Rob and I had just finished a training session paddling Clear Creek. We were sitting on the back of his tailgate taking off wet gear when he said, “E, I’ve been thinking about the Grand Canyon trip approaching. You know, I’m off the androgen deprivation therapy now, and feeling okay, but my PSA is still rising pretty fast. People with my kind of cancer, well, it’s incurable, my prognosis is not good, and it’s unknown how long I’ll be around. I’d bought some property on the east side of the Sierras for when Annette and I retire; that’s probably not happening anymore. We’re looking to buy a new house, a one-level, without stairs, so I’ll be able to stay there as long as I possibly can.”
Rob was contemplating thoughts so overwhelming, they didn’t seem real. My brain didn’t even know how to process them, but in his typical style, he was confronting the future clearly, with different scenarios drawn out to their logical conclusions, plan A, B, and C. “By next year,” he continued, “by the time of our trip, I just don’t know what my situation will be. So I’ve been thinking, you should reach out to some other kayakers. What about that guy you mentioned from your first Grand Canyon trip with the blind kids?”
Rob was referring to Harlan Taney, the young kayak safety guide, described by his sister as “half-human, half-dolphin.”
“You said he was pretty awesome, and he knows the Grand Canyon better than anyone, so let’s test him out,” Rob said.
Rob was right. When I’d met Harlan, he could describe all 165 rapids down there with his eyes closed, and he knew all the best lines through, which changed in the myriad of different water levels.
“Where should we test him?” I asked, fearing I was stepping into something I might regret.
“Well, that brings us to the second idea I’ve been pondering. We need a river we can train on this winter, and I think we should go back to the Usumacinta.” My gut lurched a little, and my face must have twitched, because Rob jumped in, “I know you got in a little over your head, but you’re a way different paddler from what you were a year ago. It’s a big Grand Canyon–style river, and you already know it and what to expect.”
“I think that’s the problem,” I replied. “Do you really think it will be different?”
“One hundred percent!” he answered.
* * *
So once again, in March of 2013, I sat in my kayak on the fertile banks of the Usumacinta with the buzzing whine of insects swarming around my head and the growl of howler monkeys above. I thought about the “open-heart policy” shown to me by Matt Burgess. I slowed my breathing, forced the air into my lungs, and slid in for another whirl. Before the trip, I’d called Harlan and said something silly like, “Hey, I’m not sure if you remember me, but we met on a No Barriers trip five years ago.”
Harlan laughed on the other end and replied, “Yeah. I remember.” After listening to a description of the project and asking a few questions, he immediately agreed to join us. In fact, I got a strange impression—like he’d suspected I’d be calling someday. So now on the Usu, Rob guided me through the flat water, coaching Harlan on our technique and systematically handing over the guiding reins. Harlan was observant and a quick study; by the end of the day, we were getting calibrated. That night, sitting together at dinner, since Harlan was the newbie, we tried to coax some stories out of him. Rob had recently read a magazine article on him and said, “Harlan, tell us about your recent speed attempt on the Grand Canyon. Sounded pretty epic.”
Harlan seemed a bit reluctant at first, but soon he had warmed up and was rolling on a wild tale. “I’ve always been infatuated by water,” he started, “how it flows, by its energy and power. When I was just starting out as a Grand Canyon guide, I used to look out at the water from the beach as it rushed by and think, We’ve stopped for the night, but the river never stops. It just keeps moving.”
As he spoke, I got a sense he was reliving that scene in his mind, seeing the moon’s reflection off the rippling water. “I didn’t care so much about breaking records,” he said. “I was more interested in experiencing the Grand Canyon the way the river saw it, to ride the flow, almost like current. Fourteen years after that seed was planted, I felt ready, and it all came together: the goal of kayaking the entire length, 277 miles nonstop and alone. I launched at midnight, right on the peak of a forty-five thousand cfs flood stage.”
