pull off the cast material and make check sockets first out of plastic. (The socket is the piece of the prosthetic that your limb fits into.) Eventually they’ll make your sockets out of carbon fiber, but carbon fiber is so expensive, they don’t want to mess those up or have to make them twice. So they work with the plastic check sockets first, fitting them and seeing where they need to shape those so they fit perfectly with your body. Then they build the carbon fiber pieces and fit you to those, and after you learn to use them you’re off and running.
Rehabilitation is a real team effort. The guys who make the prosthetics do their part. The physical therapists get you strong enough again to use them. The occupational therapists help you use the prosthetics and understand how they work. There’s not enough credit given to all the team members who help make it possible for guys like me to live a normal life again.
And they were all cool about it too—at least the ones who worked with me were. Their attitude was that they weren’t around to babysit me or take it easy on me or even to motivate me. They were here to help me get better when I wanted it. They treated me like a grown-up from moment one. The responsibility was up to me. If I rose to the challenge, then I’d go forward. If I didn’t, then I’d sit around for the rest of my life watching TV. It was my choice.
Occupational therapy is pretty much designed to make a person upset. Each daily task was a challenge to relearn, and that took time and effort. Things I could do normally would take ten times as long. The staff helped break down every task into steps. Before I brushed my teeth in the morning, I needed to put on my arm, then consciously maneuver the arm to the toothbrush to pick it up, then consciously get the hand at an angle where I could grasp the toothbrush, then work to grasp the toothbrush, then grasp it firmly enough, then maneuver it to my face, then hold it still while I shook my head around to brush my teeth. Nothing felt fluid or straightforward at first, and I needed to develop patience, something I’d never had much of before.
All this time I continued working on physical rehabilitation too. I continued with the arm stretches and leg stretches and worked with weights attached to my nubs, all the while trying to get ready to take my first steps. One big question still remained: would I ever walk again?
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Even the act of positioning my body fully upright took some doing. I was sitting up by then, but overall I’d been on my back for so long, I wasn’t used to being fully vertical anymore. Staff checked out my stumps first to make sure they could hold weight. They hooked me up with short, unbendable legs at first, strapped me to a specially designed table, and slowly tilted me upright.
At first the tilt was only 45 degrees. The blood rushed all around my body. It was a burning, uncomfortable feeling, I could hear my heart beating in my ears, and I broke out in a bad sweat. After I got used to that, they tilted me all the way vertical so I could stand. Before my injury, I’d been six foot three inches tall. With my short legs on, I was only five foot five. The first thing I did after standing was hug Kelsey. It felt different to look up at her instead of down, but I didn’t care. This was another turning point for us. I was on my way.
On June 7, three days shy of it being two months after the blast, Riot and Fessey came to therapy to visit me. It was going to be a big day. I was planning on taking my first steps. Riot and Fessey were both healing nicely, and they’d come to watch and cheer me on.
Hospital staff tilted me up, fitted me with arm crutches, and with a harness tethered the back of me to a hook on the ceiling. The hook moved on a track so I wouldn’t fall flat on my face if I tripped—the system was called a Solo-Step. Two therapists positioned themselves on either side of me to help if neede
d. My dad was taking the night shift with me at the time, so he was in his room sleeping. But my mom and Kelsey were there to watch. If all went well, the therapists’ goal was for me to walk one lap around the room.
I took one step and then another. My legs felt like they were in cement. I kept going. Three steps. Four. Five. My steps were shaky and jerky—it hurt so bad. I wobbled, then righted myself. My arms and legs burned, but I kept going. I told everybody how thankful I was that they were letting me do this. Kelsey was in tears. My mom too. Riot and Fessey were cheering me on. Kerry Quinn, my physical therapist, kept shouting at me, “Opposite crutch, opposite foot!” But I lifted my crutches right up off the ground and took a few more steps without any support from my arms. “Get those crutches on the ground!” she yelled. But she wasn’t mad. She was as ecstatic as I was.
“Hey—I told you I was going to walk today!” I yelled back to her with a grin.
After the first lap around the room, the staff said I could stop, that was enough work for one day—but I wasn’t stopping. I wobbled again and lost my balance and set my crutches down but didn’t fall over. Then I put myself together again and kept going. I was covered in sweat. My limbs were trembling. I was exhausted. I broke down and cried. It wasn’t sadness. It was elation. I was coming back for good.
That day, I walked three laps.
For my second day of walking, my dad got to come see me. I told him I was going to walk five laps that day. But I walked half a lap and fell over, my legs in spasms. I felt so weak and tired, that was as far as I could go. The therapist said the second day a person is often weaker because of all the work done the day before. I was tearing up. “I’m so sorry, Dad,” I said. He hugged me and told me it was okay.
The following day, I was riding in my electric wheelchair heading out to eat with my family. I still wasn’t very strong at the time. As I went over a doorjamb, I went too quickly, hit the bump, and tumbled out of my chair. Instead of landing on my butt (which I should have had the presence of mind to try and do), I instinctively stuck my right leg down and landed full force on my stump. That’s like landing on the end of a broken bone. I yelled and writhed in pain. That was the end of my walking for a while. I was bruised and sore for days, but fortunately nothing got broken.
It took ten more days before I was permitted to walk again. I walked that day and the next. I walked and walked. Every day after that I came in to rehab to walk more and more. I kept plugging away at my next goal and my next. To learn how to walk without crutches completely. To walk up steps. To pick myself up from the ground if I fell down.
