Tough as They Come

by Travis Mills

  In October 2014, we were set to move in. They held a big ceremony for us. We drove up the long gravel driveway toward our new house for the first time, and covering the whole front of it was an enormous American flag so we couldn’t see the house at first. Paul LePage, the governor of Maine, attended the ceremony along with his wife, Ann. When the time came for me to speak, I looked across the crowd and thanked all the tradesmen who’d helped build the house, plus everyone else who’d contributed. It was an emotional moment for me, and I spoke about the journey Kelsey and I had been on so far. This house was our own little piece of heaven. When all the speeches were over, Chloe led us all in chanting, “Move that flag!” The flag was moved, and behind it stood our new home.

  It was beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

  The house sits on twenty acres. A great organization called Truckin 4 Troops donated to me what’s called an Action Trackchair, so I have two motorized wheelchairs, and the Action Track has special rubber tracks so I can navigate over rugged terrain outdoors. With the chair, Kelsey and Chloe and I can take walks around the trails on the property. There’s space for everybody on the property, and Buddy the dog can run around to his heart’s content. Each room is set up to be easily navigated by me no matter if I’m in my chair or on my prosthetics. The house was an incredible gift, a lifetime home for us, one more opportunity to receive and appreciate the incredible generosity of the people of America in support of the troops.

  Not long after we moved in, we renovated an outbuilding on the property and made another living quarters with a garage underneath. When it comes to navigating day-to-day living with the prosthetics, I found I could do almost everything by myself, but it was still very helpful to have someone help me in the mornings and evenings getting up and getting ready for bed. So Kelsey’s parents moved onto the property with us, and Kelsey’s father became my right-hand man. I’d started doing a lot of public speaking by then too, and Craig started traveling with me to help navigate airports and hotels and rental cars and stuff.

  I surprised myself when I found I really enjoyed public speaking. I’d begun to do some while I was back at Walter Reed, and the talks had turned out pretty well. After that, requests started pouring in from everywhere. Foundations. Universities. Corporations. Churches. Libraries. You name it. I had a PowerPoint presentation professionally worked up with pictures and all. In the presentation, I talked about my story and my family, about being in the military and the injury, and about what it takes to come back from that.

  My main message is one that many people can relate to. Hard times come to everybody. When hard times happen, we have a choice to make. We can become discouraged and bitter, or we can choose to never quit. When life gets hard, the key is just to keep pushing forward. Instead of saying, “It could be worse,” the key is to say, “It’s going to get better.” Then work with all your might toward that goal.

  Once I was doing a radio promo spot, and the DJs and I were all riffing on each other in the studio while on air, and the main DJ asked me in fun, “I hear you’re doing a lot of public speaking lately. What do you have to speak about anyway, dude?!”

  “That’s just the thing,” I said. “Nothing really. All I do is walk into a room full of people and say, ‘Hey, everybody, snap your fingers and wiggle your toes.’ They snap and wiggle, and I say, ‘Okay, your life’s not so bad.’ Then I drop the mic and walk away.”

  Everybody howled.

  An organizer for a veterans memorial called Freedom Fest approached me and asked if I’d go skydiving to help raise money for a veterans center and museum. Skydiving was right up my alley. Altogether, I’d made some fifty jumps before being wounded. But just as a joke, I told him I’d only do the event if Maine’s first lady, Ann LePage, would make the jump with me. I’d known her for some time, and we’d become good friends. I would have done the jump anyway, but this made things more interesting.

  Shortly after that, to my surprise, I got a call saying that Mrs. LePage was up for the jump. A few weeks later she and I found ourselves falling from the sky. It was a bright sunny day, and we both jumped tandem, separately, with instructors at our backs. It felt pretty crazy to be jumping out of a perfectly good airplane when I didn’t have any arms or legs. But it felt good too, really good, like I was back to my old self. Truly back for good.

  —

  I’d so much enjoyed the winter and summer sports I’d participated in when I went to Colorado that I started thinking of ways to help other wounded veterans do the same. Maine is a beautiful state with four distinct seasons, so I established a nonprofit organization called the Travis Mills Foundation, raised some money, and secured the use of a campground to hold a retreat for wounded warriors.

  We brought five families out to the area the first year and enjoyed tubing behind a powerboat, golfing, kayaking, and various other sports. We ate great lobster dinners together and talked about how to succeed in various ways despite having disabilities. When you’re an amputee, you don’t normally see other amputees in daily life. But at the camp we had an opportunity to hang out with other people with similar disabilities. Afterward, everybody said the camp was really encouraging, so we held a camp the next year too, and six families came to that. That camp was also a success, so Kelsey and I started dreaming of purchasing a property for the foundation so we could hold regular events in both summer and winter.

  Back when we were living with my in-laws in Texas, we’d met a young attorney and his wife, Reece and Katie Norris, and they quickly became two of our closest friends. Reece was instrumental in doing all the legal paperwork for my foundation. Katie ran her own nonprofit organization called Fotolanthropy, where she created documentaries about people who had overcome adversity. As it turned out, Katie and her team made a documentary about me. At first, it was just going to be a short ten-minute film. But then the project grew into a full one-hour documentary. It won awards, and it’s been shown all over the country.

