Let's say your grandfather, he was a soldier. And you grow up hoping somehow to follow in his footsteps. So, right after high school you join the Marines and you train like crazy and get yourself shipped to Afghanistan, plunged into battle.
After years of prepping for this, you're finally there, fighting Taliban soldiers so near to you that you can smell their acrid sweat just across the tree line. And then let's say, just to imagine it, that three weeks in you step on an IED, and in a blast of light and sound, your legs are gone—and something more than that, too. Your days as a soldier are done; the things you've built your life around, evaporated. It's possible, don't you think, that one night, five years later, you might find yourself on your couch at 3 A.M. feeling a phantom pain, not for your missing legs, but for your missing life?
Maybe that's the moment when you dig through your pockets for an e-mail address one of your buddies at the rehab clinic slipped you a few weeks ago. And maybe you pull out your phone to send a long, desperate message to a guy you've heard is a lifesaver—an ex-con named Tim Medvetz who trains wounded vets to climb mountains—an unlikely savior who now seems like the only person on the planet who can help. Maybe you say, “I need this, Tim. Listen. I'm your guy.” And when Tim hits you right back, maybe you're beyond thrilled but at the same time belted by the notion: Holy shit. What have I gotten myself into?
A year later, and Sergeant Julian Torres is crammed in the back of a Toyota Land Cruiser in rural Tanzania. He's tightening the bolts on his prosthetic legs, and I can see he's got the same mix of excitement and trepidation written on his face as when he first banged out that note to Tim. Out the window, I watch our path grow treacherously steep and comically muddy as we wind toward the trailhead at the base of Mount Kilimanjaro, the tallest peak in Africa. Julian is taking steady breaths, gaining inward focus—a soldier on a mission. Tim, meanwhile, is all laughs, doing his best to translate a dirty joke for the driver. A former Hells Angel, he's spent a little time in jail and a lot of time partying with the dudes from Guns N' Roses and Jane's Addiction; for a while he was romantically linked to Cher. So, not the first guy you'd imagine sermonizing about the healing power of mountaineering. But to Tim, our trip these next ten days is just the sort of adventure that can change a man's life. It did once for him.
Up at the trailhead, the local crew of porters and guides that Tim's hired cluster around the Land Cruiser as Julian gingerly steps down. They'd been told about him—they knew he was a Marine, injured in Afghanistan—but still, they can't help but stare as he pulls gaiters up over his shoes and binds them to his prosthetics with duct tape. Fake legs or not, he needs to keep them dry. They study Julian as he leans forward, bracing himself with what look like ski poles. These guys have climbed this mountain a million times, and still they've never seen anything like this. As Julian sets off up the muddy trail, they all gaze after him with narrowed, disbelieving eyes. Their expressions say what they're thinking: This guy's gonna try to summit?!
A blinding flash. Sand and grit across his face. Julian, age 22, was blown upward, off his feet and into the air. He looked down, caught sight of his own shadow on the road far below. And when he landed, Julian dragged himself from the crater the IED had blasted there at the edge of a canal. Enemy fire was whizzing past, but Julian pulled off his gloves, his flak jacket, and his ammo belt with a simple thought: I finally got into the fight, and now my warring days are done. His squadmate and best friend, Lance Corporal Cody Childers, helped him onto a rescue chopper. And as he did, Cody's frightened glance at the carnage below his buddy's waist confirmed the worst for Julian: His legs were gone.
Aboard the chopper, Cody held Julian in his arms, whispering encouragements in his ear, but expecting his friend to die. As fast as blood was pumped into Julian, it rushed back out of him. Hours later, he awoke on a cot in a field hospital and was handed a phone. When his wife, Ashley, heard his voice, she began to bawl. “Hey, don't trip out,” Julian told her, “but when you see me, I'm gonna be a little shorter. Don't judge me.” Her tears turned to laughter. They had met in high school, in Modesto, California. Julian was a wrestler with a Mohawk; Ashley helped him with his homework. They went together to prom, and when the slow jam “Always and Forever” by Heatwave came on, Julian found himself holding Ashley close, singing along. That was that. When Julian joined the Marines, Ashley bounced with him, and in May 2010, their son, Julian Jr. (known as JJ), was born. A month later, Julian's platoon shipped out, and in July he came home, blown to pieces. His left leg had been sheared off below the knee; his right leg, just above.
