They flirted a bit over dessert. Dan wondered whether she would let him kiss her. He still had an open wound in his stomach where the colostomy had been reversed.
“She has every right not to be interested,” Dan recalled thinking.
He and Rebecca went back to her apartment and sat next to each other on her couch. There, they kissed for the first time since his injury.
“You know, I am missing my legs,” Dan joked. “Is that an issue?”
“I never dated a guy because he had nice knees,” Rebecca replied. “But I do like nice arms.”
Rebecca’s college roommate worried that Rebecca was mistaking empathy for romantic love and would find herself in a relationship that she could not end. “Who could break the heart of an Army officer who lost both his legs?” Sabrina recalled thinking.
Rebecca’s mother fretted as well. “I kept saying, ‘If you don’t think you would have wanted the person that Dan was before he got hurt, then you should really think about whether you want that sort of relationship now,’ ” Andrea Taber recalled.
‘I am going down’
Dan’s battalion returned from Afghanistan in June 2010. It had been a brutal deployment. Some 25 soldiers from the 800-man unit had been killed, the highest fatality rate of any battalion by that point in the war.
In late July, Rebecca and Dan flew to Fort Lewis for the battalion’s end-of-deployment ball, held in a fancy hotel near the base. Rebecca wore a purple and pink cocktail dress, and Dan donned his formal uniform.
He had lost his entire right leg and had only a thigh on the left side. In almost 10 years of war, no one with Dan’s amputations had been able to walk for more than short stretches. Dan was still struggling with his prostheses, but he wanted to be standing when he greeted his soldiers.
Rebecca had spent the day getting her nails and hair done. This was going to be her introduction to the real Army. She expected the banquet to be a little like a prom, with military uniforms instead of tuxedos.
It was more like a drunken wake.
Before the ball began, Dan and Rebecca were chatting and snapping pictures outside the banquet hall with several soldiers from his platoon. The heels on Dan’s dress shoes were throwing his balance off.
“I am going down,” Dan whispered urgently.
He grabbed Rebecca’s strapless dress, yanking it down to her waist. She latched onto the wife of one of Dan’s soldiers. The three of them fell in a pile, and the woman, an epileptic, suffered a mild seizure. Rebecca pulled up her dress and laughed off the fall.
The scene inside the hall was almost as disorienting. Rebecca met the Army medic who had kept Dan alive as they waited for the rescue helicopter. In her mind, she had pictured him as a young doctor, but the soldier looked as though he was barely out of high school.
He mentioned that he was leaving the Army and returning to school.
“Are you planning on going to medical school?” she asked. He was looking for a good community college, he replied.
Rebecca tried to tune out the grisly conversations as soldiers visited with Dan, reliving the day he was wounded. Music thumped in the background and pictures from the deployment were projected onto the walls. A slender, blond woman named Lisa Hallett stopped by the table and began chatting with Rebecca.
Her husband, Capt. John Hallett, 30, had been killed in Afghanistan seven days after Dan was wounded. Lisa had three small children. Her youngest was born two weeks before her husband died. He had missed the birth. Shortly after her husband’s funeral, Lisa had written to Dan that she would have given anything to have her husband come home with no legs.
Rebecca remembered reading the letter in the hospital. “I had this image of the person writing to Dan as a middle-aged woman,” Rebecca recalled. “Instead, she was this young, beautiful woman.”
The lights dimmed and a slide show memorializing the battalion’s dead played on a screen in the front of the banquet hall. A picture of Lisa’s husband appeared, and the young widow began to cry. Rebecca hugged her. “I felt like she needed someone to be there for her, which is a strange thing to say about a woman you met 10 minutes ago,” she said.
When the slide show was over, Rebecca left the hall alone and returned to her hotel room. “I remember being so profoundly sad,” she said. “Here is my boyfriend, who just fell on the floor because he has no legs and can’t wear dress shoes. And here is a woman who is going to raise three kids by herself because her husband died, and both of these guys could have done anything with their lives.”
Dan returned to the hotel room a few hours later and found her asleep, still in her dress.
Rebecca’s influence
Earlier that summer, Dan was honored in Peachtree City, Ga., where he was raised. There were pictures of him in uniform with the words “Our Hometown Hero” written beneath. There was a three-mile fun run to raise money for his recovery and a parade with more than 500 motorcycles, firetrucks and police cruisers.
Dan’s parents ran a small printing business in the middle-class Atlanta suburb. His brother Rob had been a star student at the local high school, earning admission to Yale and paying for it with an Air Force ROTC scholarship. Two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, New York Times columnist David Brooks had celebrated Rob as “that rarest of creatures, an Ivy League member of the ROTC.”