  These sorts of things gradually became my new life. Motivational speaker. A celebrity of sorts. Head of a foundation. A national symbol of determination, of someone who believes in and lives by the motto Never give up, never quit.

  —

  People ask me: If I could go back in time and change things, would I do it all over again? Would I join the army? Absolutely. I loved being in the army, and I’d go back to it in a heartbeat if I could. Would I want to be injured? Absolutely not. I wouldn’t wish being injured on anybody. But being a quadruple amputee is my new reality. It’s what happened, and there’s nothing that can be done about it in hindsight.

  Sure, even with as far as I’ve come in my rehabilitation, there are things I miss to this day.

  I miss holding my wife’s hand with my real hand. Having a prosthetic that senses pressure is good, but it’s not the same as the real thing.

  I miss the feeling of my bare feet on the grass in summertime. Maybe that sounds a bit weird, but I loved walking around barefoot when I was a kid.

  I miss lifting weights to the degree I did before my injury. I can still lift weights a bit now, but it’s not the same.

  I miss picking my daughter up, tossing her in the air, and catching her. I don’t do that now.

  Truthfully, I miss every aspect of my old life. I would love to have come back from my third deployment and gone on with my original plan. But there’s no point in living in the past, dwelling on what can’t be changed.

  I reminisce from time to time, and that’s okay, but I never want to live in the past. When things frustrate me now, I laugh them off. Or I find new ways to get smarter. The other day there was a lamp turned on that I wanted to turn off. Kelsey was out of the house at the time. The switch was one of those twisty things and I couldn’t grab the dial enough to turn the lamp off. I grew frustrated for a few minutes, then I chuckled to myself and unplugged the cord from the wall socket. That did the job.

  I look forward to the medical advances that will come in the future. Researchers are so close to so
many breakthroughs. Hopefully, in the next ten to twenty years, they’ll be able to regrow and reconstruct limbs and repair severed nerve endings. But if nothing changes until I’m ninety-five and die, I’m fine with that too. What I have today works for me, and I keep working on new and innovative ways to tackle the world around me.

  We live near Augusta, the capital of Maine, and there’s been so much news coverage of me over the last few years that I’m recognized pretty much everywhere I go now. If I sit in a restaurant and have lunch with a friend, people come up to me during the meal and afterward and tell me thanks for my service. I love talking with people, and I’ll crack jokes and even sign autographs from time to time. People tell me that my story encourages them. That if I can keep going forward then they can too. Often I’m called a hero, but I don’t know about that. I didn’t do anything special. I just had a bad day at work—you know what I mean? It was a normal day in Afghanistan that turned ugly. I just had a bad case of the Mondays.

  Life at home isn’t all easy, even as far as I’ve come. The other day I went to the barbershop and fell into a snowbank on the way out. The slush was deep and it was hard for me to get my footing. That was frustrating. People came along and offered to help me, and eventually I got out. Sure, I could go around with a chip on my shoulder, saying experiences like that suck. But having a negative perspective won’t do me any good. I don’t want to be in a miserable mood, and I don’t want to be someone who’s miserable to be around. I remind myself daily that I’m one of the lucky ones. I came home alive. I have a wonderfully supportive family. I have a community that respects what I’ve done. I have much. I truly do.

  It sounds surprising to say it, but my initial thought when I was blown up and lying on the ground in Afghanistan was a thought of full confidence. One of our medics told me I was going to be okay, and I told him then to shut up, I knew I’d be okay. That was true then, and it’s true now. If I had lived or died in that moment, that wasn’t up to me ultimately. Maybe that’s why I remained so calm when the injury happened. That’s what faith looks like, I’d say.

  Sometimes I feel like I’m not a very good Christian, because I don’t know the answers to a lot of things. But my faith is more at play than I let on sometimes. It sucks that I got blown up, but I believe that God has a reason for everything, even that. I think His reason was that He wants me to help others. He wants me to help spread the message that when things get bad you can still keep going forward. Like I said, I’m not wounded anymore. There’s nothing wrong with me. That’s my message for anybody: you can keep going.

  I don’t think what I’ve gone through is particularly harder than what plenty of other people go through. Maybe your mom has gone through terminal cancer. Or maybe you lost your job. Or maybe you struggle with an addiction. I don’t compare the degree of difficulty in my story to anybody else’s. We all have our unique challenges to go through. The point is that you can keep going. You can choose to never give up. You can choose to never quit.

  —

  Just a few months ago, my foundation was able to buy property for a camp. It’s the historic Maine Chance Lodge previously owned by cosmetics pioneer Elizabeth Arden. We’re working now to raise funds to transform the property into a fully accessible veterans family retreat center. I want it to be a gift to our nation’s veterans, and I know that someday that goal will be accomplished.

  It’s good to set big goals like that, but it’s also good to set smaller goals too. Sometimes they can be just as satisfying.

