No Turning Back

by Bryan Anderson

  Then a general—whose name I’m ashamed to admit I can’t remember—stepped out of an office into my path. I stopped my wheelchair, and the general looked me in the eye. “You like football, son?”

  After nearly choking on my tongue, I stammered, “Yeah, of course I do.”

  “Wanna go to the Super Bowl?”

  I blinked and stared at him, wide-eyed. “Sure.”

  He gave me, my mom, and my dad tickets to the Super Bowl in Detroit. They were awesome seats, right on the fifty-yard line, down by the field. I got to watch the Steelers crush the Seahawks, 21–10 . . . when I wasn’t watching the cheerleaders, that is.

  Things like that still seem to happen to me from time to time. I don’t seek them out, and I neither expect nor ask for special treatment from anyone. If there should come a day when I walk into your place of business, please feel free to say hi, but don’t feel as if you need to treat me differently from any other customer. That said . . . on those rare occasions when someone goes out of their way to honor me for my service, I’m always surprised, flattered, and grateful.

  Recently, as part of my renewed attempts to further my acting career, I decided to have my teeth straightened. After considering a number of different types of braces, the one that I liked best was called Invisalign. They seemed both convenient and inconspicuous, so I called a local dentist and made an appointment to come in for the preliminary consultation.

  Long story short: they turned out to be a lot more expensive than I had expected. When I heard the price, I felt myself go pale. I think the dentist was afraid I’d pass out in her lobby. Still, even though they cost more than I had planned to spend, I decided they were worth it, and I told the dentist to go ahead and start the paperwork.

  A few weeks later I returned to her office so she could take some impressions that would be used to create the first plastic aligner for my teeth. When she was finished, I went back to the lobby to pay the receptionist for that day’s visit. As my credit card was being processed, the dentist came out to the lobby. She was smiling at me.

  I asked, “What’s going on?”

  “I thought you might like to know that’s the last payment you’ll have to make for your Invisalign,” she said. “I’m only going to charge you for the initial visit and the impression set we made today. The rest of your treatment is on me, as a thank you for your service.”

  She’d caught me totally off guard. I didn’t know what to say, so I mumbled, “Thanks.”

  “Our pleasure.”

  Favors such as those make me happy—not because I’m getting something free or at a discount but because it’s proof that some of my fellow citizens still care about their men and women in uniform, still honor our sacrifices, and want to do something, anything, to give a bit of themselves for us. No one who puts on the uniform of an armed service expects to be praised or rewarded simply for doing their job—all any of us really ask in return, I think, is respect. But when the people we’ve served make an effort to express their gratitude, that’s a better reward than anything else I can imagine. And it really isn’t about the dollar value, it’s about the gesture.

  Nothing beats the outpouring of support my family received for my homecoming, though.

  While I was in rehab, my family and neighbors helped remodel my parents’ house. My uncle Rick and friend Rod Blain persuaded the community to pitch in. Contractors donated materials and supplies, and ordinary folks donated their time, money, and labor. Understand that this wasn’t just a simple upgrade to make it wheelchair accessible for me; it was more than a few ramps and some railings. What they really did was gut my family’s house and build a new one from the inside out. I think the only parts they left intact were the front wall, the roof, and the living room. Everything else is brand-new and completely different.

  All told, it was a roughly $400,000 renovation. This is the kind of everyday miracle that can happen when good people choose to take action.

  I also put more than half my TSGLI payment toward that renovation, because I considered it an investment in my future, and because it was a way to thank my family for being there for me when I’d needed them most.

  Next, I invested more than half of what I had left to open an IRA, into which I still deposit a chunk of my monthly service pension, because I want to retire in style when I get old.

  Then I bought a fourteen-foot jet boat. Because being responsible is good, but what’s the point unless you remember to have a little fun once in a while, right?

