Learning to enjoy life again

Fishing trip among adventures that help injured veterans rediscover capabilities

BOND, COLO. -- The trout rose and sipped a mayfly off the surface of the Colorado River. Joshua Williams caught the small disturbance on the water from the corner of his eye. Standing in a drift boat, he raised his fly rod and the trout rose again and gulped in the artificial fly on the end of the line.

Suddenly, Williams was in trouble.

He'd done this a hundred times before on the rivers and creeks around his home in Virginia, passionately throwing a fly at rising trout, holding the long rod in his right hand and gently stripping in the slack line with his left, a delicate two-handed operation.

But on a recent Friday, the 22-year-old Army staff sergeant, who had spent a hellish year engaged in street combat in Iraq, had a problem.

He didn't have a right hand.

The trout surged into the current. Williams, holding the rod in his left hand, hung on. Normally, he would grab the line with his other hand and keep it tight, slowly bringing the trout toward the net. Williams hesitated. The right sleeve of his blue T-shirt flapped in the wind, exposing the nightmarish scar just below the shoulder where doctors had removed the remains of his shattered arm.

Now he moved his head toward the rod, snatched the line in his mouth and began pulling in the slack by moving his head away from the rod.

At the end of each pull with his mouth, the fingers on his left hand would pin the line against the rod and he'd repeat the motion.

In about two minutes, a dazzling 18-inch brown trout was in the net.

And Williams had taken a giant leap back into the world that had been so cruel to him.

A hundred yards down the river, big-shouldered Chase Savage, 21, a former Marine lance corporal, stood in another drift boat and watched as a trout came to his fly. He raised the rod in his left hand, and the trout was hooked.

Savage, who never had fly fished before, retrieved the slack line with the metal hooks of his mechanical arm, part of the price he paid for standing up in a machine gun turret atop a Humvee in Fallujah in November when a hidden roadside bomb exploded.

"It isn't so bad," the big man from Senatobia, Miss., said. "I was in the hospital with guys who were missing two limbs or had brain damage. This is just an arm."

Williams and Savage were part of a 12-man contingent of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans undergoing rehabilitation at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington invited to spend a few days in Colorado. They spent a weekend fishing, kayaking, rafting and camping.

The visit was sponsored by the Vail Veteran's Program, a volunteer group started three years ago by Cheryl Jensen to bring injured veterans to the Rocky Mountains to learn, or to relearn, how to ski. This was the program's first summer event.

Williams, from Boutetourt, Va., grew up prowling the banks of Glade Creek and Tinker Creek and the Roanoke River. He was in Baghdad from March 2004 through the following spring, an infantry soldier on the front line, searching door to door for men intent on spilling American blood.

"The mortars were the worst," Williams said. "You woke up every morning wondering if that was the day you were going to die."

Friends did die. Others were horribly injured. He came home only with terrible memories.

Then on April 6, while riding his motorcycle to work from his off-base apartment near Fort Hood, Texas, Williams was struck by a car driven through a red light by a 17-year-old boy. His motorcycle was going 65 mph on a highway. The car was going even faster. Williams was thrown 170 feet. His right arm, severed by the shattered side window of the car, lay on the road in the intersection.

"I came home from Iraq, and I thought I was safe," he said.

At Walter Reed, he made a list of things he never could do again. Fly fishing was on the list.

"At first there was a lot of 'I hate this. I can't believe this. What am I going to do?' " he said. "One day I just said to myself, 'OK. Time to adapt.' "

Williams caught three trout on Friday. His mouth line-retrieval system worked just fine. When the five-hour drift down the Colorado River was over, he smiled.

"A few times, when a fish hit that fly, I thought how nice it would have been to have my other hand," he said. "But then I figured it out.

"And you know what, I can do this. I can still fly fish."