Iraq War Helps Swell Paralympic Team

It is a bizarre byproduct of the disastrous US war in Iraq, a growing – and seemingly invincible – Paralympic team. Gerard Wright talks to veterans who have turned to sport.

At left, the US national wheelchair tennis champion … tries putting the shot.

It is a bizarre byproduct of the disastrous US war in Iraq, a growing – and seemingly invincible – Paralympic team. Gerard Wright talks to veterans who have turned to sport.

EVERY once in a while Scott Winkler has that moment that every athlete experiences, when technique and muscle and effort synchronise. Then the shotput leaves his hand as though propelled by some external, uncontrollable force.

When that happens, he says, he feels great joy. His body is again doing what it is asked, or perhaps told.

The sum total of those efforts is a world record for the shotput, and a plane ride to Rio de Janeiro, there to wear his beloved country's uniform, once again, as the first veteran of the Iraq war to be selected for a US Paralympic team.

"I wouldn't say I'm a poster boy," he says. "I'm just a soldier out there trying to do one more thing for his country."  (continued…)

Three years and five months after the war began in March 2003, it has claimed the lives of 3677 American servicemen and women. There have been 27,000 injured, although that may be as high as 53,000, an Associated Press report says.

Another report, by the Council on Foreign Relations, says half of those injured will suffer the effects of their wounds for the rest of their lives.

An estimated 7500 of the wounded have suffered serious head and spinal injuries. As of January, there had been 500 amputees, nearly a quarter of whom had lost more than one limb.

Apart from its cost, now estimated at between $US1 trillion and $US2 trillion, the Iraq war will leave another legacy, with those it maimed vying, in increasing numbers, for selection in the Paralympic Games in Beijing next year and in London in 2012.

John Register, the founder and development director of the US Olympic Committee's paralympic military program, says the US team for the Beijing Paralympics may include nine Iraq war veterans in a team of about 300. The committee believes as many as 15 per cent of its 2012 paralympic team members will be soldiers wounded in the war in Iraq or the one in Afghanistan.

Winkler was one of those, a cook in his first stint in the army who re-enlisted after a short stint of civilian life. In May 2003 he was unloading ammunition from a truck in Tikrit when the load slipped and he fell off the truck.

The fall injured his spinal cord. A former high school sprinter and long jumper, Winkler was able to walk again by the end of the year after extensive rehabilitation. But he was told he needed surgery for spinal lesions.

Now 34, Winkler awoke from the surgery, paralysed from the chest down.

He is from Georgia, in the American Deep South, where religion and patriotic fervour are as much a part of life as a heartbeat.

"I loved the military," Winkler says. "It's an awesome thing to join. It takes certain kinds of people to do it, and they're highly respected. The paralysis, that was the hard part of my life.

"That saying 'Walking tall, looking good', that was a big saying in the military. Now that I couldn't do that, that was a big downfall for me.

"Seeing other soldiers who weren't injured, I felt I'm missing out on so much. Now I have another chance to fight for what I believe in."

For those able to catch it, sport is a lifeline back into the world they knew, or something approaching it.

Winkler's 10.12 metre world shotput record and his place in the US paralympic team are the indirect result of a three year-old program run by the US Olympic Committee.

The paralympic military program is an echo of the origins of the Paralympic movement, which began near London after the 1948 Olympics as a device to encourage the physical and mental rehabilitation of injured World War II soldiers.

The program holds two annual sports camps at US Olympic Committee facilities and half a dozen clinics at military rehabilitation hospitals, as well as allowing military veterans residence at US Olympic Committee training sites. Winkler threw the shotput and discus for the first time at a camp in May last year. He now practices by himself, with occasional trips to Florida for coaching.

He makes his throws seated, the chair held stable by four tethers, at the apex of the standard discus and shotput triangle.

His paralympic class is F (for field) 54. In the calculus of paralympic sport, this puts him at the mid-range of paralysis, ahead of the quadriplegics, who are ranked 51-53, and behind the amputees, 56-59. Those with spinal injuries are ranked 54-55.

Those numbers also divine the capacity for balance and muscular control. "I have some balance if I sit in my chair," Winkler says.

He remains a strong supporter of US involvement in Iraq and sees only benefits in the experiences of veterans like himself.

"Yeah," he says, "the paralympic team will become stronger and society around it will have more job openings for disabled people."

There will be another virtue too, he says, one having nothing to do with sport, but everything to do with how the US treats its injured veterans.

Finally the country would begin to take notice of its disabled citizens.

"It's a win-win situation in a way," Winkler says.

"You might lose part of your ability, but the biggest thing is we're still alive, and we're still here and we want people to know who we are, what we are. Our disabilities show. Theirs, like depression, or phobias, don't. It's just letting people know it's OK, that we're all human, no matter what creed or shape or size.

"We're still the same people."

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