thedrifter
04-06-08, 06:16 AM
Winter Soldiers
by Andrew Travers, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
Saturday, April 5, 2008
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
— Ernest Hemingway,“ A Farewell to Arms”
More than six decades ago, a group of bold World War II soldiers from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division skied over remote, untracked mountain passes from Leadville to Aspen and planted the seeds of what would become the four mountain ski resort we know today.
Last week, 391 military veterans came back from harrowing journeys of their own, from battlefields to hospital beds to Snowmass Mountain, where the 22nd annual Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic wrapped up on Friday.
As he strapped into his skis on Fanny Hill on Thursday, Littleton-native Jonathan Lujan struck the profile of any other skier getting ready to take laps on the Big Burn. To look at him, you wouldn’t know that he couldn’t walk three years ago. You wouldn’t know that on the initial march to Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq, Lujan was riding in the back of a five-ton truck that took fire and ran off an Iraq highway.
But you would know he’s a Marine: the Corps emblem was emblazoned on the front of his silver ski helmet.
Under his wide-legged ski pants, braces allowed Lujan to stand and ski.
“I was nervous to try it,” said Lujan, 37, as he prepared for a lesson on a Snowmass racing course.
He grew up skiing at Winter Park, “doing the whole ditch-school-and-go-skiing thing.” Intense rehabilitation efforts had brought back feeling in Lujan’s upper legs and recently allowed him to walk with braces and a cane. But until this week he hadn’t gotten on the hill since being paralyzed.
“It’s the inner battles you fight,” the recuperating vet said. “To not give up. To push yourself and try new things. More than that, this week is about me being with my brethren.”
More than therapy
Learning to do things such as skiing while recovering from severe injuries, it turns out, provides more than just physical therapy.
James Nappier recalled sitting in the woods with a .45 revolver, contemplating suicide after returning from Iraq.
“I had some rough times in my early days of rehabilitation,” Nappier recalled.
Having retired from the Marines in the 1970s, Nappier re-enlisted to build bases and pave roads with Navy Seabees in 2001. But in 2004 in Iraq, his crew was ambushed in an attack that killed seven and severely injured 28. An exploding mortar left him with the inability to walk or use his right hand.
Out of the despair in his first days back stateside, Nappier chose life and the hard work of rehabilitation. This was his third year to the Snowmass clinic, a period in which he has regained use of most of his body.
Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.
— Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals”
The clinic began as a lark, according to its founder, Grand Junction recreational therapist Sandy Trombetta.
In the early 1980s, Trombetta was treating a paralyzed veteran and experimenting with fresh rehabilitation methods. “I said, ‘We’re going skiing,’” Trombetta remembered. “‘He said, ‘I can’t even walk, how am I gonna ski?’”
Trombetta rigged up a pair of skis with a seat and made it happen.
The technology for equipping handicapped skiers, and the Snowmass clinic itself, have come a long way since then. The hundreds of vets traveling here annually now ride on complex sit-skis, some valued as high as $4,000. Today, first timers with leg disabilities ride down the mountain strapped into seats with two skis attached at the bottom, tethered to and guided by instructors.
Over the decades, the Snowmass clinic has branched out to include other adaptive activities for handicapped veterans. In addition to the skiing on Snowmass, the week included snowmobiling, curling, sled hockey, rock climbing, mountain-side scuba diving and fly fishing.
“I would advise everyone here to try rock climbing and skiing,” said Air Force veteran Bilal Hassan, who is recovering from a stroke. Hassan had just completed a Tai Chi session, and said the unique challenges of sport were speeding his recuperation.
Skiing, clinic instructors said, is among the best-suited sports for the handicapped. “They’re out here skiing as fast, if not faster, than anybody else,” said Scott Olson, a volunteer instructor from Minnesota. “With something like a hand-cycle, you’re always slower than someone on a pedal bike.”
Navigating a mountain on skis depends primarily on balance, he noted, even for people with no handicaps. So with adaptive ski technology, he said, someone with limited or no use of their limbs or senses can be put on a level paying field with other beginners.
“Nobody’s born with skis on their feet,” said Michael Fairchild, an instructor from Maine. “Skiing is unnatural for everybody.”
Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal of Honor.
— John Dos Passos, “The Body of an American”
Everybody got a medal at the end of the week in Snowmass, which culminates in a series of races.
This year, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) also got to highlight one of its best programs, after a year when the quality of treatment for injured Iraq vets has been questioned.
A Congressional investigation last year, prompted by complaints of veterans being treated at Washington’s Walter Reed Medical Center, exposed the U.S. veteran treatment structure as a massive and sometimes monstrously calloused bureaucracy.
The VA doesn’t run the Walter Reed facility. But the department’s top health official, Brig. Gen. Michael Kussman, used to oversee it. The Senate confirmed Kussman as under secretary for health at the VA last spring, while a White House-appointed committee investigated the Walter Reed allegations.
