Noah Galloway, an Army veteran from Alabama, will compete on the 10th anniversary season of "Dancing with the Stars." Galloway, 33, lost part of two left limbs in Iraq, after a bomb blast flipped the Humvee he was driving in December 2005.
He rallied, however, and became a long-distance runner, a personal trainer, a motivational speaker -- and the cover guy for Men's Health in 2014. His motto, according to Galloway's website, is #NoExcusesNoah.
The Birmingham News talked to Galloway just a few months after he was injured, as part of its coverage of troops and veterans from our state. Here's a story from reporter Tom Gordon, published on March 19, 2006.
By Tom Gordon, The Birmingham News
WASHINGTON - The occasion was a doctor-patient chat, and Noah Galloway, the patient, was talking about his left leg.
''When I feel my leg is hurting, I try to rub it, and it reminds me that it's not there,'' Galloway said, chuckling.
Standing behind him, Galloway's father, Andy, added a humorous bit of his own: ''You need to talk to it.''
Galloway's left leg is indeed missing, from just below the knee. So is his left arm, from just above the elbow. He still feels them. Sometimes they itch. Sometimes they cause sharp pain.
But they have been lost to him since the night of Dec. 19, when the 24-year-old Alabama native drove a Humvee into a trip wire that ignited two 155 mm artillery shells hidden in a tumbleweed.
The improvised explosive device sent Army Spc. Galloway to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where he arrived on Christmas Day with his jaw wired and bloody bandages on the stumps left by the amputations of his damaged limbs and on the left side of his face.
Just a few months before, as a strapping member of the 101st Airborne Division, the former Midfield High student had stood on both of his legs and used both of his arms to hold his infant son, Colston, who had survived a rare operation to allow him to digest food.
Months of rehabilitation and care still await Galloway. He is about 50 pounds lighter, his lower lip is still numb, his right foot lacks a lot of feeling, and his right leg, hit by bits of shrapnel and a larger chunk that tore through his thigh, isn't as strong as it needs to be. A bit of shrapnel still in his right hand has taken away the feeling in his index finger, and the titanium plate implanted in his left jaw sometimes feels as though it was sitting out all night in the cold.
But Galloway, who was wounded while serving his second tour in Iraq, is eating food instead of slurping it, and that's fine as long as he avoids contact with two yet-to-be-fixed broken teeth. While thinner, his face is pretty much the same.
''I'm just glad I can open my mouth,'' he said.
He also has started walking on an artificial leg, surprising doctors with his progress. He has been working with an artificial arm, though some pain kept him from wearing it at times last week. And he's an outpatient, having shown enough self-sufficiency to move into Mologne House, a hotel-like complex near Walter Reed where wounded soldiers stay while continuing their recovery.
''One hundred percent improvement from where I first saw him initially,'' said Heidi Radford, a Walter Reed occupational therapy assistant. ''He's doing great.''
Radford said Galloway was intent on getting out of Walter Reed and getting on with his life. ''He's set on his goals,'' she said. ''He knows what his goals are.''
Before he got hurt, Galloway's Army goals included becoming an underwater welder. Now he wants to go to college and study business management and accounting, then open an exercise center.
''I've always wanted to own my own gym,'' he recently told Capt. Kevin Fitzpatrick and 2nd Lt. Tristan Lai, a medical student, just before they removed an irritating piece of stitching that was still embedded in his left knee.
''Now I see that as more of a challenge with just an arm and a leg. I want to be, you know, in great shape because I don't want to just own it. I was always big into being healthy, so I'm going to push for that.''
Walter Reed has quite a few patients whose plans and bodies have been altered by the Iraq war and its roadside bombs. Since the fighting started three years ago, more than 17,000 American service members have been wounded there, 57 percent of them by explosive devices. According to the Defense Department, the total of wounded includes 291 Alabamians.
Through March 1, Army hospitals had treated nearly 400 Iraq and Afghan war veterans who have lost limbs. Galloway is among 63 who have lost more than one.
A lot of the amputee recovery efforts take place in Walter Reed's occupational therapy clinic, where Galloway has used Myo Boy, a video game in which he uses the muscles in what's left of his damaged arm to steer an automobile through a shifting series of openings.
On another piece of equipment, he has practiced the onehanded use of screwdrivers and other tools. On another, equipped with pressure cuffs around his partial arm and his good arm, he pulls on cables with weights to build his upper body strength.
''He used to be in the wheelchair to do his workouts,'' Radford said. ''But now I'm making him stand to do it.''
Part of the clinic is Fort Independence, a replica of a working apartment where Galloway and others learn how to handle household chores such as cooking and loading a dishwasher and how to navigate their way from their wheelchairs to the bed, the toilet or the shower.
On a recent afternoon, a female soldier sat in a wheelchair in the living room. Both of her legs were missing. In the same room were a therapist and the soldier's mother.
''Kids and moms, that's what you mostly see here,'' said Walter Reed spokesman Don Vandrey. ''And spouses, of course.''
Walter Reed has plenty of parents who have put their jobs and lives on hold to come to help their war-shattered sons and daughters rebuild their own. Galloway's mom, Bebe, with the help of sick days given to her by co-workers, was with her son and husband at Walter Reed for two months. She returned to her secretarial job at Vestavia Hills Elementary School West at the end of February, and Vestavia Hills High held a ''Green for Galloway'' fund-raising drive last week.
Andy Galloway, 53, stayed behind after his wife left. He's taken leave from his job as an apartment complex maintenance worker and put on hold the remodeling construction jobs he does on the side.