Harlan had paddled through the night, everything going smoothly, on pace to crush the speed record that had been set way back in 1983. However, just below Grapevine Rapid at mile eighty-two, a giant boil slammed him into the canyon wall and trapped him there, stuck between the boil and the rock. It flipped him and pounded his boat for a long time. After several roll attempts, he pulled his skirt and wound up swimming three miles downriver before he could retrieve his boat and kick to shore. “I drained about three gallons of water out of each pant leg in my dry suit,” he said. “I was so pumped full of adrenaline, I got back in and paddled down to Phantom Ranch where I had a food cache.”
Refilling his water jug at the spigot, he noticed his hand was bright purple. “It kind of stopped working,” Harlan said. “It was seizing up, and I couldn’t rotate it or hold my paddle very well.”
So, knowing he was only a third of the way, he made the painful decision to abort his attempt. He shouldered his one hundred–pound, eighteen-foot-long kayak and hiked 4,500 feet out of the canyon.
I thought back to Rob and Rocky’s horrific, near-death tales, recited on our first trip down here, and envisioned the Mayan crocodile and jaguar gods of the underworld, drawing out hauntingly dark memories of adversity and suffering, and trying to rekindle my fears. But they must have begun losing some of their power over me, because I managed to force myself back into my kayak the next morning and retrace our journey of the previous year, past Piedras Negras, past the cascading waterfalls where we’d jumped off the cliff, past the camp where RPGs had ripped through the night, and past the Rio Chocolja, where we had dropped over the succession of travertine waterfalls. This time, I kayaked through the inner gorge, the same roiling canyon where the Gypsies had swum and where Gypsy John had almost lost his life. I paddled through Whirlpool Rapid, where I’d had my own meltdown and thought my river journey was over.
On our last night, we sat around the campfire, eating long silvery fish caught with spearguns made by the locals. Harlan seemed quiet and peaceful most of the time, happy to listen to the river stories, laugh at the jokes, and strum the guitar he’d picked up in a local market. But besides the recounting of his speed run, I realized, after our first GC trip and a week of him guiding me, I still knew practically nothing about his life. That night, after the others had gone to bed, we stayed up talking, and I peppered him with questions. Harlan’s childhood sounded pretty idyllic. He described growing up in Flagstaff, Arizona, before it became a yuppie tourist destination, full of coffee shops and yoga studios. His father, Guerin Taney, had made a living as a blacksmith, but his true passion was working with metal, fashioning eclectic pieces like a deer’s head out of an old car bumper or an abstract design made with coat hangers and fire pokers, all fused and twisted together. “He was very talented,” Harlan said, “but it always remained a hobby. He didn’t have the business savvy to show his work or sell anything.”
Harlan’s family didn’t own much. Their prized possessions were three old beater vehicles: a pickup truck, a Volkswagen Bug, and an old school bus. “Except,” Harlan said, “we only had one engine between all of them. It actually hung from chains in our living room.” His dad would switch the engine from one to the other, depending on the activities: in the truck if he was going to shoe horses or do some forging, in the Bug for a trip out to Lake Powell, or in the bus if they were heading up into the San Francisco Peaks. They’d spend a lot of weekends up in the mountains picking mushrooms, watching the aspens turn to gold, and shooting an old black powder rifle. Harlan said, back then, all the mountain roads were dirt, and there was not a soul around for miles.
His father believed in tough love. Guerin taught Harlan how to ride a horse at age five by putting him on the back of a goat. He would slap the goat on the rump and get him riled up as little Harlan went for a ride across the field, the goat bucking and kicking. When Harlan fell off, Guerin picked him up, brushed him off, and threw him back on again. He told Harlan, “Son, when you can ride a goat, you can ride a horse.”
“I remember, about at that same time, he was forging metal,” Harlan said, “and he pulled this big piece of red-hot metal out of the forge and set it down on the floor. He was pulling another piece out when I backed up, right into the first piece. It burned my calf, searing into my leg. As I yowled in pain, he just hoisted me up and dunked me in the quench tank, a fifty-gallon barrel of cold water. He said, ‘You’re fine,’ and I stayed there in freezing waist-deep water for a long time, until he pulled me out. That was our family: ‘Get up; keep going. That’s what we do.’”