At Bethesda Naval Medical Center, outside D.C., Ashley held vigil by Julian's bed. She squeezed his hand, JJ crooked under her free arm. The pain in the nubs of Julian's legs was so searing that even the flutter of air when someone walked past could make him cry out in agony. The pain meds caused intense nausea, and after days of vomiting, Julian refused to take them. The nurses fetched the head doctor, and as the guy began to lecture him, Julian eased his left leg out of his hospital gown. He held his mangled limb up with his hands, as if it were a kind of doll, bobbing it up and down and bringing it to life with a petulant voice, “No more pills! No more pills!” The doctor's jaw dropped. “I've been doing this 25 years,” he told Julian. “I've never seen anyone operate their nub like a hand puppet.”
In late August, while he was still in the hospital, Julian received a devastating call: Cody Childers had been killed by enemy fire. Cody had felt more like a brother to him than a best friend. And now he was gone.
Months passed, and slowly Julian adjusted to his new life. Teetering around on unfamiliar prosthetic legs, he managed to go fishing with JJ; he changed his baby daughter Analicia's diapers. But Julian couldn't shake a lingering sense of unease. For years, he had trained to be a warrior, a machine-gun squad leader in a unit that had killed upwards of 50 Taliban in just a few weeks. But the IED blast had yanked him from the life he'd been preparing for—and left him legless on a suburban couch, watching reruns late into the night. He badly missed Cody. And he had the gnawing feeling that he hadn't finished what he'd started. That he'd never have the chance.
“You're putting on weight,” Ashley said to him one night, sad-eyed, grasping his hands. “I'm worried about you. There's something not right.”
“Don't worry,” he assured her. “I'll find something.”
A fellow amputee had told Julian about a guy named Tim and an outfit he'd started called The Heroes Project. Late one night, Julian e-mailed Tim, proposing to hike the length of California's John Muir Trail.
Now, for a guy with no legs, a 211-mile trail hike would be plenty daunting. But Tim wanted something way more epic for Julian—he imagined a near impossible undertaking that would require the kind of sacrifice and commitment that soldiers are forced to muster for battle.
“Fuck John Muir,” said Tim. Instead he raised the idea of Kilimanjaro. “Heard of it?”
“In Africa?”
“Yup. Here's what's gonna happen. You're gonna train your fucking ass off—I'll train you—you're gonna do what I tell you to do and I'll get you there. Summit and back. Deal?”
Me, I've got both my legs, and I've been hiking with Tim now and again for a couple of years. Still, when he told me I should tag along to Kilimanjaro, I had to really think about it. Kilimanjaro's not Everest: Any reasonably fit person can attempt to climb it, but less than half who try make it to the top. Just over 19,000 feet tall, the mountain is known for its sneaky dangers. Altitude sickness is common, and the same risks apply to its high slopes as on Everest or K2—nine or ten climbers a year die from cerebral edema, pulmonary edema, hypothermia, falls, or avalanches. Tim has also seen fit to increase the challenge by scheduling the ascent in cold and wet November. His conceit is to reach the summit on Veterans Day—if we can make it, a CNN host named Brooke Baldwin, who has summited Kilimanjaro herself, has promised to interview Tim and Julian from the top of the mountain. Intimidated, but excited for the challenge, I told Tim I was in.
Joining us are Ken Sauls, 50, an accomplished rock climber and high-altitude cinematographer, and Kevin Hwang, 42, the owner of Ultimate Kilimanjaro, a seasoned expedition company, managing the details. I'm clearly the least fit and least experienced hiker in our crew—I've just turned 40, and I still hoop twice a week, but I've never once in my life taken the stairs when there was an elevator to be found, and busy with life's usual bullshit, I've barely trained for this trip, which I now regret.
The rainy season is in full effect. And here in the rain forest, where the trail isn't oozing, it's perilously slick. Again and again, Julian slips and goes crashing hard to the ground. It's a punishing routine that I'm having trouble growing used to watching. Tim, right at his heels, treats each of his falls matter-of-factly, teasing him, complimenting him on his landings, or sometimes saying nothing at all as Julian gathers his side sticks and rises to his artificial feet.
By our second day, we're beginning to find our rhythm and feel the altitude—hike for an hour, rest for ten minutes. An hour up, sit for ten more. Tim refuses to let our trail march grow tedious, filling the thinning air with wild, wide-ranging tales of global adventure. There's the goat he blew up in Thailand. The hostage situation at a gold mine in Papua New Guinea. The blizzard on the mountaintop in Argentina—and the dead climber there whose eyelids he gently pushed shut. Then he claps his hands. “Okay, guys. Ten-minute break.”
