THE 2019 WARRIOR GAMES ‘‘Be Inspired’’ BY CRAIG COLLINS
W
hen the U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) hosts the Department of Defense (DOD) Warrior Games in Tampa, Florida, in the last week of June 2019, it will be the 10th year of an event that has blossomed into an international adaptive multi-sport event, a showcase of the grit, determination, and fellowship of the world’s wounded, ill, and injured warriors.
Founded in 2010, the first official Warrior Games were hosted by the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, Colorado – but there had been other competitions in the years leading up to them. As Army Col. Cary Harbaugh, director of SOCOM’s Warrior Care Program (Care Coalition), remembers, the games held from 2010 to 2014 were more like intramural competitions among wounded warriors from the different service branches. At the 2010 games, said Harbaugh, the SOCOM team was in its infancy stage. We were writing ‘Team SOCOM’ with markers on white T-shirts.” Jim Lorraine, the retired Air Force lieutenant colonel who served as the Care Coalition’s first director, explained why SOCOM athletes might have looked a little shabbier than other competitors: “None of the services wanted us to have our own team,” he said. Through much of his 20052011 tenure, Lorraine fought to get warriors who’d been served by the SOCOM Care Coalition to be recognized as a separate team at adaptive sports competitions, but the service branches were reluctant, for two reasons: They thought the Care Coalition’s team would take all the good athletes, and
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2019 Warrior Games
they thought recognizing a Team SOCOM would suggest special operations forces were service branch equivalent to the others. For a few years, Lorraine said, organizers of the games wouldn’t allow the SOCOM team to choose a uniform shirt color – hence the white T-shirts. L o r r a i n e ’s l o b by i n g e f fo r t wa s two-pronged: First, he argued the athletes at the games weren’t representing service branches, but individual warrior transition programs: the SOCOM Care Coalition, the Army Wounded Warrior Program, the Marine Corps Wounded Warrior Regiment, Navy Wounded Warrior – Safe Harbor, and the Air Force Wounded Warrior Program. Second, he negotiated deals. He told the Navy, for example, that the Care Coalition would take only half the eligible SEALs; the Navy team could keep the rest. “I knew that if we got our foot in the door,” Lorraine said, “we would be able to stay. I was willing to give up anything: T-shirt colors? I didn’t care. Just let us have a team.” The first four annual Warrior Games were hosted in Colorado Springs by the U.S. Olympic Training Center, and they immediately captured the public’s interest. Britain’s Prince Harry, who was at the time a helicopter pilot in the British Army, participated in the opening of the 2013 games, and was so inspired by the games he created a similar event, the Invictus Games, launched the following year in London. The success of the games animated DOD leaders to throw the military’s support behind them and administer the Warrior Games as
