“Extreme gratitude” has sustained retired Marine and Purple Heart recipient Gabe Martinez after he lost both of his legs to a roadside bomb in Afghanistan 15 years ago.
Martinez spoke to Morning Wire about his injury, recovery, life after the military, and the Semper Fi & America’s Fund that helps wounded veterans with severe injuries and disabilities.
Martinez was in seventh grade on September 11, 2001, when al-Qaeda terrorists hijacked commercial planes and flew them into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon, while a fourth crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. The tragedy spurred Martinez to enlist in the Marines in 2006, immediately after graduating high school.
In 2008, Martinez found himself on his first deployment with a Marine Expeditionary Unit assigned to Navy ships across the Middle East. Two years later, in 2010, he was on his second deployment, this time in Afghanistan.
“Thanksgiving 2010 is obviously a day I’ll never forget. I remember everything about it,” said Martinez. “I was in for about three years at that point. We were going to the Helmand province of Afghanistan. … We knew it was going to be a tougher deployment. That was a real brutal year for some of the Marine Corps units out there.”
About an hour into the convoy near a Taliban stronghold, an IED exploded underneath one of the vehicles in Martinez’s line. Martinez’s immediate job was to hunt for secondary explosives hidden in the surrounding dirt. The wreckage of the destroyed vehicle made his metal detector worthless. He was forced to dig in the dirt with his hands, carefully sweeping for more potentially buried explosives.
Martinez had just finished investigating one spot and was moving to another area where the dirt appeared to have been recently disturbed when another IED — a 25-pound bomb in a glass jar — exploded beneath him.
“I remember getting tossed up into the air, and then I landed in this crater that the IED had created,” he recalled. “I remember everything was red — like all my vision was red — and I remember thinking, like, something really got rattled loose up, you know, up in my head. And what I realized is that it was blood going down from my skull into my eyes. The piece of shrapnel had gone through my helmet and into my forehead.”
“I remember wiping that free and looking down and seeing that my legs were, they were still there. One was hanging off to the side, one was on my chest,” Martinez said.
A whirlwind 48 hours followed. Martinez and two more Marines, one concussed from the first IED and the other with his legs also blown off from a bomb just after Martinez, were loaded together on a helicopter and rushed to the nearest medical facility capable of performing surgery. Within an hour of his injury, Martinez, still conscious, was able to call his wife using a satellite phone on the base.
Doctors at the facility finished amputating what was left of Martinez’s legs. From there, he was flown back to the United States and arrived in Bethesda, Maryland, less than two days after stepping on an IED in Afghanistan.
After finding out that he would survive, Martinez’s thoughts shifted to how he would live with his injury. But despite the difficulties, he was mostly grateful to be alive.
“I didn’t really know what life looked like for me, especially now having no legs — lost both my legs at 22 years old, I was recently married — and so life was very uncertain at that point. In my mind, I figured that was pretty much it. I didn’t have legs, so I was figuratively and literally half the man I once was,” said Martinez.
“The day I woke up in the hospital in the United States was when I met the Semper Fi & America’s Fund, and they were able to answer a lot of that for me, you know, because fortunately-slash-unfortunately, they had a lot of experience with my situation,” he continued. “My mentality then is similar to how it is now — and it’s gratitude despite ups and downs. It’s extreme gratitude.”
The Semper Fi & America’s Fund provided Martinez opportunities to push himself and conquer new challenges despite his disability.
“My wife still to this day says I was like a ‘yes man.’ Like, I said yes to anything and everything, whether it was rock climbing, skiing–things I’ve never even done before, I found myself doing it. And it was great for my recovery because it showed me what I could do. And really, there weren’t any limits to what I could or couldn’t do,” he said.
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The toughest challenge for Martinez was leaving the military and losing the community that had sustained him throughout the early days of his injury. Martinez again found himself relying on the Semper Fi & America’s Fund. The fund assigned Martinez a case manager who checked in on his progress and connected him with other veterans in similar situations.
In the military, the anniversary of wounds like Martinez’s is called “Alive Days,” and so Martinez’s Alive Day comes around Thanksgiving every year. (He suffered his injury the day after Thanksgiving in Afghanistan, which happened to be the day of Thanksgiving in the United States).
Having his Alive Day fall on Thanksgiving has reinforced the gratitude he felt early on at just surviving and being able to return home.
“For me and my Alive Day being either on or around Thanksgiving was one of those blessings in disguise because it brings me back to that day 15 years ago … and like I said, gives me that reset perspective,” he said. “I’m able to, you know, look around and see my family, my kids, you know, my wife and family — kind of how my future has evolved from 15 years ago.”
“It gives me that perspective of even though every day is not perfect, even though many days I wish, you know, I had my legs or this didn’t happen to me, it gives me so much to be thankful for. And then being on Thanksgiving just kind of amplifies that while I’m surrounded by family and friends and all the chaos that ensues with that,” he continued. “I mean, it’s a huge blessing, and it’s a great reset for me to kind of have that perspective.”
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