  So much has been given to me, and I truly appreciate it. But what really makes my life full is being able to give back to others. Not only do I get great joy and a sense of purpose when I can help someone, it also affirms for me that I’m whole enough—that I have enough—to give to someone else. I think giving and helping others is crucial to healing. Being able to reach out to others means you’re not focused solely on yourself. You can put aside your own troubles, even for just a while, and look outward to see who else needs help. And by serving others, you’re showing others, and more important, yourself, that you have worth and have something to give.

  Something that is very important to me and that I give a lot to is advocacy for veterans. I’m pleased and humbled that so many people I’ve met have thanked me for my service and praised me for the sacrifices I made while in uniform. I still wish, however, that we did more as a country to serve and honor our veterans, who have done and given so much for all of us. It often seems that we set aside only two days of each year—Memorial Day and Veterans Day—to pay tribute to our men and women in uniform; I think we need to remember them every day. I try to do my share. I think the stuff I’m doing makes people aware of what a lot of veterans are going through, and when people really know what’s going on, they’re more likely to chip in and help. My work as a spokesperson with USA Cares is like that. USA Cares gives financial aid to post-9/11 military personnel and their families. The bills can pile up while someone is serving, and the transition back to civilian life can be hard. USA Cares keeps veterans out of the red until they get back on their feet.

  Too many veterans come home after serving in combat—sometimes multiple tours—to find themselves out of step with the country they left behind. It can be disorienting to return to civilian life after a long time in the service. It’s even more difficult for disabled veterans, especially those who have lost limbs, been paralyzed, or suffered a traumatic brain injury. So much happens so quickly to a veteran after arriving at Walter Reed that it can be confusing, to say the least. It’s as if one day you’re thousands of miles from home, in the thick of combat, and the next day you wake up in Washington, D.C., missing parts of yourself and wondering how you landed in the middle of a paperwork blizzard.

  One place we might start would be to provide better financial counseling to returning veterans, especially those who are due to receive generous pensions and large payouts from TSGLI. Let me say from experience, when you’re fighting to relearn how to walk after having half your body blown away, it’s not a good time to be making financial decisions by yourself.

  During the rehab period, when many wounded veterans are struggling to regain mobility or adapt to prosthetic limbs, the government buries them in red tape at the same time as it drops a ton of money and benefits into their laps. I was lucky because I had my mom there with me at Walter Reed to shield me from the bureaucratic bullshit and keep track of my finances. Not all my fellow soldiers were so lucky. Most of the soldiers I knew at Walter Reed, when they got their TSGLI checks, ran out and blew all their money on cars, quads, or motorcycles. Some of them bought televisions so big that they didn’t fit in their shoe-box-size hotel rooms.

  I watched them, shook my head, and said, “All right. Now you’ve spent all your money. How’s that gonna help you? Sure, you’ve got a car free and clear without a note, but how are you gonna be able to afford to go back to real life?” It’s as if they just weren’t thinking ahead.

  Those are the sorts of dumb mistake
s that can be avoided with a bit of education.

  This, among other reasons, is why I’ve started spending time on Capitol Hill in Washington, meeting and getting to know different members of Congress. The wounds I suffered in Iraq and the notoriety they brought me after I came home helped me get a job at Quantum Rehab. The people I’ve met while working at Quantum have introduced me to several elected officials in our national government. I use these connections to serve as an advocate for veterans and the disabled.

  There is a lot more we could do to improve the quality of life for members of both groups—especially for those individuals who happen to belong to both of them. We need better funding for the Veterans Administration, more full scholarships for veterans, better-staffed facilities and more up-to-date medical equipment for wounded soldiers, tax relief for disabled veterans who were wounded while on active duty, and better coverage for all disabled Americans who rely upon Medicare and Medicaid for such necessities as power wheelchairs so that they can lead fuller lives outside their homes, as active members of society.

  I’m just one person, and I can’t make these changes happen by myself. It’s my hope that if I lead the way, more concerned citizens will join me in writing to their elected representatives to voice their support for these important changes to our national spending priorities.

