Reinventing the Wheelchair: How Soldiers Are Finding Salvation Through an Unlikely Sport

Leo Curtis woke up two weeks later in a hospital in Germany. He doesn’t really remember what happened, but his injuries read like a perverted grocery list: The back of his skull needed a plate. His brain had been shuffled around, like the yolk of an egg being shaken, and he had lost parts of his memory.
Curtis needed spinal fusions. His right hand had to be reconstructed. His left knee and left ankle had to be repaired. His right ankle was practically removed, and fused back into his leg. His right shoulder had to be put back together. So did his face, which was smashed.
About two weeks before, Curtis, an Army sergeant, was near Baghdad, riding in a Humvee on MSR Tampa, the main supply road between Baghdad and Kuwait, when bombs exploded behind a guardrail. The attack occurred in 2004, at the beginning of the war in Iraq (Curtis was there for the first one, too, in 1991).
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His Humvee didn’t have the proper armor to prevent what was about to happen. The vehicle had half an inch of steel welded to the frame — enough to stop a bullet, but not an explosion. The soldiers had placed sandbags on the floor to stop stuff from coming in. Continue reading “Reinventing the Wheelchair: How Soldiers Are Finding Salvation Through an Unlikely Sport”