War has torn a hole in the lives of these wounded soldiers. The Team River Runner program has used the healing power of whitewater to help them discover life after combat

Troy Crawford was returning to the Malone House, a hotel for soldiers on the campus of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., when curiosity lured him toward a van loaded with kayaks. Despite the loud, piercing ringing in his ears, the result of a bomb explosion in Iraq, he heard a stranger’s question just then—and he heard it just fine. It didn’t hurt that Joe Mornini, the shag-headed paddling instructor and driver of the van, was shouting at him like they were buddies from way back.

“Hey, how come you’re not paddling with me?”
Twenty minutes later he was sitting in a kayak at the therapy pool in the main hospital building, listening to this shag-headed fellow, Mornini, whom he had just met a moment earlier.
“Do you trust me?” Mornini was asking him.
“Yeah, why?” replied Crawford.
“Then hold your breath.”
And with a jump-rope flick of his wrists, Mornini turned Crawford upside down in the water.
Life had been turned upside down on Crawford before. The 27-year-old from Lincoln Park, Michigan, was on a second tour of Iraq in March 2006 when he found an improvised explosive device (IED) by a road in Al-Mahmudiyah, a town south of Baghdad. He tried to run, but it blew him across the road and sprayed a couple dozen pieces of metal into his body. Some of those pieces were larger than a half dollar. Some were pieces of hot asphalt from the road. The blast blew out both of his eardrums.
Doctors operated on Crawford operated four or five days a week for a month after that. Unable to walk or dress himself, his injuries marooned him to the hospital. Other soldiers were coming and going, and any lasting bonds would be hard to come by. His girlfriend, Lauren, came from Michigan to care for him, but her return to college at the end of the summer left him unplugged. So by the time he ran into Mornini that fall, he needed something more than the dull repetition of the physical therapy room.
Mornini flipped Crawford back over in the pool. When the vet popped up unfazed, Mornini asked Crawford if he was ready to try boating on a river in Pennsylvania.
And that was the beginning of Crawford’s whitewater addiction.
Mornini is co-founder of the Team River Runner program, the civilian group that brings paddling to Walter Reed, and now with the help of some sizable grants, to many other military hospitals across the country. Mornini, 55, is a paddler of 26 years, and a former instructor at Liquid Adventures kayaking school in the Washington, D.C. area. He is also a high school special education teacher who thought of modifying boats for the disabled long before the wars began in Iraq and Afghanistan. His idea fell into abeyance for years but was revived in the summer of 2004. His paddling friend, Mike McCormick, was a stenographer at the White House who had traveled with the press pool when President Bush visited Walter Reed to pin Purple Hearts on soldiers wounded in Afghanistan.
One day, over beers, McCormick told Mornini of his idea to take kayaking to these wounded soldiers. Mornini went home and dug out his old proposal.  
A friend with connections at Walter Reed put the two paddlers in touch with the physical therapy program there, and after a kayak demonstration in the therapy pool, Team River Runner was welcomed into the hospital. They next showed a kayak-porn video to potential participants. If they sensed a clash of cultures when they first walked in the room, the video didn’t loosen things up at all.
“It was one of these loud, rock and roll, kayak-dudes being out there partying [kind of videos],” McCormick said. “There were some people who were more traditional military who looked at it and said, ‘This group probably isn’t for me.’ ”
But with a few interested veterans, Team River Runner started Tuesday afternoon pool sessions and Saturday river trips with borrowed boats and equipment from local kayaking schools. Locals from the D.C. paddling community volunteered.
Now, more than 200 soldiers have tried kayaking at Walter Reed. Some have floated happily on flatwater, connecting with the outdoors. That’s just fine for everyone involved. But for some veterans, the rapids are filling a distinct void.
“They tell me that being out there and paddling whitewater—the excitement and the intensity of the water—it’s the closest thing they can come to being back in combat,” Mornini said. “And I say, ‘Dude, I don’t really know what you mean by that, but I’m just happy you’re running whitewater with me.’ ”
On a Tuesday afternoon I’m signed in at a gate outside of Walter Reed and met by a public affairs official who escorts me a short distance to the large main hospital building. We take an elevator to the third floor, and on our way to the pool we stop at the physical therapy room. A long rectangular room with weights, medicine balls, Thera-Bands, and treadmills. It’s no different than a civilian gym. A list of rules on the wall catches the eye, however. Rehab rules. One says, “Share your story.”
Sgt. Rob Brown, 25, of Monk’s Corner, South Carolina, was shot twice in the hip in a house he occupied with his Army unit in Ramadi, Iraq, in September 2006. When he arrived at Walter Reed, he told his new commanding officer he wasn’t leaving until the Army fixed him. The nerves damaged in his hip have left no feeling in the lower half of his right leg.