Kussman came to Snowmass for this year’s clinic, and said it was just one example of his department’s comprehensive approach to veteran rehabilitation. “It’s beyond this event, it’s about building confidence,” Kussman said. “But this event and ones like it are an integral part of our multi-disciplinary treatment.”
And Kussman shook off allegations that veterans’ medical treatment is inadequate. “The idea that the VA is struggling in its ability to provide care is a fallacious one,” Kussman said, noting that it serves more than five million vets at 1,400 sites ranging from readjustment centers for new war veterans to nursing homes for the elderly.
Hope Cooper, who served as an Army nurse from the tail-end of the Vietnam war, said the VA treatment is good for vets who are proactive. “They treat you right, treat you great really, but you’ve got to stay on top of them,” she said. Cooper has been skiing, hunting and bowling through programs sponsored by her local VA in San Antonio and the Paralyzed Veterans of America. “Events like this appease us and prevent us from being angry about our injuries. They know how guys can get suicidal or kamikaze.”
As the yearly Snowmass program grew during the 1980s, it served primarily Vietnam veterans such as Cooper, along with aging vets from earlier wars and peacetime.
But over the last few years, the faces on the slopes have gotten younger, with injured American vets from today’s wars coming home. Nearly one-third of the disabled veterans in Snowmass this year were injured during the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And more of them are returning with the devastating effects of injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars, when combat medicine was less advanced. As a result, there were more multiple amputees than ever at this year’s event.
“I wasn’t expected to survive after I was shot,” said Alan Balan, an Army medic with the 82nd Airborne who had 90 percent of his stomach destroyed by gunfire in Iraq in 2003. A subsequent stroke and other complications left him paralyzed.
“After my stroke, I spent two and a half years in hospitals, unconscious for most of the time,” Balan said. “Now, I am able to ski, scuba dive, lift weights and travel with my family.”
The empowering effects of the clinic, founder Sandy Trombetta said, could get the newly injured “to redefine themselves as whole.” The psychological, physical and emotional landscape of a hurt veteran’s world can be as fragile and volatile as a battlefield. But harnessing the courage and drive that first led them into the military — and maybe schussing down a mountainside — can lead to some remarkable recoveries.
As one vet in a wheelchair quipped: “We have to sit, but we don’t have to sit still.”
andrew@aspendailynews.com
Ellie
by Andrew Travers, Aspen Daily News Staff Writer
Saturday, April 5, 2008
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places.
— Ernest Hemingway,“ A Farewell to Arms”
More than six decades ago, a group of bold World War II soldiers from the Army’s 10th Mountain Division skied over remote, untracked mountain passes from Leadville to Aspen and planted the seeds of what would become the four mountain ski resort we know today.
Last week, 391 military veterans came back from harrowing journeys of their own, from battlefields to hospital beds to Snowmass Mountain, where the 22nd annual Disabled Veterans Winter Sports Clinic wrapped up on Friday.
As he strapped into his skis on Fanny Hill on Thursday, Littleton-native Jonathan Lujan struck the profile of any other skier getting ready to take laps on the Big Burn. To look at him, you wouldn’t know that he couldn’t walk three years ago. You wouldn’t know that on the initial march to Baghdad during the invasion of Iraq, Lujan was riding in the back of a five-ton truck that took fire and ran off an Iraq highway.
But you would know he’s a Marine: the Corps emblem was emblazoned on the front of his silver ski helmet.
Under his wide-legged ski pants, braces allowed Lujan to stand and ski.
“I was nervous to try it,” said Lujan, 37, as he prepared for a lesson on a Snowmass racing course.
He grew up skiing at Winter Park, “doing the whole ditch-school-and-go-skiing thing.” Intense rehabilitation efforts had brought back feeling in Lujan’s upper legs and recently allowed him to walk with braces and a cane. But until this week he hadn’t gotten on the hill since being paralyzed.
“It’s the inner battles you fight,” the recuperating vet said. “To not give up. To push yourself and try new things. More than that, this week is about me being with my brethren.”
More than therapy
Learning to do things such as skiing while recovering from severe injuries, it turns out, provides more than just physical therapy.
James Nappier recalled sitting in the woods with a .45 revolver, contemplating suicide after returning from Iraq.
“I had some rough times in my early days of rehabilitation,” Nappier recalled.
Having retired from the Marines in the 1970s, Nappier re-enlisted to build bases and pave roads with Navy Seabees in 2001. But in 2004 in Iraq, his crew was ambushed in an attack that killed seven and severely injured 28. An exploding mortar left him with the inability to walk or use his right hand.
Out of the despair in his first days back stateside, Nappier chose life and the hard work of rehabilitation. This was his third year to the Snowmass clinic, a period in which he has regained use of most of his body.
Valor is stability, not of legs and arms, but of courage and the soul.
— Michel de Montaigne, “Of Cannibals”
The clinic began as a lark, according to its founder, Grand Junction recreational therapist Sandy Trombetta.