Asked to reflect on his experience, he said, ''It's hard.'' To meet expenses, he has drawn on family savings and donations from friends and relatives.
Earlier this month, Andy Galloway returned to the family's home in Ashville for the first time since his son's arrival at Walter Reed, staying long enough to pick up his tools so he can pick up some remodeling jobs in the Washington area.
At Mologne House, father and son share a room with a television, two double beds, a 3-foot-tall fridge, a microwave, a coffee pot and a bathroom. The younger Galloway still drinks plenty of Boost, but now that his jaws and stomach can handle regular food, his father makes regular runs to some nearby eateries: Domino's for sausage pizzas, Taco Bell for beef and cheese burritos, and a Chinese joint for iced tea with an Alabama taste.
He, of course, is more than an errand boy. He listens to the doctors and therapists and asks questions, and gets stuff his son needs from the backpack attached to the back of his wheelchair. But he also brings something to the table that few of the other parents and spouses have brought -- life as an amputee.
Thirty-five years ago, Andy Galloway lost his left hand in an accident at a steel plant. He knows about rehabilitation and can still feel sharp phantom pain from where the hand used to be. The hand always seems to be open, as it was when he lost it.
But he learned to live and work despite the disability, and he showed his son how to do roofing and how to operate under the hood of a car. Last fall, before Noah headed to Iraq for the second time, he said his father's life would be an inspiration to him should he lose a limb. Now, though he says his dad sometimes tries to help too much, he is helping.
''He's showing me how to tie my shoe with one hand,'' Noah said. Asked how he was doing with it, he said, ''I can't get it as tight as I'd like. He told me as time goes on, my fingers will be more nimble and able to do a lot more than I can now.''
During his brief stop back in Alabama, Andy Galloway said his son is steadily moving toward self-sufficiency.
''I wouldn't be down here right now if I didn't think he could be a couple of days on his own,'' he said.
''He does dress himself like anybody,'' the senior Galloway added. ''He was a little bit frustrated. Sometimes he needed a little help pulling his shirt on, but now he's pretty independent there.''
What about that shoe-tying?
''He's lazy. He stuffs his shoelaces in his shoe and slips it on.''
Noah Galloway still has the pack of Miamis, a cigarette brand sold in Iraq, and the can of Skoal Mint that he had when the roadside bomb went off. But he has no intact memory of the explosion, nor of his early days at Walter Reed, when he would periodically pull back his bed covers to see if his limbs were still missing.
''I'm still trying to piece things together,'' he said. ''I'm still running into people I don't remember meeting.''
Through photographs taken at the time and accounts from one of his passengers, Lt. Jerry Eidson, Galloway has learned the Dec. 19 explosion sent the Humvee tumbling into a canal. The other drivers in the convoy, thinking Galloway had followed standard procedure and sped away from the bomb site, drove off as well. Meanwhile, Galloway was stuck in the Humvee, his wounded leg jammed under the seat.
Today, when he tries to sleep on his stomach, he feels the missing leg elevated and bent at the knee. His missing hand, which was gripping the Humvee's steering wheel when the bomb went off, often feels as though it is clutching something.
Fortunately for Galloway, another convoy heard a radio report of the bomb blast and stopped along the canal. Soldiers helped get him out of the Humvee and on to the medical care that saved his life.
Two weeks ago, in a Walter Reed elevator, he met one of those soldiers. The GI was being treated for foot injuries he suffered when an IED exploded in almost the same place - near Yusufiyah in the dangerous ''Triangle of Death'' south of Baghdad - where Galloway had been wounded. The guy apologized and said he didn't think Galloway had gotten the help he needed as quickly as he should have.
''Don't be sorry,'' Galloway said he replied. ''I'm alive. I'm doing great.''
That encounter touched on one of Galloway's biggest fears: seeing one of his friends brought to Walter Reed with a serious wound.
''I can't stand it. It drives me crazy,'' he said. ''I think about them all the time. All I want is for them to come home.''
IEDs have brought many soldiers home ahead of schedule, and Galloway said he would probably use the bombs if he were an Iraqi insurgent.
''Iraqis are doing what they should do,'' he said while waiting for his knee surgery. ''They're hitting us and then running away. They're hitting us with IEDs and they're gone, because they can't fight us headon, so they're doing the only thing they can do and it's obviously working. You know, it sounds bad, but that's the way it's going.''
An hour later, Galloway was wearing a harness and an artificial electronic arm, one of at least two he will wear until he gets a prosthesis that meshes with his muscles.
''It feels strange,'' he said, looking at the prosthesis as he turned it and opened and closed the fingers on its hand. ''It's weird trying to get used to it.''
''We'll practice,'' Radford said.
Near the rehab and workout machines, Capt. John Verdoni, who oversees amputee occupational therapy, put Galloway and his prosthesis through their paces. Then with a snap, the artificial arm thrust upward toward Galloway's chin.
''Hit yourself in the face; good one,'' Verdoni said.
Overall, Verdoni said, Galloway was doing well with the device, and he described himself as a parent about to become an empty-nester.
''I'm losing you,'' he told Galloway. ''I don't like it, Noah. I don't like it at all.''
More evidence of that would come later, when Galloway took his first steps on his artificial leg. Last weekend, he was able to take it back to his Mologne House room, ahead of schedule.
''If I'd been average, I wouldn't have been happy,'' he said. ''If you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly.''
If you watch:"Dancing with the Stars" will make its season debut on March 16 at 7 p.m. CST. The show airs Mondays on ABC. This year marks the show's 10th anniversary season and the 20th season overall.