Back in the swing

The Baltimore Sun

On a recent humid afternoon, Sean Lewis, a retired Army sergeant with a thin face, glasses and skinny but muscular arms, stands in the fairway on the 16th hole of Congressional Country Club, one of the country's most famous, and most private, golf courses.

Holding a 7-iron and pinching a Marlboro Light between his teeth, Lewis, 23, squints into the sun and zeroes in on the canary yellow flag exactly 141 yards away on the right side of the green.

"I'd kill for a good cigar 'bout now," he says, speaking in a drawl that is unmistakably Texan.

Lewis takes two practice swings and a long drag from his cigarette, but he's not ready to swing just yet. He hops, backward, away from his ball, a white Nike Mojo with a black swoosh splashed across its dimples. With the graceful balance of a flamingo, Lewis stands, statue still, on his left leg and thinks about tempo. He thinks about keeping his hips level. He thinks about keeping his head down, and about his follow-through.

On the golf course, he almost never thinks about Iraq, or about the 155 mm mortar round that landed 3 feet away from him, blew off his right leg and damaged the frontal lobe of his brain, robbing him of short-term memory. He doesn't think about the friends he watched die, lying just a few feet away in the sand and the dirt. He doesn't think about enemy soldiers he killed in combat when faced with the worst - but most important - choice a solider has to make during war: my life or theirs.

Instead, in quiet moments such as this one, Lewis stands on his one good leg and thinks about birdies.

For soldiers such as Lewis - many of whom return home from the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan damaged, not just physically but also emotionally - sports have become an essential part of their rehabilitation and recovery, often mere weeks after they arrive at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Bethesda.

The goal isn't the Paralympic Games, although some soldiers go on to reach them. Sports are simply a vehicle to feel normal again, a chance to regain self-confidence and reconnect with the civilian world. At the most basic level, sports get soldiers, very often for the first time, out of their beds and out of the hospital.

Some were athletes before joining the military, and they use sports as a recreational outlet for their competitive energy, though they might be faced with new physical limitations. Other soldiers might join the U.S. Paralympic Military Program, where some of them will end up training to compete in the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing.

Even when he dumps his approach in the front bunker, Lewis manages a weak smile. He knows there are worse ways to spend an afternoon than playing the same course where, just 24 hours ago, Tiger Woods had for the first time hosted a tournament, the AT&T; National.

"It takes me away from everything," says Lewis, a resident of Dale City, Va., and one of 22 veterans selected to play in an amateur scramble tournament at Congressional as part of the Wounded Warrior Project. "When I'm on the golf course, I literally don't think about anything but golf. That's the only time in my life when I block everything else out. I used to think it was a stupid sport, but now I love it."

Power sources

John Register, a Gulf War veteran, a two-time U.S. Paralympian and the associate director of outreach and development for the United States Olympic Committee's Paralympic division, says, "Sports have challenged us throughout the fabric of American history, challenged us to push past what we can already do.

"It's empowerment. We take individuals who perceive that they have lost something and challenge them to change their paradigm," Register says. "If you've lost your legs, then you can learn to walk on a prosthetic. If you can't do that, we'll show you that your wheels can be your legs.

"In our Paralympic military camps, we deliberately put soldiers who are now Paralympic athletes with those who are just learning how to walk again so they can see there is someone out there who has had a similar experience. They can harness that power and move forward. And if they want to continue to have an athletic career, that opportunity is there for them."

Kirk Bauer, executive director of Disabled Sports USA and a Vietnam veteran who lost a leg to a hand grenade in 1969, says that if the soldiers are thinking about sports, they're not thinking about their disabilities.

"When I see a lot of these men and women for the first time, they have pins in them, tubes coming out of every part of their body," Bauer says. "They're laying in bed all day, thinking about their disability, their limitations and all the negative. Many of them are as low as they can be, because they don't know what they can do yet or what they're going to be.

"But when we get them out there doing a sport like water skiing or golf, they're focused on standing on one leg or hitting the ball. ... They're focusing on something very positive. That act in itself is part of the healing process."

Bauer and Disabled Sports USA have been making visits to Walter Reed to get soldiers involved in sports as a part of the Wounded Warrior Disabled Sports Project since 2003. But the soldiers already involved in the program, which offers instruction in 18 sports, end up making the biggest impact.

"A lot of these soldiers are constantly getting hit up by people, and so they tend to be skeptical when we first show up," Bauer says. "Some people look at me like I'm selling snake oil. But when they see another soldier who is already encouraging them to do it, they've already got that immediate trust. They'll believe one another a lot faster than a guy like myself."

Finding balance

For Lewis, a high school rugby player growing up in Texas and Indianapolis, golf was, at first, nothing more than a chance to break up the boredom of his days after he came to Walter Reed in late January 2004. He says the military wouldn't let wounded veterans living at the facility have jobs, especially not amputees. His physical recovery, he says, was rapid. But the hours of sitting in his bed, staring at the wall, feeling guilty that he survived while others had not, were agony.

"I had a soft tissue wound right where my deltoid and my clavicle are, and it was about the size of a softball," Lewis says. "It was so deep, you could see all the way to the bone. I had to pack it with gauze soaked in saline, then tear it out three times a day. It hurt like hell."

According to Lewis, he and his wife, his former high school sweetheart, stopped speaking entirely and headed down a path that led to divorce. Lewis was unable to think about anything else, but then a friend talked him into a trip to the Olney Golf Park driving range after he had been fitted with his prosthetic. He had barely swung a club before, but right away Lewis knew it wasn't something he could do while wearing his new leg. Because only 4 inches of his right leg remained, Lewis' prosthetic was designed to keep his lower body mostly stiff. Great for walking, but not so great for trying to hit a driver off the tee.