After passing the goat test, Harlan and his dad would saddle the horses, pack the saddlebags, and ride for days. Once, they trotted straight up old Route 66 and tied the reins to the hitching post outside his father’s favorite saloon. Harlan would sit on a bar stool drinking root beers while his dad drank whiskey. Once, his father, a 250-pound bruiser, came to the defense of a lady in the bar. He took on three bikers, beat them senseless, and tossed them each out the door. Guerin wore a cowboy hat and a silver heart pendant on a thick chain around his neck: “Half-cowboy, half-hippie,” Harlan said. “One minute he’d be so mad he’d be throwing a refrigerator across the room, and the next, he’d be scooping you up in his arms and telling you how much he loved you.”
As Harlan talked about his father’s wild life—driving cars off cliffs for fun, motorcycle accidents, drunken nights with police billy clubs cracked over his head—I couldn’t help but think of my brother Mark. I knew firsthand that being near those kinds of people was like being in the front row of the most amazing fireworks show you’ve ever seen: Bombs exploded above in the most brilliant patterns and colors. You couldn’t take your eyes away, yet you also knew if you got too close, there was a high chance you’d get burned. “He was a bighearted, large-living man,” Harlan said, “but he didn’t always take care of himself.” He’d suffered from grand mal epileptic seizures, and Harlan remembered a few times when he convulsed on the floor, his tongue hanging out of the side of his mouth. “But he never did anything about them. He refused to get help.”
“What about your mom?” I asked. “She must have been pretty strong to handle all that.”
“My mom has been the greatest rock in my life,” said Harlan. As he spoke, I noticed his quiet, even-keel voice drop just a touch deeper with emotion. “She’s an amazingly talented, educated person. She speaks six languages fluently. She has two degrees and could have done anything. But she chose to be a parent above everything. She worked multiple jobs: cleaned houses, did landscaping, and worked her entire schedule around my sister and me. Our house was a shanty cobbled together with plywood; we would have been psyched to reach the poverty line, but we were a tight little team and took care of each other. She bought backpacks from climbers selling their secondhand junk and got us scholarships to climbing and skiing camps. I was the kid in the down jacket covered in duct tape with the feathers pouring out. But I was also the kid on the podium. My first climbing rope was frayed down almost to twine, and I learned how to make a webbing harness, because I couldn’t afford a real one. My mom made sure I had a book on knots, and I’d disappear into the forest every weekend to build zip lines, the ropes running from tree to tree. My first kayak was from a garage sale. She never allowed us to miss out on anything, and she told us we could never be defeated—that there was a way around or through anything. Some people might look at that life and think we were just a bunch of dirtbag poor people, but I only have memories of pride. I honestly felt like I was sitting at the richest table in the world.”
When Harlan was nine, his mom took him out of fourth grade for eighteen days on his first rafting trip down the Grand Canyon. “It was as poorly organized as a trip could be,” Harlan said, but out of his 160 subsequent trips, it was still his most vivid. He said, “It was like my eyes were opened.”
He spent hours on the wide beaches building driftwood forts and tossing sticks into the water, watching them drift away and wondering where they’d end up. But scouting the different rapids, that joy on the beach was replaced by terror. While scouting House Rock Rapid, he saw another trip’s boat flipping end over end with all the people and gear tumbling out. A few nights later, his group had camped above Crystal Rapid. “We could hear its roar all night long, and I was scared as hell,” he said.
“But Lava was the worst. I was almost puking.” His mom, rowing the raft, had gotten sucked too far right and slammed against Cheese Grater Rock, a sharp black volcanic boulder halfway down. It was lucky their raft wasn’t shredded. Their boat became wrapped around the house-size boulder. As water rushed over the edge and the raft sank lower, his mom hung on to Harlan’s life jacket. “I was halfway in the water and felt myself being sucked away, but she was there, pulling me back into the boat, yanking me to safety. Six years after that, I started working in a raft company, patching boats, scrubbing life jackets, and knowing what I was going to do. When I was seventeen, I got my first paid trip down the Big Ditch.”
