Combat vets vie at Paralympics

American combat veterans became a corps of elite athletes who triumphed over catastrophic injuries.

FREMONT, IND. >> The bald, broad-shouldered cyclist has spent years remembering a nighttime road in a faraway city. He can still describe the city’s narrow streets and crushing heat. He talks about the dead end that forced his convoy turn around.

And the explosion. “It’ll always be a part of me,” said Tom Davis, sitting outside his family home in rural Indiana. Cicadas are screeching. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” says a tattoo on an immense forearm.

“But I can’t continue to be that guy that got blown up in Ramadi,” the city outside Baghdad where a hidden bomb threw his armored vehicle high into the air, costing the soldier much of his left leg.

Davis is no longer that guy. Tens of thousands of miles of training helped make him into someone else — one of the fastest men alive.

Twenty years after the attacks of Sept. 11, and just days after the Taliban took control of Kabul, Davis is one of the small group of American combat veterans competing in the Tokyo Paralympics — a corps of elite athletes who have triumphed over catastrophic injuries they suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There’s the triathlete who lost a leg when her convoy was ambushed on the bomb-cratered road to Baghdad’s airport. The swimmer who went blind after stepping on a land mine in rural Afghanistan. The sprinter who lost both legs in another Baghdad convoy.

There’s the cyclist who remembers clutching his dismembered leg in the moments after an attack in Afghanistan, holding it to his chest as if it was a baby.

They are a disparate group. Some are relentlessly optimistic. Others spent years wrestling emotional demons. Some insist they emerged from their personal battlefields without emotional scarring. Others insist that’s impossible. Their stories are tangles of adversity and redemption, loss and achievement.

What unites them is a fierce competitiveness and an ability to push past disabilities that can look insurmountable to an outsider. And, at times, a quiet anger at people who dismiss them.

“Sometimes, people look at us and they don’t see real athletes,” said Freddie De Los Santos, a handcyclist and Army veteran. Those people are wrong. De Los Santos is open about his own struggles.

There were the basement suicide attempts, when he’d take handfuls of painkillers and wash them down with liquor. There were the nightmares that sometimes awakened him, and still do. There was the time he was locked into a psychiatric ward after attacking a pharmacist, and the countless times he screamed at his wife and two kids.

He scoffs at disabled combat vets who say they’re fine.

“It’s not possible,” he said. “There’s always some kind of trauma there.”

De Los Santos, 51, who grew up in a rough New York City neighborhood at the height of the crack cocaine epidemic, has created an idyllic small-town life north of the city. His family lives in a neighborhood of quiet streets and American flags, where young mothers push strollers and rockers sit on front porches. He loves the neighborhood’s strict rules: Grass must be cut weekly; houses can only be painted in approved colors; Christmas decorations must come down after Jan. 1.

De Los Santos, who is Black, was furious when a neighbor put up a Black pride flag.

“That’s about division,” he grumbled, driving past the flag. “We have rules because we don’t want things like that here.”

A fierce cyclist, he was introduced to the sport by physical therapists at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, the hospital outside of Washington where tens of thousands of injured American soldiers were treated after Sept. 11.

Now, he trains on twisting, hilly roads that go past centuries-old farmhouses. He regularly breaks speed limits.

His life changed in 2009, when a rocket-propelled grenade ripped into his vehicle in an Afghan village. He remembers his beard burning, and grabbing his leg after it was ripped off by the blast.

But by then he’d already seen plenty of firefights in Afghanistan, and in an earlier combat tour in Iraq. He’d seen friends die, and children cut down. The scars on his psyche were deep before that ambush, he says.

Even after he began training as a Paralympian, he sometimes hid for days in his basement. It took him years to feel stable, and he says he’s still recovering.

“I function pretty well right now, but it hasn’t been easy,” he said.

He credits psychotherapy, along with a deep Christian faith, a very patient family, and a love for painting — his art expresses his pain.

And he credits cycling. Combat, he said, taught him to thrive on pain, making him a relentless competitor.

“You enjoy the pain,” he said. “Sometimes, that pain is your best enemy. When I’m racing and I start to feel the pain, I say ‘How are you doing?’”

Combat also taught him to advance relentlessly.

It’s easy to hear echoes of that today.

“I have days where you see me moving and laughing, but I’m not functioning very well,” he said.

“But I’m still pushing forward.”

Walking through his New Jersey neighborhood, Brad Snyder looks like just another guy with his dog. In his bright, spotless kitchen, he moves effortlessly, a man with no eyes navigating with a few quick touches on the marble countertop.

Losing his sight, he says, seems to matter more to other people.

If anything ties these combat veterans together, it’s how casually many can dismiss their injuries.

“Everyone is really distraught about this blindness thing,” said Snyder, who is 37.

“Society has this bizarre reaction to me when they realize I’m blind,” he said a couple weeks before leaving for Tokyo. “Almost every person will say ‘I’m sorry.’”

“Well, I’m not sorry,” he continues. “It’s who I am. I’m used to it. I have an awesome life, an awesome wife, a cool life here in Princeton. Don’t pity me. Don’t feel sorry for me.”

Sports, he says, lets the rest of the world see that.

“The Paralympics turns that pity upside down.”

A Navy explosives expert, Snyder stepped on hidden mine in Afghanistan in 2011 as he moved to help a group of Afghan commandos badly injured by another blast. In moments he went from thinking he was dead, to relief that he was alive, to confusion as he stood up with blood pouring from his face.