At six five, Tim is a brawny, real-life action hero, built like an NFL linebacker and dressed like a biker: boots, camo shorts, a leather jacket, and a red-white-and-blue bandanna wrapped around his head. This is the kind of dude who nurtures survivalist fantasies, imagining how he could thrive on his own once civilization falls, and who views himself as a sort of anti-establishment hero, fighting off the forces of political correctness and “mo-mos”—people who are weak, lame, or just don't get it. But his bravado is tempered by a soulful, spiritual streak and a love for connecting with people: The night before our climb began, in a hotel bar in Arusha, I watched him threaten to smash a German businessman's face in for a passing remark that disparaged Americans. Then I watched him buy the guy a beer before quizzing him curiously about his work.
Tim is the manliest man I've ever spent time around, which is both intimidating and kind of thrilling. After high school, he worked for years as a Manhattan bouncer, racked up a couple of assault charges, and spent a year in prison, before heading out to Hollywood. He then joined the Hells Angels and built custom bikes for the stars, outfitting Harleys for folks like John Travolta and Keanu Reeves. Late one night, on his motorcycle in the Valley, rolling at a hundred miles an hour, Tim collided with a truck. Doctors said he'd never walk again. Months later, he managed to get up on his feet, though he was filled with bolts and screws and metal plates, and suffered constant pain. “Pills and booze kept me going,” he says, “but that's no way to live.”
Tim read Jon Krakauer's book Into Thin Air, which details the 1996 disaster on Everest that killed eight climbers, and he found himself oddly inspired. The next day he told his biker buddies, “Guys, you know what? I'm climbing fucking Everest.” Nobody believed him.
He bought a one-way flight to Kathmandu, calling his mom from the departure gate before chucking his phone in a trash can. Over the next few years, he lived with a Sherpa family in Nepal, rebuilding his body and learning to become a high-altitude climber. On his second try up the mountain, he made it to the top. For a guy who'd been told he'd never walk again, the accomplishment was nearly unbelievable. He went on to climb the world's Seven Summits. But it wasn't enough. He needed something more. One day, listening to a speech from a wounded soldier, he had a flash of insight—he'd help veterans climb out of the hole that he'd found himself in after his motorcycle accident. If scaling mountains could bring him back from the dead, he thought, maybe it could do the same for injured vets.
Tim got some advice from Cher, whom he'd met in the Hollywood rocker scene and remains close with. (The tabloids claimed at one point that the two were planning to marry, though Tim laughs at the idea.) Cher suggested that he start a foundation. He bought the book Nonprofit Kit for Dummies, began raising funds from helpful foundations and generous donors, and soon The Heroes Project was born. Within months, he brought a vet with only one leg to the top of Mount Elbrus in Russia, and in the years since, with a rotating cast of vets, he's conquered a slew of other magnificent peaks. At the Naval Medical Center San Diego, where wounded vets like Julian rehab their injuries, a certain folklore developed around Tim. Here was a guy giving battered soldiers something crazy to train for and then something risky to overcome—building a kind of boot camp, and then taking men into battle. Those who'd climbed with him spoke of him with rapture and dread. “He'll work you like a son of a bitch,” one alum advised Julian, “but there's no one you'd rather have on your side.”
We are three days and 20 miles into our hike when we first glimpse the snowcapped summit of Kilimanjaro. Julian eyes the peak warily: “That's a big fucking mountain.”
Overnight, he's become grimly focused. His Marine training had taught him to break difficult tasks into chunks, and now, on the mountain, he's doing the same. “I'm just trying to hike toward lunch,” he says. “After lunch, I'll try to hike till dinner.” He tucks his earbuds in, blasts the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and begins picking his way up the trail.
Soon, though, he starts to struggle. At a rest break, he unscrews a leg and inspects the battered scars at the end of his right nub. The pounding has taken its toll: His skin has broken open, a shallow but weeping wound. Julian grimaces in pain, and Tim, kneeling at his side, shakes his head.
“I don't want to freak you out or nothing,” Tim tells him, “but this is serious trouble.” A couple of years ago, Tim had been forced to abort a climb when a vet's leg blistered open in the same way.
Julian is pissed. “I didn't come all the way here to quit,” he fumes. “Summit and back!”
“That's right,” says Tim. “Summit and back.”
For now, the priority is getting Julian out of his legs and letting the skin heal. Though we'd planned to climb higher, Tim directs us to a nearby camp. We're going to take a rest day. A few hours later, as torrential rains lash his tent, Julian gently rubs in a fresh coat of Adaptskin, a high-octane protectant ointment. The danger, he says, goes beyond failing to reach the summit. There's a risk, should his nubs get infected, that doctors would have to re-amputate, higher up, impairing his mobility even further. The idea is terrifying.