Harlan’s path seemed to defy reason. He’d confronted the fury of Lava at an impressionable age and had almost been lost. Most people would have run away from that adversity, burying it and trying to forget, but Harlan had only been drawn closer to the river. Although I didn’t fully understand the implications, I was fascinated and resolved to try to model it.
On our last day of the Usu, Harlan guided me through the biggest rapid, San José. As we rode the shifting, bucking line through the minefield of boils and whirlpools, Harlan’s voice had a calming effect. Through his commands, both his competence and confidence were loud and clear, but it was never bravado. Instead, it felt like a deeply learned appreciation of the river, a Zen-like acceptance. When we reached our take-out in Boca de Cerro, I’d paddled every mile.
“Rob, you were right,” I said as we dragged our boats up the bank. “It felt like a different river this time.”
“Of course,” Rob replied, “the water level was lower this year, but it wasn’t just the river that changed. I’m proud of you.”
Throughout the trip, Rob had fallen back, allowing Harlan to do the majority of the guiding. But I knew he was always nearby, observing, analyzing, and deducing. I suspected, at some point soon, I’d be hearing his conclusion. It happened on the plane ride home, just as I was drifting off into sleep. I felt Rob nudging me with his elbow.
“Hey, E, you awake?” he asked.
“I am now,” I said, yawning.
“Erik, in my opinion, guiding a blind person is rather challenging, and just because someone is a good boater doesn’t mean they’ll necessarily be a good guide. It’s way too easy just to go into autopilot, but guiding you requires deep thinking about what it would be like paddling without sight and what is the most effective way of communicating, to constantly be asking yourself how it is working or not working. It’s a problem solving process: execute, evaluate, modify if necessary, then repeat. I can tell you I’ve been assessing Harlan for the last week, and I want you to know, he’s your man—no question.”
Rob also recommended we add a few more guides to the team roster. “Even with Harlan and me,” he said, “it’s still not enough. You’re putting in all this time and effort, so let’s stack the odds. If something happened to Harlan or me, we should have other guides ready to step in, and it’s good to have a wide talent pool anyway to share the responsibilities.”
* * *
So back home again, we brought aboard three additional guides. Steven Mace was twenty-five years old and the son of my old climbing partner Charley Mace. He hadn’t followed his dad into the mountains, but instead had established himself as an expert river man, both a rafting guide and formidable kayaker. We also enlisted Timmy O’Neill, who was not only a climbing legend, but had been paddling a kayak since he was nine years old with his father. He had a reputation of being a wild man who did stand-up comedy and made underground climbing films about “buildering,” free-soloing the sides of buildings and even tall bridges throughout New York City. However, behind the popular image was a meticulous planner and brilliant strategist. It also made sense to recruit Skyler Williams, my right-hand man at my small speaking company in Golden. Skyler had started kayaking to be able to help with my learning process and had come along on some of the training trips, and he was such a strong athlete and quick learner that he was soon a vital part of our kayaking team.
At this point in my training, it came down to one crucial objective. We had to become a cohesive team that understood how to fluidly step in and out of different roles and respond seamlessly to the wide array of challenges we’d encounter on the Grand Canyon. The way to achieve this was to log a lot of river miles together. So we all began heading out to local paddling areas like Shoshone and the Upper Colorado. Both areas were long drives, almost three hours, west on I-70, over the Rockies. As we were driving one day, Timmy said, “Let’s try the Eisenhower Tunnel test.” The Eisenhower Tunnel is situated on the top of the Continental Divide at over eleven thousand feet, making it one of the highest highway tunnels in the world. It’s almost two miles long. The test was to try to hold your breath all the way through, for at least two minutes—that is, if you broke the speed limit.
“You can’t do it cold,” he warned. About twenty minutes before the tunnel, he taught me how to do what he called “active breathing” by slowly pulling air into my lungs for twelve seconds, holding it for ten seconds and then letting it out again for another eight. “It may come in handy for you when you’re sputtering in a hole.” He made a loud burbling sound with his lips. “It’s saved me a few times—once on a rapid on the Ottawa River, Phil’s Hole, where I was de-paddled, de-boated, and almost de-lifed.”
