At the top of the mountain, it’s incredible how much you can see. The sky is clear, the air is pure. It even smells different up here. The wind whips around the trees, shaking the snow from the pines. But inside your helmet – it’s completely quiet. The only sound you can hear is your steady, rhythmic breath. Any moment now, you’ll push yourself forward towards the slope. For now though, you stand and appreciate what it’s taken you to get here. Funny, the simplest things seem so beautiful after you think you’ll never get a chance to see them again. Lake Tahoe seems bluer. The snow feels like powder under your feet and it’s beckoning you to come play. The sun touches everything around you and the light dances off the trees. The view from the peak leaves you breathless. You’re at the top of the world. You tilt your head back, close your eyes, and inhale deeply.
This, you think, is what it feels like to be alive.
Chris Wolff never imagined he’d be here. In fact, he never thought he’d see the outside of his C-130 troop transport plane. “I had accepted it,” he said. “I was going to die in the sky over Afghanistan.” But somehow, against all odds, he survived. Even though an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) penetrated the aircraft’s engine, the pilot “was able to limp the aircraft back to base.” Ironically, it wasn’t this harrowing experience but a virus vaccine that almost killed him. His spinal cord became infected, his white blood cell count skyrocketed, and within a matter of days doctors were telling him he would never walk, breathe, or eat on his own again. A month before that he was the picture of health, and now his life was unrecognizable to him.
Jake Schick is a third generation Marine. Everything about him “epitomizes service and sacrifice.” In 2004, a triple-stacked tank mine detonated below his vehicle in the Al Anbar Province of Iraq. Jake suffered compound fractures in his left leg and arm; he endured burns, loss of skin, ligament, and bone, partial loss of his left hand and arm, amputation below the knee of his right leg, traumatic brain injury and PTSD. At the moment many people would give up and give in… Jake set to work. To date, Jake has undergone 46 operations, 23 blood transfusions, and countless hours of rehabilitation. In 2014, Jake appeared in the film American Sniper. And in 2015, he met a group of people who were going to change his life.
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