He was working out in the physical therapy room in the spring of 2007 when Team River Runner instructor Dave Robey walked in and shouted, “Anyone want to try kayaking?”
Brown got his roll down that first night. He also met Mornini, who filled his head with promises of big water in Colorado, and he was pretty much sold after that. Within two weeks he was on the river. Within two months he was in Colorado running Class IV.
Today Brown wears a carbon-fiber brace to keep his drop foot—a neuromuscular disorder that affects his ability to raise his foot—in place. He slips on a black neoprene bootie for protection; with no feeling in the foot he might inadvertently cut it, or rip off a toenail. Brown, his hair cut high and tight, walks to the pool with a black metal cane plastered with stickers that could be found on the back of any paddler’s car. Jackson Kayaks, Wavesport, NRS, Boof and Rally Huck ze Gnar, Demshitz. He lays down the cane and slides into a red Wave Sport play boat, and gradually he scoots into the water.
Brown and Crawford are the most competent paddlers Team River Runner has produced. Brown hopes to compete in the Olympic slalom trials in 2012. Team River Runner has paid for him to take a swift-water rescue course and, like Crawford, he will soon seek his ACA certification. He’s already an instructor with Team River Runner. With no one around to teach today he casually rolls upside down.
His boat begins to move like a bright red turtle shell across the water’s surface. You can see his arms spreading and gathering underwater in a breaststroke that goes on for 40 seconds or so. When he rolls up, the water drains off a torso that shows the lean muscle mass of a model soldier, or an elite athlete.
He’s breathing easily and moving again with the grace he knew on land before Ramadi. A track athlete in high school and at the Virginia Military Institute, he joined the Army because he’d always wanted to, because it was in his family, and because he was tired of working fast food.
Over dinner one night at a Thai restaurant in D.C., I asked Crawford and Brown about the war, Walter Reed, and Team River Runner. Both were thoughtful in their answers, but I sensed a subtle boundary with Brown that I didn’t feel with Crawford. Brown mentioned a lifelong aversion to big crowds, one that grew more intense in Iraq. He told me that the Team River Runner volunteers know what he will and will not talk about.
I don’t. Weeks later I ask Brown in an email if he had been diagnosed with any of the conditions that are affecting the mood, thought, and behavior of so many of his fellow veterans returning from Iraq. Twenty percent have reported symptoms of post-traumatic stress syndrome, deep depression, and traumatic brain injury, according to a study by the RAND Corporation.

When you kayak you’re the same as everyone else. No one can see below the spray skirt. It makes you feel a lot better about yourself, makes you feel normal for a minute,

It might just be that he hasn’t suffered any of these disorders, and that his psychology is none of my business. Fair enough. But Brown’s “no comment” email reply reminded me of something Crawford said about Iraq. “There are things you’ve done and seen over there that you don’t necessarily want to talk about with anyone back here,” he said. “There are things I’ve seen that I don’t want Lauren to even have to imagine happened.”
The longer trips to places like Colorado and Costa Rica are the heart and soul of the program. Veterans and instructors live together for a week or more, long enough for the cultures of the river and of the military to overlap. The camaraderie of a team of paddlers begins to fill a hole that might have opened for a veteran when they left their units in Iraq. Maybe it’s the power of the river to heal that opens up the conversation, that allows the soldiers to unburden themselves of some of the terrible freight they’ve hauled home from the war. A kayak might not be a cure-all for the complicated residue of their war experience, but for many it has proven to be a means of momentary transcendence, a way to connect with the world beyond the hospital fence, a way to use their bodies at a high level again.
In the pool today Brown uses his hands to move across the water. His momentum takes the boat onto the deck. He sits there a moment, half-grounded, the athletic legs of a few Team River Runner volunteers standing behind him. It seems he would keep the boat and spray skirt on him everywhere he went if he could.
“When you kayak you’re the same as everyone else. No one can see below the spray skirt. It makes you feel a lot better about yourself, makes you feel normal for a minute,” he said. “Until you go into a McDonald’s and you hear some little kid say ‘Mommy, why’s that man using a cane?’ ”
A perverse hierarchy of injury exists at Walter Reed, where amputees find themselves at the top of a relative scale of the physically challenged. Among amputees, yet another structure of comparison is in place, in which a missing hand is better than a missing arm, and missing your leg below the knee is better than missing your leg above the knee, because it’s easier to use a prosthetic.
Mornini said 10 percent of all the soldiers who have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with limb loss have taken part in the program. It’s a number they can be proud of, and it’s a number they would like to increase.
They would like to have more Crawfords and more Browns too, as these veterans are best suited to represent the program. Not that it’s been easy for them to find new participants at the hospital. In the hierarchy of injury, Crawford and Brown are the lucky ones. They understand that soldiers with limb loss are facing new difficult situations every day. It isn’t easy to get them to sit in a squirrelly boat on a cold river. It isn’t easy to make them see it could be worth it.