I paused my breathing exercise to laugh nervously.
Timmy said, “People say it’s dangerous to do the Eisenhower test when you’re driving, but I’ve never passed out once. At least I don’t think I have.”
When the tunnel arrived, we took a last breath and tried to hang on. Timmy made it the whole way, but I was at least thirty seconds shy. However, I found active breathing to be a great tool for calming my nervous system and loading my lungs with oxygen. I started practicing it each time as a pre-kayaking ritual.
On one training session, Steven Mace was learning to guide me. He gave me the perfect line to get around a massive hole. I squeaked by, hearing its ferocious churn to my right, but a couple of minutes later, I was beginning to worry why I hadn’t heard him call any directions into my earpiece. Then, as I feared, my radio gave a long beep, indicating that the distance of the Bluetooth signal had reached its limit. I turned around, trying to listen through the deep rumble. I was now bouncing off rocks, doing 360s and just managing to lean the right way each time to absorb the blows. Hearing another big rapid below me, I pushed back the panic and paddled hard toward what I thought might be the edge of the river. I found myself in a shallow swirling eddy and clung to a rock with one hand, paddle in the other, as the current tried to spin me around and spit me out the bottom.
Finally, I heard a thread of sound in the air that began to assert itself above the river noise. It was a voice. Rob was furiously paddling toward me, screaming for me to hang on. When he pulled up beside me, panting hard, he told me what had happened: Steven had gotten me past the hole, but had failed to account for himself. His boat caught the edge of the hole, and he was yanked in, flipping end over end. He rolled up at least nine times but couldn’t escape. Exhausted and out of air, he’d finally relinquished, pulling and swimming. The hole finally released him, but when he eventually made it to shore, he was half-drowned, beaten, and demoralized. His boat and paddle were somewhere downriver, and he noticed the hole had stripped him of his river booties.
When Rob found me in the eddy, I knew he was without a radio—it was still attached to Steven. The rapids below were big and loud, but hiking out of the canyon wasn’t an option. “Remember plan B?” Rob asked, and we floated together for another twenty minutes as I tried to fortify my resolve. I realized then, thinking about what had just happened to Steven, that there were serious consequences for my guides, not just for me. When we finally began descending again, I could barely hear Rob. We entered a tumbling cauldron of white water, and I was knocked over, rolled up, and immediately knocked over again. Upside down and being dragged downriver, my head slammed against underwater boulders. When I rolled up, my knuckles were scraped and bloody, and I could feel my elbows bleeding beneath my paddling jacket. Then I was flipped a third time, and upside down in another hole, I fought to right myself. When Rob saw me, he had to resort to his old trick of purposely flipping as well so he didn’t torpedo me. Somehow, we got through. “How about another run?” Rob suggested at the bottom of the canyon.
“No, thank you. Not today,” I said with my head hanging and hands shaking.
Another day, Timmy was guiding and directed me around another large hole to my right, but the eddy line to my left grabbed my bow and spun me. Before he could say anything, I slammed directly into the overhanging rock wall. It cracked my helmet as I flipped over instantly. When I rolled up again, my lips were split, and I could taste blood. But I had bigger worries: I was entering another rapid, and the waves were tossing me left and right. What had distracted my team was a family full of rafters who had spilled directly into the hole I’d just missed. Their raft had flipped, and they were all swimming for their lives. There were two young kids and even a couple of small dogs in the water all at once. Timmy pulled me over to the edge, and my team paddled out to pull the family to safety. When everyone was all collected on shore again, we flipped their raft upright. The little kids were bawling and clutching their parents. They feared the dogs were drowned. However, an hour later, we found both of them washed up downriver. They were miraculously alive.
The father, who we learned was named Donald, had been the one rowing. As he sat in glum silence, Timmy reached into their cooler, cracked a beer, took a long swig, glanced over at the crying children, and said, “Donald, well, the good news is, at least your dogs still love you.”