I graduated to a set of taller legs with manual locking knees. I was now six feet tall. My taller legs felt like the real thing. “Watch me go!” I yelled to everyone in the room on the first day I tried them, and gave a little shoulder shake of a dance. “I’m 82nd Airborne. I’m as tough as they come. Never give up. Never quit!”
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Some days were harder than others. Much harder. And it wasn’t because of rehabilitation.
On June 7, 2012, the very same day I walked for the first time, my platoon had gone out on patrol like usual in Afghanistan, half a world away from me. Two of our men were clearing an area outside of Maiwand when they struck an IED. Both were gravely wounded. It took several days for the news to reach me.
The area they were in was narrow—an alleyway about seven feet wide—and dangerous to stay in for long. Our medics and evacuation team needed to move quickly to get them out. When the helicopter landed, medics were still working on the two wounded men.
The mine hound searched the pathway from the wounded to the helicopter. Everything looked okay to proceed. An eight-member team placed one of our wounded, PFC Brandon Goodine, on a litter, picked him up, and started carrying him to the helicopter. Unknown to anyone, an IED was hidden near the corner of a building. The mine hound had picked up a false reading due to the proximity of the bomb to the wall. The IED exploded. The entire eight-man team carrying the litter took the brunt of the blast. The shrapnel scattered, and thirteen men total were wounded that day.
Among the seriously wounded was PFC Stefan Leroy, our radio telephone operator (RTO). He lugged around the big backpack radio with him and was Lieutenant Lewis’s right-hand man. PFC Leroy was a special kid. He’d signed up to be a scout, but the lieutenant had handpicked him to be his radio operator instead because Leroy was mature for his age and intelligent. The RTO is the only private who directly reports to the lieutenant, and he went out on every mission. PFC Leroy lost both his legs.
Also among the seriously wounded was PFC Jon Harmon, one of the guys from my squad. He was our ammo bearer, who carried rounds and took rear security. He was one of my toughest soldiers and never said no to a fight. The news hit me hard. Harmon had lost both his legs too.
PFC Goodine, age twenty, was wounded in the first blast and was the soldier carried on the litter when the second IED was struck. Another special kid. As a teenager, he’d been a bit aimless and had kicked around doing this and that. Then he’d fathered a daughter when he was only seventeen. He knew he needed to do the responsible thing, so he married the girl he got pregnant and joined the military so he could provide for his wife and daughter. But Brandon’s motivation was even greater than that. He saw a higher call to the military. He wanted to make a difference in the world.
The second explosion killed Brandon Goodine.
Everybody in our platoon loved Brandon. He was a quiet kid who manned his rifle and followed orders explicitly without ever complaining. He was from Georgia and loved NASCAR. He loved his wife and daughter more than anything. I couldn’t believe he was gone.
When we’d started my third deployment, we had 32 men total in our platoon. Including the injuries to Fessey, Riot, and me, it meant 16 men total were now taken out. Half my platoon was gone.
With this news, my getting better took on an even deeper meaning. As a platoon, we were hurt but not destroyed. My guys were still out there going on patrols every day, still getting in firefights, still getting the job done.
I wanted them to know I was never going to quit now. I wouldn’t quit for me. I wouldn’t quit for them.
Pretty quickly I moved out of my hospital room at Walter Reed to their outpatient building number 62. They call it the “Warrior Building.” It offers kind of an apartment-like setting, and Kelsey and Chloe were with me here. It felt good to be out of the hospital. They started calling me “the mayor of 62” because I walked around like I owned the place. As I became more independent, I could come and go more as I pleased.
Most of my time each day was still spent in rehabilitation. But I started to tackle a few other activities too. One day not long after I got my legs, a doctor whispered to me, “A patient needs to talk to you on the fourth floor. I can’t tell you who it is because of confidentiality issues. But if you just go up there, I’m sure you’ll find him.” He gave me a knowing look, like he’d already talked to someone on that floor about what he was asking me to do.
Instinctively, I got what he was saying. Enthusiasm is contagious. Not everybody has the will to go forward, and sometimes a soldier will need a bit of a push. Like back when it came to my jumpmaster duties. A soldier might be accomplished in every area, but if it’s his first jump out of a plane, he might need a bit of a kick to help him get out the door. I went to the fourth floor, smiled at a nurse who recognized me, and asked, “You know anybody here I might want to talk to?”
She nodded and motioned to a room two doors down on the left. I walked straight in, took one look at the soldier in the bed, introduced myself as Staff Sergeant Travis Mills of the 82nd Airborne Division, and said, “You can do this.” We talked for a bit, and it was amazing to see a soldier respond to a firm, encouraging stance, same as if he was back in basic training. He just needed to be told he could go forward. He needed a kick out of the door of the plane.
After that, doctors called on me regularly to do the same thing. Or I’d just take it upon myself. I’d
go walk up and down the hallways of the hospital and into people’s rooms, introduce myself, and see if I could encourage any of the other wounded veterans. All branches of the military were represented at Walter Reed, and we became a real brotherhood.
Kelsey and Chloe would often come with me as I made my rounds from room to room, and it’s amazing what good things can happen when somebody knows you’re cheering for him. Some of these guys didn’t have any family and friends who’d come and visit. Man, I’m not sure how a guy can make it without a support system like that. When I was at my worst, Kelsey would stay with me eighteen to twenty hours a day. She was amazing. Another family member would take the night shift with me, so I’d never be alone. We had a strong network of family and friends we leaned on. That was so important.