An Iowan who is one of five quadruple amputees from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan says another amputee in the same hospital helped him visualize his future.
Cedar Falls native Taylor Morris was serving as an explosive expert in the Navy when he was injured by a bomb in Afghanistan on May 3 of last year. Morris lost both legs and his right hand. His left arm was amputated from the bicep down. On April 10, a little less than a month before, Army Staff Sergeant Travis Mills lost portions of both arms and both legs when a bomb exploded in Afghanistan.
“He was just a person I could always look up to, you know: What’s coming next? What kind of prosthetics is he doing?” Morris says. “What kind of therapy is he doing? And all of that.”
The two soldiers were both treated at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in the nation’s capital.
“It was nice to have somebody taking that one step ahead of you that you could kind of track and keep up with,” Morris says.
Morris recently announced on his blog that he and his girlfriend would be coming home to Iowa for Thanksgiving to “eat dinner with our parents, grandparents, siblings and close friends.” Mills — the soldiers who was injured a few weeks before Morris — is the subject of a documentary that was released last spring. “Travis: a soldier’s story” was shown again in some U.S. cities this past Veteran’s Day.