* * *
Over the next year, we made several training trips to Peru. With warm water, hot sun, and massive snowmelt off the Andes, it was an ideal boating destination, with exotic-sounding rivers like the Marañón, the Apurímac, the Yanatile, and the Urubamba. We also headed north of the U.S. border to the Ottawa River, to the very place where Timmy had almost been “de-lifed.” The purpose was to do a course called “Desensitization to Big Water.” For a week, the guides repeatedly had us paddle into massive holes like Phil’s, which upended you and held you down for about fifteen seconds before releasing you. It didn’t matter how great a combat roll you had; you weren’t coming back up with the force of Phil’s holding you under. So the key was patience, to just relax and wait it out. Fifteen seconds didn’t seem that long to hold your breath, but being throttled around and around, over and over, beneath ten tons of crashing water, it seemed like an eternity. With each underwater beat-down, I was getting plenty of chances to practice the Eisenhower Tunnel test.
Coming home from that trip, for the most part, I felt proud of myself. I’d begun to rebuild my skills and my confidence after being shattered on that initial trip down the Usumacinta. Physically, I was improving, making it through rapids that I would have pulled my skirt and swum through a year ago. Yet my progress wasn’t like getting over the flu; symptoms still lingered at the edges. In moments of stress, like when I was entering a rapid, an almost paralyzing dread would surge up and engulf me. I was also still suffering those dreams of floating down the river blind, without a guide, being tossed at the river’s mercy.
I thought about the different soldiers I’d worked with over the years who struggled with PTSD. I didn’t want to be presumptuous and give my nightmares a name—no bullets were flying at me, and no IEDs were exploding—but it sometimes felt like I was responding in a similar way, like my brain was an old scratched vinyl record skipping at the same musical notes, playing over and over. It wasn’t a song I liked either. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t shut it off. I hoped my brain wasn’t scratched, doomed to repeat an endless feedback loop.
There was one veteran I’d met on our last Soldiers to Summits expedition named Captain Ryan Kelly. As he guided me down the trail, I’d learned a lot about his life. He had served as a Black Hawk helicopter pilot and company commander in Iraq and had come home with PTSD. He lived in denial of the symptoms for seven years before finally giving in to pressure from his family and seeking help. Now retired, he had a master’s degree in playwriting from Columbia University, and he wrote plays, all of them revolving around our nation’s wars, and the characters were all struggling with the aftermath as they tried to heal.
I thought Ryan might have the insight to help me with my own challenges and especially with those reoccurring dreams. Ryan was kind enough to meet me at the public library. After catching up, I tried to broach the subject but hesitated. Then I went ahead and told him about my experience on the Usu. “This may sound weak,” I said, “but I think something’s wrong with me, maybe something wrong with my brain, like it got broken somehow.”
“You’re talking about PTSD?” he asked. I nodded, embarrassed. “When I came home from Iraq, I had those same perceptions,” he said. “I was pretty messed up and didn’t even know it. I wouldn’t go see anybody about it because I thought I could deal with it. I hadn’t been blown up. I came home with all my limbs. In my mind, I was a man, so I should be able to conquer anything I set my mind to, especially this imaginary problem. But after a lot of support from my family and after counseling, I know now, there’s no such thing as a weak man or a brave man; there’s just a man. That’s all.”
“But you served our country,” I said. “With a ton of combat missions. I’m just trying to get back in my kayak.”
“This isn’t just a soldiers’ disease,” he continued. “In fact, that phrase clouds the issue. I think that everybody sooner or later will experience some degree of trauma, the process of being crushed and having to rebuild.” He laughed ironically. “Hell, we’re born into trauma. It’s all blood, tears, and pain. Whether it be a fear of getting back in your kayak, or losing your house because you’ve gone bankrupt, or being in an abusive relationship and not having a clue how to get out, or being a doctor in an emergency room, or trying to help somebody and they don’t want to help themselves; maybe you watch them dwindle away and die. They’re gone, yet you have to live with it. That’s trauma. That’s part of being human.”