  Chloe is three years old now, nearly four, and we love her more than anything. Someday Kelsey and I would love to have more children. It would be great to have a little Travis Mills Junior running around. Our daughter was such a bright spot in our lives during some really dark days in the hospital. She kept us going, reminding us that we had obligations greater than ourselves to think about. Whenever people ask her what happened to her daddy, she says, “Daddy got hurt at work in an explosion.” She knows enough for now.

  What does success mean for me? It’s being able to do normal things again. How simple that seems—to live normally—yet you’d be surprised how important that becomes when you can’t do it anymore. In fact, you’d be surprised how many people around the world don’t ever get that opportunity. The ability to live in freedom might be taken away due to an injury, or it might be because of political oppression. To live a life in freedom is cherished, desired, worth fighting for, worth getting wounded for, and even worth dying for.

  The other day I set the little goal of driving my family to the movies in my truck. It was a special day for Chloe, and we got popcorn and went and sat down, and we watched the silliest, squirmiest princess movie you could imagine. Chloe loved every moment of it. Afterward, we went out to dinner and then I drove us all home again. Kelsey had some time for herself in the early evening, and Chloe and I wrestled around, which is one of our favorite activities. She jumped on my back and bounced on my stomach and giggled and laughed. Later, I helped put Chloe to bed, and then Kelsey and I sat up late and had our time together and talked about the day.

  That night I couldn’t help but think that we slept “soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm,” as the quote goes. When I was in the military, I’m proud to say those were my rough men doing their job. And I was proud to be counted as one of them. Today, other rough men do that for me and my family, just like they do for you.

  The next morning, I got Chloe’s waffles made and poured juice in a cup and set the waffles on her plate along with the butter and syrup. I poured cereal and made coffee for Kelsey, then let the dogs out. When breakfast was over, I drove Chloe to school. Simple things. Gold.

  To live in freedom. To go forward. To love your family. To make something of your life. To never give up. To never quit.

  That’s success.

  The Travis Mills Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization dedicated to helping wounded and disabled veterans and their families get a new chance at life.

  During his recovery at Walter Reed, Travis discovered a passion for encouraging fellow wounded veterans when he traveled from room to room in the hospital and met others whose lives had been radically reshaped by the wars.

  Today, Travis continues his mission by showing wounded veterans and their families that they can overcome their physical and emotional challenges and find purpose by staying the course through their recovery.

  The foundation is actively involved with several dynamic veterans initiatives, in particular the newly purchased former Maine Chance Lodge once owned by cosmetics pioneer Elizabeth Arden (1878–1966). Travis’s dream is to turn the historic lodge into a retreat center for wounded and disabled veterans and their families.

  Once renovated, the retreat will fill a vital role in the recovery, camaraderie, spousal support, reconnection, and relaxation of our military heroes. Travis hopes the center will become a true and lasting symbol of a grateful nation.

  Built in 1929, the lodge was once part of Arden’s estate and served as Ms. Arden’s private home. The Foundation purchased 17 acres of the estate, which includes the main house, stables, various outbuildings, and a lakefront cottage across the road.

  From 1934 to 1970, the lodge was turned into the first elite destination spa in the United States. The spa served celebrity clients such as actress Ava Gardner, entertainer Judy Garland, author Edna Ferber, and former first lady Mamie Eisenhower.

  Fundraising efforts have begun in earnest to renovate this iconic homestead. Upon completion of extensive rehabilitation, the property will become the nation’s first fully accessible “smart home” facility dedicated to serving the reintegration needs of combat-wounded veterans and their families.

  Travis is currently seeking your help to fulfill his mission. To sponsor or donate to the cause, please make checks out to Travis Mills Foundation and send to: 89 Water Street, Hallowell, ME 04347.

  TravisMills.org

>   info@travismills.org

  @ssgtravismills

  Kelsey and I have so many people to thank.

  We want to send enormous thanks to our parents, Dennis and Cheri Mills, and Craig and Tammy Buck. Thanks for always being there for us. Huge thanks also go to Zach Mills, Sarah Mills-Sliter, Josh and Deanna Buck, and Kaitlin Buck. To our daughter, Chloe, you are an absolute angel.

  To all our friends, you mean the world to us.

  To the doctors, nurses, hospital staff, medics, and rehabilitation therapists, thank you for your amazing dedication to helping people get better.

  Thanks to Reece and Katie Norris, director Jon Link, and all the people who worked on the documentary.

  Thanks to the board members of the Travis Mills Foundation.

  Thanks to our agent, Rick Richter of Zachary Shuster Harmsworth, and to editor Mary Choteborsky and all the team at Crown Publishing. Special thanks to collaborative writer Marcus Brotherton.

  Enormous thanks to my fellow soldiers at the 82nd Airborne Division.

  Retired U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Travis Mills of the 82nd Airborne Division is a motivational speaker and inter-national advocate for veterans and amputees. He is one of only five servicemen from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan ever to survive his injuries as a quadruple amputee. He started the Travis Mills Foundation, which benefits and assists wounded and injured veterans. www.travismills.org

  Journalist Marcus Brotherton has authored or coauthored more than twenty-five books, including A Company of Heroes, Shifty’s War, and the New York Times bestseller We Who Are Alive and Remain, with twenty of the original Band of Brothers. www.marcusbrotherton.com