"I tried it for about five minutes, and then I literally threw my leg aside," Lewis says. "I just couldn't turn on the ball."

Learning to drive

Instead, he balanced himself on his left leg and refused to leave the range, often to the point of exhaustion. Endurance was the hardest part. At first, he couldn't stand on his leg and hit balls for more than a few minutes without having to sit down. In time, he could go through two full buckets without so much as a leg cramp.

His misses were all slices and pulls, especially at first, but as he figured out the physics of it, the shots began to straighten. Every day - for a year and three months while he was living at Walter Reed and then in Silver Spring with Billy Bartlett, a Vietnam veteran who became a friend and mentor - Lewis would show up at the range. Hour after hour, he would pound balls into the blue and gray Maryland sky, watch them climb until they reached their apex, then study their descent as they arched back toward Earth. His mind, during those nine-hour stretches of athletic therapy, was a blank canvas.

On the course, he would use a pair of crutches to get around and toss them aside when it was his turn to hit. With the help of Olney Golf Park's teaching pro, Jim Estes, a man Lewis calls "the nicest golf pro in the entire world," he learned to drive the ball 250 yards and developed a feathery touch around the green. Soon, he was shooting in the 80s. On Bauer's insistence, he started to attend clinics for other disabled veterans. Lewis and Sgt. Dan Nevins - another member of the Wounded Warrior Sports Project, who lost his left leg below the knee in Iraq to an improvised explosive device - recently played nine holes in the pro-am of the Bank of America Championship at Nashawtuc Country Club in Concord, Mass. Dozens of wounded veterans came out to watch.

"I figure if they saw how well I was doing on just one leg, they might get off the couch and do something for themselves," Lewis says of the veterans. "They might stop feeling sorry for themselves, and believe they could do what I'm doing."

More than friends

Lewis says he doesn't like doing interviews, but if he has a fresh pack of cigarettes on hand, and if you get him talking, he'll tell you anything you want to hear about Iraq, including the details of Jan. 21, 2004.

"It's a miracle of God that I'm alive," Lewis says.

Lewis had been in the country for close to 11 months when it happened. He and two other soldiers, Spc. Gabriel T. Palacios and Pfc. David Parker, were standing between a pair of Humvees on the base of Camp War Horse, one of the most heavily shelled bases in Iraq, when a 155 mm mortar round landed 3 feet from them. Palacios was killed instantly. Parker died within minutes, just a few feet away. Lewis, barely conscious as he screamed for a medic, thought he might be a goner, too. He could see his right leg, torn from his body, several feet away.

"I had a piece of shrapnel in my left leg, and another piece of shrapnel had nicked an artery in my neck," Lewis says. "I panicked. I ripped the shrapnel out of my left leg, which meant I was bleeding out of that artery, too. ... I was in so much pain, I was in another world, almost outside my body."

Lewis was bleeding so badly, the medic, Mike Bradley, now one of Lewis' closest friends, couldn't give him any pain medication. He put a tourniquet on Lewis' right leg, pinched off the main artery in his left leg and stuck his fingers in Lewis' neck.

"As they were working on me, I started to fall asleep," Lewis says. "I felt like if I fell asleep, I was going to die. So I decided to focus on the pain instead. It hurt like hell, but it kept me awake."

While Lewis was in surgery, another round of mortars knocked out power to the base, so the rapid blood transfusion machine couldn't be used. Six of Lewis' fellow soldiers were rounded up to give him direct blood transfusions while doctors worked to save his life.

"That's love, right there, six of your buddies giving you a direct blood tap," Lewis says.

Once Lewis was stable, the Army arranged a phone call to his parents, back home in Mesquite, Texas, so Lewis could tell them he had lost a leg. His father, a Vietnam veteran, handled it better than his mother, but it was toughest on his younger brother William, then 11. When he heard the news, William ripped the right legs off all his action figures.

Nearly two years later, Lewis ended up telling that story, and countless others, to a beautiful Army specialist and X-ray technician named Cindy Davis. She, too, had been hurt by love, and had a young son from a previous relationship.

They told everyone they were just friends, but he couldn't stop thinking about her smooth dark skin, her mesmerizing brown curls, her big smile and her pretty eyes. One night, after rounds of tequila and plenty of dancing at their favorite bar, she told him, on the way home, that she loved him. He laughed and said he loved her back. On Aug. 11, they'll be married in front of their family and friends. Bradley, the medic who saved Lewis' life, will be the best man. Lewis says every time he looks into Davis' brown eyes, he can't believe how lucky he is.

"She's my baby. She's my life. Without her, there isn't anything," Lewis says.

And the best part?

"She loves golf, too. We play together all the time. In fact, she says we get along better when we're playing a lot of golf."

kevin.vanvalkenburg@baltsun.com

Project assists wounded vets

The Wounded Warrior Disabled Sports Project is a partnership between Disabled Sports USA and the Wounded Warrior Project, a nonprofit organization that helps injured combat veterans and tries to raise awareness about the difficulties troops face when they return home. Representatives from the Wounded Warrior Disabled Sports Project visit soldiers around the country in facilities such as Walter Reed Army Medical Center, often just weeks after the soldiers arrive, and encourage them to use sports as part of their physical and emotional rehabilitation.

In addition, the United States Olympic Committee recently began conducting summits at military facilities around the country as part of its Paralympic Military Program, which works in cooperation with the Department of Veterans Affairs to help wounded soldiers regain confidence and physical movement. Soldiers, many of them amputees, meet with soldiers who are Paralympians as part of their rehabilitation. A small number are invited to train for the Paralympic Games in Beijing in 2008.

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