“But when does trauma become PTSD?” I asked.
“The question becomes how it affects you,” he answered, “how you process it, how you adapt or redirect, or change with it. And sometimes that trauma feels so overwhelming; you get stuck for a time, maybe forever. I don’t know a lot about kayaking, but maybe it’s like being stuck in an eddy and you want to get back into the current; the current is where you know you should be, but there’s a barrier that you can’t get through, no matter how hard you try, or how bad you want it. People tell you, ‘Just think positive thoughts or put on a brave face,’ but that doesn’t get you through either. I believe all our experiences are recorded in our subconscious. Nothing ever gets left behind. And those experiences, negative or positive, are who we become. Sometimes those events are so overwhelming, they get embedded in our souls like a vibration that you feel—no matter what. The trauma becomes part of you. It melts into you.”
“How did yours happen?” I asked.
“It wasn’t just one thing,” he replied. “My nemesis was constantly being under the gun, always preparing for the worst—sometimes waking up and not knowing if I’d be alive by the evening or just for the next ten minutes. There’s an underlying pressure that wears on you, that changes you over time. But even worse than that were all the decisions I had to make that involved the lives of others. Those were soul crushing. There was one night when I was sleeping. About 2:00 A.M., this sergeant rushes in and wakes me up. He’s panicked. ‘There are possible insurgents coming through the wire, on foot,’ he said. We didn’t know exactly how many there were. I’m thinking, the helicopters and living quarters would be the ideal target, so I’m yelling, ‘Everybody, load your weapons! Get to your positions! Get your shit on! Wake the colonel!’ I threw on my clothes and ran over to the TOC—the tactical operation center—and I was floored to find no one there. I didn’t have any information except for what was coming in over the radio, and the information was coming at me very fast. I immediately activated our security plan. Part of that is you send roving guys out in Humvees with machine guns and then you put the checkpoint people out there to block the roads, like interior perimeters, to signal all vehicles and make them stop. The rule is, if they don’t stop, you light them up. It was pandemonium, guys running around in their underwear with loaded guns. We’re not infantry; a lot of us were pilots, so this was not a good situation. And I was the only officer in the TOC, so I was tracking all the radios. Then I get a call from one of my soldiers on a checkpoint, and he says, ‘There’s a bus coming toward us, and it’s not slowing down. I’m flashing lights, and it’s not slowing down. Permission to engage.’
“I said, ‘Where is it coming from?’
“He yelled, ‘From the PX area! Permission to engage! Permission to engage!’
“That was the moment,” said Ryan, “maybe only a couple of seconds, but scenarios are flying through my head. If I give the order, it will kill everybody on that bus. Inside, it could be our own guys, or it could be the terrorists who’d breeched the wire, gotten ahold of that bus, and packed it full of explosives. This was the last checkpoint before our living quarters, an entire battalion housing 350 people. The guard is still yelling, ‘It’s speeding up! I’m flashing my Humvee headlights, I’m locked and loaded, permission to engage!’
“If we light them up and it’s the enemy, I win—if it’s a bunch of GIs, then I lose. The guy on the radio was actually a friend of mine, and at that point, I remembered before deployment his daughter sitting on my lap and asking me to bring her daddy home. But I made the decision. I am going to gamble and sacrifice the lives of my men. I thought, If I’m wrong, then you’re going to die, and that’s the way it’s going to be.
“I said, ‘Do not engage!’ And you know who was on that bus? It was full of eighteen-year-old American GIs coming back from the PX. They were eating Doritos and drinking Dr Peppers, cranking tunes, absolutely clueless, and I almost killed them all.”
“You made the right decision,” I said, trying to reassure him.
“Yeah,” he replied. “The emergency that’d started the whole thing turned out to be a bunch of dumbasses, civilian contractors who were sneaking back onto the base with a case of beer. But in the long run, it doesn’t really matter, because when we got home, the guy at the guardhouse invited me over for a barbecue. His kids hugged me and said, ‘Thank you for bringing my daddy home.’ What was I supposed to say? ‘I’d already made the decision to sacrifice your daddy—the fact that he’s alive is just dumb luck’?”
