Warrior Games – More Thoughts

Posted on | May 15, 2010 | No Comments

I’ve been trying to come up with a way to sum up the Warrior Games experience of the last coupla weeks, and I’m really having a hard time – it was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life and truly a first-ever event in more ways than one.

For me personally, there have been so many overlapping and intersecting worlds – friends on the Air Force team who were competing, Air Force Academy coaches along with training and events at USAFA, a Canine Companions for Independence graduate on the AF team – it’s just been overwhelming. I’ve met a lotta ‘old’ friends – people who I’ve been talking to for years in some cases but had never met in person – and made a ton of new ones as well.

It’s really been the center of the wounded warrior universe here for the last week or so, and we reached critical mass with all of the elements that have never before been assembled in one place at the same time.

First, you had the inspirational competitors – 200 wounded warriors from all the services setting an example for all of us that has just left me in awe. In fact, “awesome” is a word that used to be reserved for events like this before it became just another meaningless overused trite expression.

This paragraph from the American Legion blog Thursday is the best description I’ve seen of what’s gone on here – I was there Wed afternoon, and it happened just this way:

My “I wish I brought a hankie” moment came in the Mens 50m freestyle. The heats were divided into 3 categories, Lower Body Injuries, Upper Body Injuries, and TBI/PTSD athletes. In the LBI heat there were 6 competitors, the first 5 of which finished the heat bunched up closely at around 45 seconds. But the 6th competitor trailed by a lot. In fact, he was only about 15 meters in to his swim. It was a young Marine….a young marine with no legs. He could have stopped, he could have turned around, since he was about 1/3 done. But that isn’t what Marines do. The entire crowd was on it’s feet. I even saw a guy in a wheelchair painfully push himself to a standing position to cheer. The other athletes in the heat didn’t exit the pool, they turned around, and treaded water while yelling, clapping and cheering on this survivor, this athlete who was going to finish no matter what. It was incredibly loud in there, and behind me a marine mom was crying as she cheered. She wasn’t alone, a good 50% of the crowd was either crying, and a good 49% of the remainder was blinking as rapidly as they could. I would have been in the first category, but somehow held it together. There are events you witness in your life that awe and inspire you, this was one of them. When that Marine finished the 50m, the crowd was ballistic. Athletes, coaches, fans, media, military and even the folks running the event all screaming and clapping. Perhaps one of the most moving things I ever witnessed.

http://burnpit.legion.org/2010/05/warrior-games-day-3/

The guy that was written about is Chuck Sketch, who I later had the great privilege of meeting, and who was chosen by the winning Marine team to accept the Chairman’s Cup at the closing ceremonies:

On top of that very emotional environment, you had a collection of the real “movers and shakers” from different organizations in the wounded warrior world coming together in an unprecedented way. Based on my experience, I have a feeling we will see some great things coming from all the conversations that I know went on here.

For me, it was an opportunity to talk service dogs for veterans with many varied groups – veterans thinking about getting dogs, nonprofits and government agencies looking at helping veterans get dogs, people interested in puppy raising, and so on. In case it’s not already obvious, there is a tremendous interest in service dogs in this world, but the reality is also that most people aren’t aware what’s available, and, even if they are, don’t know where to go, what to look for, and who the best organizations are.

And, trust me, all service dogs and organizations are by no means equal – might look that way (and some organizations may even intentionally try to make it look that way), but they are not.

The best way I know to get that point across is for people to see what a real service dog team looks like and then let them make their own judgments and comparisons, and having Jason Morgan with his CCI Service Dog Napal here was absolutely invaluable in doing that. Here’s a nice picture from my friend Agnieszka Obstoj taken right after Army Chief of Staff Gen Casey presented the AF team with bronze medals for wheelchair basketball – Jason, Napal, and Rich Pollock:

This is exactly what a service dog should look like in public a lot of the time – lotsa hoopla, excitement, and noise, but the dog is lying down relaxed, leash firmly in the hand of the human. Look around and notice how many times that’s not what you see, and you’ll have even more appreciation for CCI dogs like Napal.

Jason and Napal very definitely provided the example, and when I explained to those who saw them – and there were many – that it takes two years of very serious and focused effort to produce a dog like Napal and a match like those two have, and only about a third of the dogs make it all the way through, without fail, their eyebrows went up and their eyes got real big.

There’s lots more I could say – I’m not really speechless, but there are just so many thoughts and emotions still buzzing through my head a day after the events ended I can’t get them all out. So I’ll just leave it here for now.