COVER STORY: AFTER FINDING FISHER HOUSE AND ADAPTIVE SPORTS, A FORMER PILOT BECOMES VETERAN ADVOCATE Story by David Nye Photos by Craig Orsini
David Ortiz was never afraid of a challenge. He was an avid outdoorsman before he joined the Army and became a Kiowa helicopter pilot in the 82nd Airborne Division’s Combat Aviation Brigade. In Eastern Afghanistan, Kiowa pilots took a lot of risk to protect the guys on the ground, and, in February 2012, David suffered a hard landing that destroyed his aircraft, broke his legs, and inflicted extreme trauma on his spine, throat, and lungs. David’s memories are spotty from just before the crash until he arrived at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, however he does remember another pilot, a fellow Texan, pulling him from the crash. “So, you know, it was intense. When you go from being a hardcharging, over-achieving aviator with the 82nd to not being able to sit up on your own, that’s a bad day. That’s a game changer. So, if it wasn’t for the community that rallied around me, I don’t think I would have made it.” That community largely centered on other patients in the hospital and Fisher House at Brooke Army Medical Center, Fort Sam Houston, Texas. In an amazing coincidence, one of the other residents at the Fisher House was a soldier that David had guarded from the air on the day the other soldier was injured in an ambush. “I remember pulling security that day,” he said. “I know exactly what ambush it was, you know, in Khost, [Afghanistan] specifically. We were just chatting and realized we were on the exact same deployment, working out of [Forward Operating Base] Salerno, so it was an intense, small-world-type moment.” David’s rehabilitation needs were long, and some of his injuries will likely never heal. He’s very open that he had days where he felt despondent, but that soldier and others who were injured before David helped show the way to recovery. “To have a community that [we] can lean on and depend on and share that burden is huge,” he said. David’s rehabilitation took him from Texas to Craig Hospital in Englewood, Colorado. Craig Hospital specializes in rehabilitation from spinal cord injury and traumatic brain injury. The specialists there helped get David walking.
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THE PATRIOT • VOLUME 11 • ISSUE 1 • 2020