  If you can help me bring about that kind of change, you’ll all be my heroes.

  14

  SEVEN STORIES

  One of my favorite pastimes when I’m traveling and meeting new people is telling them my stories and then listening to theirs. I get to hear some pretty wild stuff from all kinds of people across the country, believe me. So since we’ve gone through a lot of the heavy shit in my life, it’s time to lighten things up and tell some funny stories. I think there are certain people who expect me to tell only the grim stuff, but like I’ve said, I don’t like to have my life defined by my injuries. Neither should you. Even if something horrible has happened to you, it doesn’t mean the rest of your life will never be fun again. In that spirit, I’m going to tell you a few short stories just because they’re fun—and they all happened after I got blown up.

  Two things you should know before reading further: a few names have been changed to protect the guilty. And if, by some chance, you happen to learn something or take some measure of inspiration from one of these . . . you’ve probably read it wrong.

  Most soldiers who go through rehab at Walter Reed, when they’re done with therapy each day, can do whatever they want. Being soldiers, the majority of them tend to drink a lot. They go to the bars pretty much every day, and then they’re hungover the next morning. “Bad hangover” is the number one excuse for missed therapy sessions at Walter Reed.

  During my rehab, I watched all this nonsense from a distance and suspected it was the reason why so many soldiers needed to stay at Walter Reed as long as they did. I didn’t want to slow down my recovery that way, so I didn’t go out very often. In fact, I hardly left the base at all during the thirteen months I lived there. The one night I really wanted to go out, however, was the Friday of Memorial Day weekend. Most of the soldiers’ family members had left to spend the long weekend at home, and my folks were among them.

  That left me with plenty of free time to hang out with my buddy Nick. He was a Marine whose wounds in Iraq had made him an above-the-knee bilateral amputee. Unlike me, he still had both his arms, but because we both had lost our legs above the knees, we had very similar rehab regimens, and that meant we spent a lot of time together. It was good to have someone I could talk to who really understood what I was going through. We bonded over that.

  When Nick and I heard that the regular crew of bar hoppers and pub crawlers were planning a big night out on Friday, we knew we wanted in. We tracked down a few of those guys and told them we wanted to join them Friday night. They seemed excited to have us along, and we all agreed to meet at six-thirty in the lobby of the Malone House, where I lived.

  Most of the soldiers skipped therapy that Friday, but Nick and I went to all our sessions, as usual. When we finally finished, we were running late. I hurried back to the Malone House to clean up and change my clothes. I made it back downstairs to the lobby about twenty minutes late. Nick was the only one there. He had arrived fifteen minutes late to find the lobby empty.

  “They left us,” he said. “Those fuckin’ jerks couldn’t even wait fifteen minutes.”

  “Are you kidding me?” I couldn’t believe it. I was so pissed off. “We told them we wanted to go with them! They said they’d give us rides!”

  Nick shrugged. “Yeah, well, they lied.”

  I spent a few seconds cursing, then I asked him, “What do you want to do now?”

  “I don’t know about you, but I still want to go out.”

  “So do I.”

  “Okay, then let’s make it happen.”

  We left the lobby and went looking for a ride into the city.

  Part of what made this situation such a hassle was that taxi service in the Washington, D.C., area really sucks. If we had called for a cab, it would have taken at least ninety minutes just for one to get to Walter Reed and meet us at the security checkpoint. The flip side of this problem was that once we were in the city, the chances of us finding a taxi that would have been willing to take us back to Walter Reed were close to nil. Most cabdrivers hate driving out to Walter Reed because it’s an Army base. To get through the checkpoint and drive onto the base, a visitor needs to show credentials and have their name logged into the system; for some reason, cabbies hate that with a passion. That’s why we didn’t bother calling a cab; we thought that finding someone to give us a ride out and back would be quicker and easier.

