Colorado Springs – Odd thing about that missing left leg.
When it was still there, mangled and frozen after the bomb blast, the soldier couldn’t sit comfortably in a restaurant, or drive a car, or walk without feeling like, as she said, Frankenstein.
Sports were out. Life was on hold.
But once Sgt. Carla Best decided to have it amputated – nine painful months after that roadside explosion in Baghdad – she began feeling more whole than ever, she said.
Suddenly, Best was an athlete again.
“From then on,” the 29-year-old said, “I knew there was no stopping me.”
Packing that same spunk and her new computerized artificial leg, Best left Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and came home to Colorado this week to compete in the first Paralympic Military Summit. The event, which runs through Sunday, allows 34 wounded military personnel – many of whom lost limbs or the use of their legs in Iraq or Afghanistan – to try sled hockey, volleyball and cycling. It’s about rehab and sweat. It’s about reclaiming their lives and moving forward.
Inside the Sertich Ice Arena on Thursday, Best removed her prosthetic left leg, slipped on a blue- and-white USA jersey and used two sharp-edged hand sticks to shove her sled across the slippery sheet. She fired pucks at the net, snapped passes to other sledbound soldiers and hollered “Woo-hoo!” each time she accidently tumbled onto her side.
An hour later, the former Denver resident flashed a defiant grin while steering a bike on a steep arc around an outdoor velodrome, and today she plans to spike a few volleyballs at fellow soldiers.
All this activity is a body-pounding blur of sports for a woman still relearning how to walk.
“This is all a validation of why I wanted them to take my leg, so I could be more active and do more normal things,” Best said. “I’ll do whatever they throw at me.”
That’s the same fighting spirit John Register aims to infuse in this paralympic summit – and ultimately into some of the hundreds of U.S. military personnel who have been permanently injured in the war.
Still, selling fun and games to freshly wounded people can be a tricky task, Register knows. Sometimes the troops aren’t ready for a new risk. They may be bitter, depressed or scared. But Register, a Desert Storm vet and former Olympic hopeful, has a way of convincing people. He merely shows them his own prosthetic leg.
While running hurdles in 1994, Register misstepped, landed awkwardly and severed an artery. Like Best, Register later jumped into new sports – swimming and skiing – as a way to regain his health. Today, the top of his artificial leg is adorned with a glossy mural of stars, stripes and snapshots of his family.
“This is not a job for me. It’s ingrained in my fabric,” said Register, who heads the U.S. Paralympic Military Program. “At first, some of them here are kind of standoffish. They’re doing something they’ve never done before. But then you get them playing the games and you can see the smiles. Sports can take you from ‘I can’t’ to ‘I can.’ They can take you from ‘I can’ to ‘I will.’ And they can take you from ‘I will’ to ‘I accomplished.”‘
This week’s summit will be followed by a second in November in San Diego. Some participants, including Best, may stick with the sports program and ultimately try to compete at the 2008 Paralympics in Beijing. That, Register said, would be a fitting legacy. The international paralympics began as a rehab activity for injured World War II vets.
But on the ice Thursday, Best just wanted to break a sweat and have some laughs. Bigger dreams could wait.
“Mostly I fell. But I liked the falling. When I ride a hand- crank bike and I biff, that hurts. But when you biff it here, it’s fun.” she said. “This is probably the fastest I’ve gone without being afraid to fall.”
As Best skimmed across the ice, her prosthetic leg leaned upright against the arena bleachers, its foot resting quietly inside a single tennis shoe, its laces tied into a tight bow.
Staff writer Bill Briggs can be reached at 303-820-1720 or bbriggs@denverpost.com.