The columnist predicted that a renewed ethic of service would bind together a fragmenting country. Instead of dorm rooms with refrigerators, this generation of college students would opt for barracks. Such high-minded sentiments, however, were quickly forgotten.
Dan was more typical of the teenagers drawn to the military. He was a good student, but not an A-plus striver. After high school, he spent a year at Marion Military Institute, an Alabama community college that admitted students who fell just short of gaining admission to the U.S. Military Academy. In 2003, he made it to West Point, where he graduated in the middle of his class.
He loved the physical aspects of Army life: the long runs with his soldiers, the patrols through the woods. He was funny, smart and not afraid to question his superiors. “I really don’t want to stop being a platoon leader, and I don’t know what I’m going to do if I do ever get out of the army,” Dan wrote to his brother one month before he left for Afghanistan.
Dan hated the idea of riding in a parade through Peachtree City. He complained to Rebecca and argued with his father in an attempt to avoid it. But his father prevailed. Dan waved to the crowd from a convertible at the head of the motorcycle procession. “It was the most uncomfortable that I have ever been,” he said. “I am joking here, but the reason I was being recognized was because I was a bad infantryman. The enemy beat me. . . . I don’t need people to feel like they have to thank me because otherwise I will be disappointed that it was all for nothing.”
The truth is that Dan is mostly fine. Doctors at Walter Reed view him with admiration and some puzzlement. He has been able to set aside his trauma and move forward with humor and little regret.
Rebecca attempted to read Dan the emotionally wrought journal entry that she wrote on the day she learned that he had lost his legs. After a few lines, he asked her to stop. “We were going out to dinner, and I didn’t feel like getting bummed out,” he recalled.
She tried again a few days later, but she could tell he was not paying attention. “Dan, are you even listening to this?” Rebecca asked before giving up.
Dan loves Rebecca’s drive, focus and ambition. She expects Dan to match her determined pace.
A year ago, she bought a white board and set it up in the living room of Dan’s apartment in Silver Spring. She wrote two weekly to-do lists for him. One is “Dan’s Personal To Do’s,” which usually includes working out at the hospital rehabilitation center, swimming and studying for the business school admission test, or GMAT. They hope to attend Harvard or Stanford business school together next year.
The other list consists of his “Professional To Do’s.” Dan is teaming up with a plastics manufacturer in Ohio to start a business selling storage chests to the Defense Department.
The first time Dan’s brother and father saw the white board and the lists, they erupted with laughter.
“It strikes everyone as hilarious,” Rob said. “It is Rebecca’s influence.”
Now Dan maintains the lists. Since losing his legs, he has become more conscious of how people see him. “I understand that most people will look at me and go ‘that guy’s life is screwed,’ ” he said. He realizes he needs to show people that he is a success. He wants Rebecca to push him.
Today, Rebecca is on leave from her consulting job and works as the deputy chief of staff to the Delaware education secretary. She lives with Dan on weekends.
Rebecca sometimes wonders whether she would have felt the same attraction to Dan if he had come back from Afghanistan intact. She lists the qualities in him that she most values: his strength, his humor, his ambition. “I am still kind of torn whether these sides existed or whether the injury brought them out,” she said. “The qualities I admire most in Dan weren’t immediately apparent to me.”
As a couple, Dan and Rebecca have developed shared rituals. Rebecca designated Aug. 18 as Dan’s “blown-up day.” This year she offered to throw him a party and invite some of their friends. Dan said he did not want to dwell on the anniversary. Instead, Rebecca came home early from work and made him spicy shrimp with mango. She wished him a happy blown-up day and they shared a quiet meal.
They have forged unspoken understandings. More than two years after the blast, Dan is still struggling to walk on his prostheses. A simple maneuver like stepping over a one-inch-high door threshold requires his full concentration and often leaves him drenched in sweat. Rebecca has learned to resist the urge to hover. “He gives me a look that says, ‘I can take care of it,’ ” Rebecca said.
“Dan lost his legs in Afghanistan, but he got me,” Rebecca kidded recently. They were sitting in Dan’s apartment, which has the temporary feel of a college dorm room. On the kitchen counter is a photo of his platoon, taken the day after Dan’s blown-up day.
“I would have gotten you anyway,” Dan retorted.
More than most Americans, Rebecca has come to understand the sacrifices that accompany military service. She told Dan that she could never have moved from base to base while he pursued an Army career. She could not have subjected herself to the worry and stress of waiting out combat deployments.
Without his injury, she never would have dated him.
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