Sitting here in the cold storm, I'm struck by how crazy this seems. Why would Julian really risk this much? When I press him on it, he fixes his eyes on me with a sobered look. We may be on a mountain in Africa, but he makes it clear that he's here to wrestle with Afghanistan, with what happened to his friends. “I'm doing this for Cody,” he says. “Cody and the other guys.” Besides Cody Childers, two other close friends of his had been killed in Afghanistan, and a fourth had recently committed suicide. “I'm going to honor them by making it to the top.”
Julian reaches into his duffel and unfurls a yellow flag bearing Cody's name, birth date, and death date. He plans to plant the flag at Kilimanjaro's summit. “And check this out,” he says, showing me a few chess pieces he's brought—four knights resting in his palm. Julian names them. “Cody Childers. Anthony Matteoni. Jason Calo. Artem Lazukin. I'm burying them at the top.”
But the top still feels a long way off, and each day provides a new reminder of how hard it will be to reach. Freezing winds. Sleet. Hail. Julian's wounds begin to heal, but always he's in serious pain. He stays focused on his rock 'n' roll playlist, as Tim has advised. Sometimes, when I try to point out a magnificent vista, or some Dr. Seuss flora and fauna, or even some jackal poop beside the trail, Julian shakes me off, like a pitcher who doesn't like the sign from his catcher. Each step takes concentration; he has no bandwidth for the nonessential. Still, he stays relentlessly positive. “That's my secret weapon,” he says. “Unwavering optimism.”
By the morning of day six, we've reached the Barranco Wall, a nearly vertical rock face about the size of the Chrysler Building, in Manhattan. It's the most technical and imposing section of the trail, a seemingly endless series of chutes that need to be scaled like ladders. For most of us, the effect is spooky, and we'll have to choose our handholds carefully. For Julian, though, the wall looks like a nightmare. “Come on,” he says, standing, “let's get this shit done.”
Over the course of hours, we work our way agonizingly up the cliff. The footholds are so precarious, Julian has to reach down, bend his metal legs, and place his feet on a mossy knob or a spit of rock as narrow as a finger. It's nerve-jangling work. Tim follows close behind, spotting Julian, so concentrated on his friend's progress that he's let his fountain of stories go dry. Through months of training, Tim's created a tiny two-person cult, master and disciple. Julian is the fresh recruit, still in his thrall; Tim, the zealous, charismatic leader, with a mad Fitzcarraldo-like vision. Yet it seems to me to be a necessary cult. A guy with no legs should not be able to climb a mountain. It should be impossible. But here before me, the impossible is happening, one painful step at a time.
By nightfall, the trail jags steeply downward, and Julian, already fried from the Barranco Wall, falls again and again, crashing onto sharp rocks and jagged roots before hauling himself back to his feet. He reminds me of a boxer being pummeled by someone stronger and refusing to cave. Part of me wants to protect him, to force him to quit, but another part of me is dazzled by the spectacle of what he's enduring. We cross a stream at the bottom of a valley and face the day's last, long ascent. That's when lightning flashes overhead, a wallop of thunder explodes in the sky, and heavy sheets of rain come whipping down. A gushing current pours off the hillside, and it feels like we're climbing up a waterfall. By the time we reach camp, we've been on the trail for 14 hours.
Julian sits between the flaps of his open tent, pulling his legs off his body. Tim—who has been everywhere and seen everything—seems mystified by the depth of Julian's resilience. “How'd you do what you did today?” he asks, genuinely astounded.
Flooded with emotion, Julian grows teary. “My friends guided me,” he says, voice cracking. “Cody. Anthony. Calo. Laz. I talked to them the whole way.” He can barely contain his sobs. “Summit and back!” he says. “I'm going to the summit and back!”
Tim has noticed this kind of thing on other climbs, veterans confronting something bigger than the mountain. These were all men built for a fight, each of them whisked from the front lines suddenly, without warning, without a plan. And while doctors can go to work on the physical trauma, the psychic impact is often left to linger. Their mission remains incomplete. That is, until they meet Tim. “Putting these guys back in battle,” he has explained to me, “on the mountain, in a life-and-death situation, gives them a chance to complete their battle experience.”