I tried to comprehend how hard that split decision must have been and how it still weighed on him.
“Then, a couple of years later,” Ryan went on, “my wife got pregnant, and she started to get this rash on her. It just appeared out of nowhere. We went to the doctor, and he immediately sent us to a cancer specialist, and that doctor said there’s a 50 percent chance it’s inflammatory breast cancer. This kind of cancer meant that unless she started chemo in the next week, it might be too late. And oh yeah, the chemo would abort the baby. My wife said, ‘No, I am going to keep this child,’ but I tried to talk her out of it. I said, ‘You have to abort the baby because if you say no, neither one of you may live. I can’t bear losing both of you.’ Funny thing is, that after three more weeks of biopsies and more tests, we found out it was just a rash. Everything’s cool, but it wasn’t really, because I was this close to losing it all. When I think about that moment, it’s so terrifying, I have to push it away, but it just keeps floating up again. And it always comes around, always back to the war.”
“So it’s not about a physical injury,” I said, “not about something done to you. More like something you did, something you did to someone else, something you might have done differently.”
“Yes,” he said. “And sometimes it’s about impossible scenarios with impossible decisions, in the face of impossible forces. It all rattles around and ties you up. And at the end of the day, you feel hope being ripped away, or potential or desire. All you’re left with is regret, guilt, and a sense of helplessness. And when it comes right down to it, you begin to wonder if you’re a bad person, like maybe you deserve it, and this is some kind of penance.”
When Ryan stopped, we both sat quietly sipping our coffees as images played through my head: I saw my brother Mark in the ring boxing with Anita, and she was about to deliver the knockout blow. There was Rob in his kayak, barely able to move after his back injury on the Usu, trying to confront his future with a disease that had no easy or logical answers. But most clearly, I saw little Arjun, recently arrived in America, staring at a book on the solar system, convinced he had arrived on an entirely new planet. Everything he’d known, everything he’d hung on to, all left behind.
Sitting across from Ryan, I recalled Harlan’s speed attempt, how he’d yearned to experience the Grand Canyon from the river’s perspective. Like Harlan, like Ryan, I also wanted to be in the current, but the fear and uncertainty felt so palpable, I thought it might crush me. To have a chance to make it through a rapid, so many factors had to come together. A subtle paddle stroke, the timing of my reaction, or pure dumb luck all determined whether I’d be high-fiving at the bottom or smashing face-first into a rock, or swimming through the rapid and having to be rescued by one of my team. And most of that depended on me. Just one mistake would throw me into even more mayhem and danger. Then I’d have to respond in kind to those new threats.
It was a lot to carry, and I felt the weight. I didn’t want to let down my guides, my team, my family, and myself. Often, I found myself questioning whether I had what it took to rise to those forces. If I had stopped after climbing Mount Everest, I could have always remained “Super Blind,” the illusion of myself fixed and eternal. But I was starting over, and the past didn’t matter. What if it had been a mistake, a fluke? What if I wasn’t the person I thought I was, or hoped to be? That realization wouldn’t just scratch the vinyl record of my mind, but would shatter it.
“But I believe there is a way to rebuild,” Ryan began again, fortunately interrupting my thoughts. “If trauma is about powerlessness, about a loss of control, then maybe overcoming it is trying to prove that you’re not insignificant, that you have an ability to impact your life, to be able to move forward or sideways, or even backward. People often say, be brave, but I don’t really know what that means. Fear and courage—they’re not a permanent state of being. They’re just choices. If you choose fear, it leads you down a path until it owns you. But the opposite is also true. Every day, I try to practice small acts of courage. You decide to wear that shirt that you love but you know everyone else hates, or you have a Coke instead of a beer, or you push down your pride and decide to ask for help, or you decide to get back in your kayak one day—even if it’s just in your garage. Those also lead you down a path, and soon it begins to build. Then when the moment comes that requires great courage, you’re ready.”