In the early 1980s, Trombetta was treating a paralyzed veteran and experimenting with fresh rehabilitation methods. “I said, ‘We’re going skiing,’” Trombetta remembered. “‘He said, ‘I can’t even walk, how am I gonna ski?’”
Trombetta rigged up a pair of skis with a seat and made it happen.
The technology for equipping handicapped skiers, and the Snowmass clinic itself, have come a long way since then. The hundreds of vets traveling here annually now ride on complex sit-skis, some valued as high as $4,000. Today, first timers with leg disabilities ride down the mountain strapped into seats with two skis attached at the bottom, tethered to and guided by instructors.
Over the decades, the Snowmass clinic has branched out to include other adaptive activities for handicapped veterans. In addition to the skiing on Snowmass, the week included snowmobiling, curling, sled hockey, rock climbing, mountain-side scuba diving and fly fishing.
“I would advise everyone here to try rock climbing and skiing,” said Air Force veteran Bilal Hassan, who is recovering from a stroke. Hassan had just completed a Tai Chi session, and said the unique challenges of sport were speeding his recuperation.
Skiing, clinic instructors said, is among the best-suited sports for the handicapped. “They’re out here skiing as fast, if not faster, than anybody else,” said Scott Olson, a volunteer instructor from Minnesota. “With something like a hand-cycle, you’re always slower than someone on a pedal bike.”
Navigating a mountain on skis depends primarily on balance, he noted, even for people with no handicaps. So with adaptive ski technology, he said, someone with limited or no use of their limbs or senses can be put on a level paying field with other beginners.
“Nobody’s born with skis on their feet,” said Michael Fairchild, an instructor from Maine. “Skiing is unnatural for everybody.”
Where his chest ought to have been they pinned the Congressional Medal of Honor.
— John Dos Passos, “The Body of an American”
Everybody got a medal at the end of the week in Snowmass, which culminates in a series of races.
This year, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) also got to highlight one of its best programs, after a year when the quality of treatment for injured Iraq vets has been questioned.
A Congressional investigation last year, prompted by complaints of veterans being treated at Washington’s Walter Reed Medical Center, exposed the U.S. veteran treatment structure as a massive and sometimes monstrously calloused bureaucracy.
The VA doesn’t run the Walter Reed facility. But the department’s top health official, Brig. Gen. Michael Kussman, used to oversee it. The Senate confirmed Kussman as under secretary for health at the VA last spring, while a White House-appointed committee investigated the Walter Reed allegations.
Kussman came to Snowmass for this year’s clinic, and said it was just one example of his department’s comprehensive approach to veteran rehabilitation. “It’s beyond this event, it’s about building confidence,” Kussman said. “But this event and ones like it are an integral part of our multi-disciplinary treatment.”
And Kussman shook off allegations that veterans’ medical treatment is inadequate. “The idea that the VA is struggling in its ability to provide care is a fallacious one,” Kussman said, noting that it serves more than five million vets at 1,400 sites ranging from readjustment centers for new war veterans to nursing homes for the elderly.
Hope Cooper, who served as an Army nurse from the tail-end of the Vietnam war, said the VA treatment is good for vets who are proactive. “They treat you right, treat you great really, but you’ve got to stay on top of them,” she said. Cooper has been skiing, hunting and bowling through programs sponsored by her local VA in San Antonio and the Paralyzed Veterans of America. “Events like this appease us and prevent us from being angry about our injuries. They know how guys can get suicidal or kamikaze.”
As the yearly Snowmass program grew during the 1980s, it served primarily Vietnam veterans such as Cooper, along with aging vets from earlier wars and peacetime.
But over the last few years, the faces on the slopes have gotten younger, with injured American vets from today’s wars coming home. Nearly one-third of the disabled veterans in Snowmass this year were injured during the campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
And more of them are returning with the devastating effects of injuries that would have killed them in earlier wars, when combat medicine was less advanced. As a result, there were more multiple amputees than ever at this year’s event.
“I wasn’t expected to survive after I was shot,” said Alan Balan, an Army medic with the 82nd Airborne who had 90 percent of his stomach destroyed by gunfire in Iraq in 2003. A subsequent stroke and other complications left him paralyzed.
“After my stroke, I spent two and a half years in hospitals, unconscious for most of the time,” Balan said. “Now, I am able to ski, scuba dive, lift weights and travel with my family.”
The empowering effects of the clinic, founder Sandy Trombetta said, could get the newly injured “to redefine themselves as whole.” The psychological, physical and emotional landscape of a hurt veteran’s world can be as fragile and volatile as a battlefield. But harnessing the courage and drive that first led them into the military — and maybe schussing down a mountainside — can lead to some remarkable recoveries.
As one vet in a wheelchair quipped: “We have to sit, but we don’t have to sit still.”
andrew@aspendailynews.com
Ellie