- I was in high school when the towers came down.
I remember the day that we were in my English class.
We were actually talking about Aeschylus and Greek tragedy.
Someone came in to click the TV on
and we actually watched the second plane
hit the second tower.
I knew from that day forward I wanted to dedicate my life
to making sure that never happened again on our soil.
I kinda always envisioned myself growing up to be a G.I. Joe
and I remember a moment in Afghanistan
where me and a couple buddies
were doing an overwatch on a mountain
and I remember looking down
and seeing I had my body armor on, a rifle,
and night vision, and thermal vision,
and there were helicopters flying and stuff like that.
And I remember remarking to my buddy,
like hey man, we made it.
We're grown up G.I. Joes.
That was actually the night
that Osama Bin Laden was killed in Abbottabad
not too far from where we were in Afghanistan.
So it was obviously an incredible feeling
to be on deployment
and to feel that sense of fulfillment, right?
Like my mission of mitigating that threat of terror
on a world scale.
I felt like I had accomplished real
and I felt very connected to my purpose.
Unfortunately, at the tail end of my 2011 deployment,
I stepped on an improvised explosive device
which, thankfully, I was able to walk away from,
but unfortunately, I lost my vision as a result.
You can imagine it being very difficult
to wake up in a hospital bed
with that sort of job and that purpose taken away.
The things that got me through that were kind of two-fold.
One, I thought about my buddy Tyler Trehan
who was killed in Iraq in 2009.
When I went to Tyler's funeral,
I watched that coffin go down in the ground
and I watched that flag be folded up
and be handed to his mother
and I couldn't help but think
that Tyler knowingly gave up his life
doing the job that he did
so that I could continue living my life.
So that we can all continue to live our life.
I remember thinking of Tyler
when I was in that hospital bed
and thinking of how lucky I was to still be alive.
And that fact was made more poignant to me
because when the actual blast went off in Afghanistan,
I thought that I had died.
When the doctors were telling me that you're blind,
we can't save your vision,
and we're really sorry about that,
the overwhelming thought in the back of my mind was,
I'm just happy to be alive.
I'm just so happy to be here.
And obviously there was this ensuing difficulty
in transition of purpose.
What's my life gonna look like blind?
What jobs do blind people do?
And how am I gonna be relevant and things like that.
Those were struggles.
It would be foolish
to say I dreamed to become a Paralympian, right?
Like obviously I didn't dream that I would become blind
and I didn't dream that I'd be a Paralympian.
I started competitively swimming when I was 11.
When I showed up to start swimming,
I was, by far, the worst kid.
And I didn't wanna be the worst kid.
And my dad told me the way that you're not the worst kid
is you have to work really hard.
So I did that and almost immediately,
I was able to see a reward.
I trained hard for a month
and I wasn't the worst kid anymore.
I trained hard for a year
and I was one of the better kids on the team.
I trained hard for four years
and I was making junior national cuts and things like that.
That dedication to swimming
reaffirmed my sense of character,
enabled me to go to the Naval Academy
where that sort of concept was exploded for me,
where I started to really understand how character
can filter into other aspects of your life,
from academics to leadership.
When I look back on who I am now, the person that I am,
weirdly, is driven from the experiences I had
in competitive swimming from developmental ages
all the way up through college.
Thankfully, I had the opportunity
to get introduced to the Paralympics pretty quickly.
Actually, there was someone who was quick to point out
that I was lucky to be injured
in an Olympic Paralympic year in 2011
leading up to the 2012 games in London.
Very quickly we were able to get into blind swimming.
My first race out the gate I was actually fifth in the world
which was a good spot to be in.
I made the Paralympic national team,
went to the trials that year,
raised that number five to number one
and then was able to compete in the London games.
It was an amazing experience to be at the games,
let alone winning a race.
It was very cathartic for myself and my family
to make that transition within a year.
So swimming,
it didn't start off as a desire to be a gold medalist.
It started off as just, hey look at me,
I'm the same as I was before.
And not only can I do it, I can do it well.
Telling my mom that I'm gonna be blind
for the rest of my life was harder on her than it was on me
but it was really important for her to see me swim.
It was just something she could latch on to
to say Brad's gonna be OK.
And then, for it to go from Brad's gonna be OK
to Brad's a gold medalist
was obviously really incredible for my family
who was there in the stands
who lived that whole experience with me
who I was able to, after getting that gold medal,
I was able to go up and be in the stands with my mom
and actually put that medal around my mom's neck
and it was healing for my family
and I can see the healing effect it has on the community.
And I wanna put that out there as much as possible.
So that's like my mission in life really.
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