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Wounded warrior resumes life fully armed
Former Schofield Barracks soldier Brendan Marrocco deserves the national awe he is receiving from his remarkable recovery following the loss of all four limbs from an exploded projectile in Iraq in 2009.
"There’s a lot of people who will say you can’t do something," says 26-year-old Marrocco. "Just be stubborn and do it anyway."
He has begun using transplanted arms that were connected six weeks ago and "doesn’t have an inch of self-pity anywhere in his DNA," says Lt. Col. Barrett Bernard, a Schofield commander who was in Iraq when Marrocco was wounded. The surgery was performed at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, and Marrocco has been living with his older brother in New York. A true inspiration.
Record or not, that’s one big wave
Put yourself in Garrett McNamara’s shoes.
OK, so he wasn’t wearing any when he was skittering across the face of that wave off Nazare, Portugal.
By some accounts, it was a 90-foot wave; by others, it had hit the century mark. (Hawaii surfers, who calculate height from the back of the wave, might have some other calculation.)
Whatever. Picture the height as if it were a building, and then see yourself sliding down at some hair-raising speed. Or then there was the time he and another Hawaii-based surfer, Kealii Mamala, took a wild ride on a wave created when part of an Alaska glacier broke off.
What can McNamara do next to top such thrills? It’s almost frightening to imagine.