CARE COALITION
USSOCOM WARRIOR CARE PROGRAM THE CARE COALITION BY CRAIG COLLINS
the spring and summer of 2014, Army Staff Sgt. Lauren q InMontoya didn’t like what she was hearing from her doctors.
106
Special Operations Outlook
Team SOCOM Staff Sgt. Lauren Montoya runs a race during the 2018 Warrior Games at the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, Colorado, June 2, 2018.
Her left leg was amputated below the knee in April 2015 and soon a military medical evaluation board, after hearing a case presented with help from Care Coalition advocates, declared Montoya fit for active-duty military service. Today, Montoya is married, with a daughter, and stationed at SOCOM headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, a member of the Care Coalition staff helping plan the 2019 Warrior Games. She knows the games well, as an athlete who trained, competed, and won medals in multiple events in the 2016 Invictus Games and 2018 Warrior Games. She’ll also be competing in the 2019 games, which she’s decided will be her last, for two reasons: She wants to step aside and let other wounded warriors have the same opportunities she’s had.
DOD PHOTO BY EJ HERSOM
“They were telling me I probably wasn’t going to walk again,” she said, “and that I should stop thinking about staying in the military.” On March 22 of that year, Montoya, a member of an all-female Cultural Support Team (CST), manning a .50-caliber machine gun on an RG-33 mine-resistant ambush protected vehicle, was returning to base after a day of reconnaissance in and around Kandahar, Afghanistan. The vehicle struck a buried improvised explosive device (IED) that caused an avalanche of heavy equipment to land on her left leg, crushing her heel bone, rupturing her Achilles tendon, and damaging muscles and nerves throughout her lower leg and foot. She was evacuated, evaluated, and treated at hospitals in Kandahar, Bagram, Landstuhl, and finally San Antonio, where doctors were determined to salvage her leg if possible. Over the next year, Montoya endured limb salvage treatments that included nine surgeries, and she wasn’t any closer to walking. She was in pain, tired of getting around with the use of either a wheelchair or crutches. She decided it was time to argue forcefully for the life she wanted, rather than the one doctors projected for her: She wanted to lose the leg and keep her job. As a member of special operations forces (SOF), Montoya knew she would have potent allies: the U.S. Special Operations Command’s (SOCOM) Warrior Care Program (Care Coalition), formed in 2005 to advocate for and support SOF who return home wounded, ill, or injured. Almost immediately after her injury, an advocate from the Care Coalition was ready for Montoya, and somebody from the program reached out to her every step of the way, from Kandahar to San Antonio. Once Montoya had made the final decision about her leg, she said, she turned to the Care Coalition. “They don’t really take no for an answer,” she said. “My advocate listened to me and … essentially said, ‘Okay, that’s what you want to do, so now we’re going to go and we’re going to fight.’” The advocate, Montoya said, “found doctors who were going to listen to what I was saying about how miserable I was, in trying to save a leg that didn’t even work and was never going to work again. They found opportunities outside of normal military medicine.”
