Liberty Feature
George grew up in a small town outside of Houston, Texas. As he approached his high school graduation, George knew he wanted to get away from his neighborhood, but he didn’t quite know what path he would take to achieve that. His older brother had already joined the Air Force, so he considered that route. And then a Navy recruiter reached out to him. “They approached me and said you can come and play basketball for us, and you don’t have to do nothing, that’s it. And I was young and naive at the time, and I believed that recruiter, and I was like, ‘Okay, let’s go do it,’” George said. “So about a month or two after high school, that’s when I set off and joined the Navy, not knowing anything about boats, and the ocean, and I couldn’t even swim at the time.” He began his Navy career as an undesignated seaman at Naval Station Mayport in 2004, hoping he would figure out what he wanted to do along the way. Soon after he arrived at his first duty station, he decided to strike for corpsman. After attending corpsman school, he was stationed at Naval Air Station Jacksonville. During the course of the next few years, he became an anesthesia technician working in operating rooms, witnessed the role of the U.S. military in the Caribbean, and made plans for the future. Then came April 1, 2008, when everything changed.
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21-year-old George pulled out of his church’s parking lot before his friend did that evening. They planned to meet at the movies, but she turned around and went home when she came upon heavy traffic. Later, when she saw George’s story on the news, she realized the traffic was from a near-fatal accident he had been involved in. George suffered amnesia as a result, and doesn’t remember any of the events from that evening. Months later, during the court hearing, he learned from the other driver what occurred. “[The driver] told me he was going through a light, and he thought another car hit him, and he got out and he saw me laid out. He thought I was gone, and he fell on his knees and grabbed my ankles and started praying for me,” George said. “I remember asking him, ‘Dude, what church do you go to?’ And he said, ‘I don’t even go to church. I was just, oh my God…you were young, and I saw your body, and…’ I told him, ‘Man, I appreciate that, because you could’ve saved my life that night.’”
Y A MOTIVATIONAL DOER How the one-armed archer took control of his future
by Courtney Stringfellow
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pril Fools’ Day fell on a Tuesday in 2008. It was the year of the Great Recession, the month Pope Benedict XVI visited the United States, and the day that changed the course of a Navy corpsman’s life.
Gabriel “Gabe” George had recently returned to Jacksonville from an enlightening six-month deployment in Cuba, was approaching his reenlistment date, and was preparing to sign up for Fleet Marine Force School when fate intervened. He was making the most of his days; if he wasn’t at work, he was at church or riding his motorcycle. “Life was a little nice and mysterious at the time,” George remembers. That Tuesday was progressing as smoothly as each one before it: George went to work, he met his friend’s mom to give her some CD’s, and he drove to church. But he never made it to the movie theatre that evening. 08 | LibertyLifeMedia.Com | FEBRUARY 24, 2021 VOL. 1 / ISSUE 13
George had been approaching an intersection when the driver of the SUV made a u-turn in front of him. The reason George said the driver could’ve saved his life that night is because he was pronounced dead at the scene. They were preparing to put George in a body bag when he rose up. The EMTs rushed him to the ICU, and he was in a medically-induced coma for three weeks. He had suffered a spinal cord injury, traumatic brain injury, and a brachial plexus injury, which paralyzed his right arm. George remembers being optimistic at the beginning of his recovery and realizing how close to death he had been. Then, bit by bit, life started crashing down around him. “I was away from work for 60 to 90 days. And then they tried to have me come back for a couple of weeks, and then they realized, ‘Well your arm is paralyzed. You can’t do what you do,’” George recalled. “They tried to have me on payroll for a while, but then they were like, ‘Well, we don’t want you driving with all these pain pills that you’re taking.’ And then they told me to stop coming into work. And then one day it was, okay, you’re no longer in the Navy.” After the Navy medically retired him, George moved to Atlanta, Georgia, with his younger brother. He lived there for nearly five years, volunteering for a local church and focusing on healing. But his experiences of essentially being alone in another city after being surrounded by a family of Sailors proved to be disheartening and discouraging. “It was the civilian mindset versus the military mindset that was eating me alive,” George said. “I was just me, going to new places thinking I could help everybody and save the world and, yeah, it was challenging, to say the least.” Despite the hard lessons he learned through being taken advantage of, George persevered, promising himself things would get better. His daughter was born
