Vail
The girl was maybe 4 and she had this skiing thing down, snowplowing herself to a graceful stop. And under the kid-sized knitted hat with the tiny pine trees on it and the small ski goggles and the little yellow jacket and pint-size mittens, there was a great big question dying to get out.
She had just come upon Aaron Schoenfeld, 25, who was also skiing, although not as well as the little girl. She watched for a while and then she stopped beside him amid the swirling flakes of a heavy March snow. She looked at the man for just a moment. And her words burst out.
“Oh, my God!” she shouted. “You don’t have a leg. How can you ski?”
Schoenfeld looked down at the little girl. And he smiled.
It wasn’t supposed to be like this, of course. The big guy from New Jersey enlisted in the Marine Corps just after his 18th birthday. Less than two years later, in 2001, he climbed into a truck at Camp Pendleton, along the Pacific Ocean just north of San Diego. He had only done that a thousand times or more. Just another training supply run.
Until the truck went off the road and the right side of the vehicle was destroyed and Schoenfeld, sitting in the passenger seat, had his right leg torn off just below the knee. That was six years ago.
On Thursday, he and 24 other veterans who have lost an arm or leg – mostly in Iraq and Afghanistan – gathered in this ski mecca. They were the guests of the Vail Veterans Program, a nonprofit group without a single salaried worker, a group that has for four years brought military amputees to Colorado to ski in the winter and fly-fish and raft in the summer.
Most of the veterans, who skied Thursday through today, came from Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, a hospital ridden with scandal for its recently revealed treatment of wounded soldiers. At a Thursday morning breakfast at the ski resort, they were ordered not to talk about it.
“You’re not authorized to give your opinion,” they were told by Defense Department official Steve Bucci. “If asked, you will say, ‘No comment.’ We’re all in the military, and that’s the way we play it.”
This left the 6-foot, 200-pound Schoenfeld with nothing to talk about – except what it’s like to have a leg taken away before your 20th birthday.
“When you’re young, you just never think you might lose a leg,” he said, rubbing a heavy hand over his buzz-cut black hair. “It’s just not something that ever crosses your mind. And then the truck tipped over.”
He is, technically, still an active-duty Marine but will probably be officially retired later this year. Two years after the accident, he enrolled at West Virginia University. Last year he earned a degree in public relations and began a three-year public-affairs internship with the Air Force at Hurlburt Field in Florida.
His wife, Tricia, who met Schoenfeld in college, joined him for the Vail ski adventure.
“There is absolutely nothing that he won’t do,” she said.
Example: A few years ago, using an artificial leg, Schoenfeld climbed the Great Wall of China.
On Thursday morning, he headed out into the blowing snow with Vail adaptive ski instructor Karen Frei. He did not wear a prosthesis. The right leg of his ski pants was folded neatly at the knee and safety-pinned.
On his first attempt, he traveled about 15 feet and went down hard.
“That was fun,” he said, sarcastically.
Within half an hour, though, Schoen feld was making turns and staying up.
Other skiers whizzed past. Schoenfeld only glanced.
“The thing is, I’ve been without my right leg for long enough now that I’ve stopped comparing myself to people with two legs,” he said. “It took a while, but I’ve let go of that.”
A few moments later, as he rested on his outriggers and caught his breath (“You could use a little more air up here,” he said), the little girl in the little goggles and the pine-tree hat approached and slowed to a stop. In her voice was no trace of meanness. Just surprise.
You don’t have a leg.
Schoenfeld looked down with a grin. She pushed her goggles up and tilted her head. Their eyes met.
“Actually,” he said to her in a soft voice, “I do have a leg. And today I’m learning how to ski on it.”
Staff writer Rich Tosches writes each Wednesday and Sunday. He can be reached at rtosches@denverpost.com.