“This is the only program that I know of that helps vets improve themselves,” Crawford said. “This is the only one with goals. There are other groups that will come and take you out to dinner and get you drunk. But with paddling you’re always bettering yourself.”
There are many shut-ins, people who want to be left alone in their rooms, to take cover in the shadows of a strange interlude, when these soldiers are cut off from being actual soldiers. Often they want to get back to their units, even if they’re so badly wounded that they never will. Crawford spoke of feeling this way in his first months at Walter Reed, of feeling failure for being separated from the guys in his unit, for being in a safe place while they were still “fighting for survival every single day.”
There is a dry remove among soldiers, one that has its roots in the culture of war. To stay focused in combat, soldiers adopt a ghoulish humor to keep their minds off of the “sick, gross things” they see, Crawford said. They push away and laugh off unconscionable carnage, and carry on with the mission. Recovering in hospital beds, the war doesn’t always leave a veteran alone, and the mind returns to the images and scenes that were earlier suppressed. It’s an experience that no one else can see, and it adds to the depressive indifference at the military hospital. “Soldiers get in these slumps where they’re just sitting in their rooms depressed and they don’t want to do anything,” Crawford said.
Every wound has its own characteristic, its own personality, its own need, and certainly every wound is serious. Some are just harder to see than others.
After several months in Iraq, Jennifer Jones stopped eating. She did not leave her room. She cried and physically shook by herself, and she lost 30 pounds. The 26-year-old from Ridgeway, South Carolina, would not tell her story to anyone. She had no trust in the Army anymore.
Jones was a specialist who interviewed suspected insurgents captured in raids by Special Forces. Stationed in Al Kut, in eastern Iraq, she was romantically involved with an Iraqi-American man who was working for the U.S. Army as an Arabic translator. The relationship caused problems with a ranking officer in her unit who had made it clear that he wanted a relationship with her too, Jones said. In Iraq, where it can be so hard to know who the enemy is, Jones’ worst foe was this officer. Even as he grew frustrated with her rebuffs, she said, she would never guess that he’d rape her in her room.
But Jones did not tell her story to anyone, and because she had an emotional breakdown in the months following this incident, and wound up in the psych ward at Walter Reed, this alleged rape could seem less plausible to some. In a room with a therapist at Walter Reed, Jones finally talked about what she says happened to her in Al Kut. The therapist told her what her options were.
“But I was just too afraid to mess with it,” Jones said. “I didn’t want to deal with it anymore. I just don’t want to go through all of the problems with investigations. I’m afraid of them.”
A starkly different picture emerges of Jones the paddler. Mornini said that she was always up for new challenges on the river. Jason Beakes, an instructor who sat on the Team River Runner board until resigning in August, calls Jones one of the most fearless paddlers he has ever met.
More than once he decided that she shouldn’t go down a challenging stretch of river, only to look over and see her ready to charge it.
Jones was separated from her Team River Runner friends when she was discharged from Walter Reed and from the Army. At home in South Carolina, her depression kept her isolated. Inside, in bed for whole days at a time, her kayak sat unused on the roof of her car. She gained a lot of weight.
There’s still no Team River Runner near Jones’ home, but by casting a wider net, the program hopes to keep veterans kayaking after they leave Walter Reed. Grants from three different veterans organizations totaling $173,000 have been used to start pilot sites at military hospitals in San Antonio, San Diego, Loma Linda, and Palo Alto, California, Seattle, and in VA hospitals in Washington, D.C., and in Richmond, Virginia.
Today, in the pool, Jones’ skills are rusty. Her plan for the next few months is to focus on kayaking—and to break away from the passive and painful existence in South Carolina. She is staying with Beakes and his girlfriend, Dana Alexander, also a Team River Runner volunteer. They are Jones’ closest friends in paddling, and they are both here watching her today.
Jones is tireless. Every time she fails to roll up, she calmly taps the bottom of the boat for help. After eight or nine attempts, instructor Jeff Fox tells her, “Keep your damn head down!”
Her work goes on so long that I stand up and look out the window. Near the hospital entrance, a silver bus has pulled up. Six men and women in yellow paper scrubs lift a metal gurney out of the back. The bus arrives with the wounded from Iraq and Afghanistan every Tuesday, Thursday, and Sunday, I am told. I watch five bags, some black and some camouflage, carried out on a second gurney, and I wonder if this soldier will ever make it up here, to be among veteran paddlers who work so hard to make a new momentum. I wonder if this soldier could be a friend to Jen Jones, who after 40 minutes of hard work, snaps her hips and keeps her head down, and finally rolls up on her own.