Driven to Ride: the True Story of an Elite Athlete Who Rebuilt His Leg, His Life, and His Career by Mike Schultz

Driven to Ride: the True Story of an Elite Athlete Who Rebuilt His Leg, His Life, and His Career by Mike Schultz

Author:Mike Schultz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Triumph Books
Published: 2021-11-25T18:23:48+00:00


11. War Zone

The plane lands at a commercial airport in southwest Germany with a thud, turbines roaring in reverse to slow us down. It’s July 8, 2011, and I’m headed overseas with Robi Powers, a veteran who’s an emcee at snocross events. Powers has begun a program called American300 Warriors Tour, escorting Olympians and professional athletes to military bases around the world on goodwill and mentoring missions. This time, he’s asked snowmobile freestyle rider Levi LaVallee—one of my old Minnesota buddies from the snocross tour—Levi’s crew chief, Glen Kafka, and me to accompany him to Europe and the Middle East on what he’s called the XHeavy Metal Tour. We will spend 12 days in the Middle East, visiting troops.

We’ve all known each other for several years on tour. Levi is a year younger than I am. He stands about five-and-a-half-feet tall, but he’s one tough little dude. Both he and I started our careers around the same time, in the late ‘90s. We’ve become close friends even though we were direct competitors while working up through the semi-pro and pro ranks. Levi is a wild man on the race track, unafraid of testing the limits, and he’s always the first rider to send it big. He’s recently made the transition from snocross racer to professional freestyle rider, showcasing his jumping skills while doing crazy inverted tricks.

We won’t be going to any forward operating bases (FOBs), but combat continues to flare in the region. Before agreeing to go, Sara and I had a talk. Is it safe to go over there? We were a little uneasy about it. Especially when I was recently refused a life insurance policy after I had to answer “yes” to this question from the insurance agent: “Will you be visiting or staying in an active war zone in the next year?”

On the ground in Germany, we disembark and catch a short ride to Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, a hospital perched on a hill above a forest near Ramstein Air Base, a U.S. Air Force station in the German state of Rhineland-Palatinate. The busiest trauma hospital in the world, Landstuhl is a destination for every injured American soldier coming from combat overseas. They’re staged and spend a maximum of three or four days in Germany before they’re sent back to the U.S. for further treatment and recovery at Walter Reed Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, or Brooke Army Medical Center at Fort Sam Houston, outside San Antonio. The freshly wounded arrive daily at Landstuhl, on the enormous C-17 transport planes from the theater of war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They are mostly young men whose flesh and limbs have been ripped apart by bomb blasts.

Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are now fought by insurgents using improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Unable to face the military might of coalition and U.S. forces, enemies have resorted to planting roadside bombs and ambush attacks, the kind that result in legs and arms getting blown off when they detonate. Where once



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