  We thought wrong. By seven o’clock, pretty much anyone we might have begged a ride from had already left the base. Things were looking bleak. Then, just as Nick and I were getting ready to resign ourselves to a night of microwave popcorn and movies on DVD, I noticed that my mom had left her rental car in front of the Malone House. I thought she had driven it to the airport for her trip home, but apparently she had taken a cab. I assume she had reasoned that the rental car would be safer on an Army base than in an airport’s short-term parking lot.

  I pointed at the rental car and looked at Nick. “There’s our ride! What do you think?”

  “Who’ll drive it?”

  “We will. How hard can it be?”

  He thought about this for a few seconds. “Worth a shot. Go get the keys.”

  I went back to my room, grabbed the keys, came back, and opened the car. Nick and I crawled in through the rear doors and pulled our chairs in behind us. I climbed forward into the driver’s seat. Nick crawled down by the pedals. I stuck the key in the ignition. “Ready?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “All right, man. You know this is gonna take a lot of communication, right?”

  “No problem. We’re five-by-five.”

  “We’ll need to come up with some kind of system.”

  “Fuck it. Let’s just back out of the parking spot and see how it goes.”

  “Brake,” I said.

  “Check.”

  I put the car in reverse and looked over my shoulder. “We’re clear. Ease off the brake. Just a tap on the gas. A little more . . . easy . . .” The car inched backward, and I guided it through a slow turn, out of the spot. “All right. A little bit more. Okay, slow down. Slower. Brake. Stop!” Nick pushed hard on the brake pedal, and the tires screeched as the car lurched to a halt. “Nice.” I shifted into drive. “Okay, ease off the brake. Give it a little gas . . . a bit more . . . slowly . . .”

  We came up with our own vocabulary. “Go” meant “Gradually increase the gas.” “Hit it” was code for “Hit the gas hard, now!” “Slow” was how I told Nick to gradually slow down. Sometimes it was as simple as saying, “Okay, a little harder, a little harder . . . a little softer . . . now harder . . . STOP!” Imagine if you had to give your legs and feet specific verbal instructions for
every little thing you do while driving. That’s what it was like. In traffic.

  Ten minutes later, we arrived at the bar.

  We even parallel-parked, because I’m that good.

  Nick and I crawled into the backseat, unloaded our wheelchairs, climbed out of the car into them, and locked the car behind us. As we rolled into the bar, the jerks who had left us behind looked up, saw us, and shouted, “Hey! You made it!”

  Nick grumbled under his breath, “No thanks to you.”

  One of the other guys asked, “How’d you get here?”

  “You don’t want to know,” I said.

  Nick added, “Don’t worry about it.”

  Once Nick got over being pissed off, we had a good time. We had a few beers, and soon we were feeling pretty good. We knew we didn’t want to stay until the bar closed, because the police stake out the bars at last call on holiday weekends, looking for drunk drivers, and I didn’t want a cop to see two dudes with no legs crawling into a car’s driver’s seat. Nick and I left the bar around midnight to beat the crowd. Outside, everything was quiet. It was early and the weather was gorgeous, so we didn’t hit much traffic on the ride home to Walter Reed.

  Despite our weird arrangement, it was a nice drive. We even got to use the cruise control for a while. Everything went great right until the moment when I pulled up to Walter Reed.

  That was when I remembered we had to drive back onto an Army base.

  If you’ve never been to a military base before, let me explain. To be admitted to a U.S. military facility, visitors need to show valid identification—a driver’s license, military ID card, passport, whatever—to the guards at the security checkpoint. Regulations require the guards to verify the identity of each person in every vehicle and permit only authorized visitors to enter.

  As Nick and I pulled up the driveway, and I saw the bright lights of the gate to the Walter Reed campus, I muttered, “Oh, shit.” I was sure we were screwed, but I played it cool for Nick. “Chill out,” I whispered. “I’ve got this. Keep your head down, and stay quiet. We’ll be okay.”