From battlefield to Tokyo: Combat vets vie at Paralympics

FREMONT, Ind. (AP) — The bald, broad-shouldered cyclist has spent years remembering a nighttime road in a faraway city. He can still describe the city’s narrow streets and crushing heat. He talks about the dead end that forced his convoy turn around.

And the explosion.

“It’ll always be a part of me,” said Tom Davis, sitting outside his family home in rural Indiana. Cicadas are screeching. “I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me,” says a tattoo on an immense forearm.

“But I can’t continue to be that guy that got blown up in Ramadi,” the city outside Baghdad where a hidden bomb threw his armored vehicle high into the air, costing the soldier much of his left leg.

Davis is no longer that guy. Tens of thousands of miles of training helped make him into someone else -- one of the fastest men alive.

Twenty years after the attacks of Sept. 11, and just days after the Taliban took control of Kabul, Davis is one of the small group of American combat veterans competing in the Tokyo Paralympics -- a corps of elite athletes who have triumphed over catastrophic injuries they suffered in Iraq and Afghanistan.

There’s the triathlete who lost a leg when her convoy was ambushed on the bomb-cratered road to Baghdad’s airport. The swimmer who went blind after stepping on a land mine in rural Afghanistan. The sprinter who lost both legs in another Baghdad convoy.

There’s the cyclist who remembers clutching his dismembered leg in the moments after an attack in Afghanistan, holding it to his chest as if it was a baby.

They are a disparate group. Some are relentlessly optimistic. Others spent years wrestling emotional demons. Some insist they emerged from their personal battlefields without emotional scarring. Others insist that’s impossible. Their stories are tangles of...