By summit day—our ninth on the mountain—we've notched 34 trail miles and our first days of the journey feel like memories from months before. The end is now literally in sight, the glacial mountaintop glistening in the morning sun as we gird ourselves for the final, most brutal ascent. Already, there's trouble. A few inches of snow has fallen overnight, and for all of Julian's training, he's never hiked in the snow. His concern is undisguised. Even beyond the weather, Summit Day is easily the toughest on Kilimanjaro. The elevation gain is nearly double that of any previous day, and the extreme altitude can be dangerous. The air is frighteningly thin, and already my blood-oxygen level has fallen so low that I've spent the night sucking “O's” from one of our two oxygen bottles, leaving only one canister if we run into trouble.
It's time to push toward the peak. Julian dons wraparound shades to fight the glare from the snow. Here are some of the things he thinks about over the next several hours, as he puts one prosthetic foot ahead of the other: The glow on Ashley's face at senior prom. The conversation he'd had with his dad and granddad when he'd told them he was joining the Marines—his granddad had enlisted 50 years earlier, and was thrilled; his dad, worried for his safety, was disheartened. More: The feel of Cody Childers's hand, squeezing his, as the rescue chopper carried them away from battle. The sensation of hot water running over his feet, back when he had them. And inexplicably, the song “Save Tonight,” by Eagle-Eye Cherry, which hit the airwaves when Julian was 9, coughed up now from his mind's deep recesses, stuck on unstoppable repeat: Save tonight and fight the break of dawn / Come tomorrow, tomorrow I'll be gone / Save tonight…
Tim is trying to get his attention now. Julian plucks his earbuds out. “This ain't the summit,” Tim says. “It's just Stella Point. Still a little ways to go.” But Julian knows better. Tim is a trickster. This is clearly the summit. Julian drops his side sticks, eyes burning with tears, and pivots his prosthetics wildly, racing the final steps, looking for the iconic wooden “You've climbed Kilimanjaro!” sign. But as he tops the ridge, he sees that Tim was right.
“Ya fuckin' mo-mo!” Tim cries. “What'd I just say?”
“Fuck you!” Julian hollers back, smiling, still buoyed by the camaraderie that's gotten him here. Though his tank has gone empty, Julian plows forward.
Fifty minutes later, steps away from the summit, Julian zeroes in on the Kilimanjaro sign, the same one he's seen in pictures. He casts his side sticks away again: He's promised himself he'd walk those final steps on his own. Tears stream down his face as he slaps both hands on the sign, letting out wild whoops of joy, triumph, and relief.
“Ya fuckin' did it!” Tim hollers.
“We fuckin' did it!” Julian shouts back.
He spins around, full of joy, soaking up the blue sky and the prairie grasslands, stretching out to the horizon, terrain that reminds him of Helmand Province in Afghanistan. Tim hands Julian his phone. He's already dialed Ashley. For all that Julian has just achieved, his thoughts are of his wife's well-being. “I'm sorry I've been gone so long,” he says, emotions unrestrained. “I miss you, man. Thank you for supporting this thing… This thing I had to do. Thank you for believing in me. What? Yeah, it's awesome up here.”
Tim reaches for the phone. CNN will be trying to link up. Quickly, Julian drops to the ground, claws up a clump of snow, grit, and gravel, and plants the four knights in the ground, saying good-bye to his friends one at a time, feeling each loss freshly, it seems. Tim watches in silence, digging out his laptop, then beckons Julian over.
Before long, the team will be headed back down, the sun will vanish, and in the darkness, a whirling blizzard will sweep the mountain. All of the pain that Julian's excitement has postponed will return with furious vigor—his right tibia, pounding into the prosthetic, will nearly puncture the skin of his nub. It'll be midnight before camp is reached, and another day before we're off the mountain. In just a couple of weeks, Tim will be preparing with his next veteran, Staff Sergeant Charlie Linville from Boise, for a summit attempt on Everest in May. And over the coming months, Julian, safe at home with his family, will discover a new peace. He'll start viewing himself in a different light—not as the guy who always aspired to be a soldier and then barely had a chance to fight, but as a man who achieved the improbable. He'll begin crafting fresh goals and bold dreams: Maybe he'll become a stand-up comedian, maybe a motivational speaker.
But here on the summit, daylight is quickly fading. From the Skype window on Tim's laptop, a producer's voice calls out. “Guys? Are you there? I'm here with Brooke Baldwin.”
Julian takes a very deep breath, steadies himself before the black eye of the webcam, ready to show the world what he has done. “We're here,” he says, his face mashed into a forlorn yet resonant smile. “I'm here, Tim's here, we're here.” He waves his hand. “Can you see us?”
Davy Rothbart is the author of My Heart Is an Idiot and the director of Medora. He is now only six peaks away from climbing all Seven Summits.
