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Function was only part of the problem. The idea of trying to pass had begun to trouble me. It made me feel as if I had something to hide or be ashamed of. When I started to go bald, I shaved my head. No comb-overs, transplants or toupees for me. So why try to conceal a handicap? I was now proud of how I had lost my hand. The stump had a story to tell, regardless of my motivations for grabbing a grenade. Why not draw attention to it?
No one could miss my disability now. I put on a hook for Thanksgiving dinner and never took it off. It twisted into the end of my myoelectric prosthesis and turned 360˚ like an electronic hand. Only it worked better. Two silver talons opened like forceps, locked on to items and could pick a dime off the floor. Occasionally I screwed on a plastic, clawlike device known by the German word for grabber--Greifer--to move heavy objects, and I contemplated the long list of attachments--garden tools, spatulas, hammers and pool-shooting bridges--that were available by special order. I usually sported the hook, however, even if it aroused more fear than friendship among people I passed on the street. Some kids cowered. Friends accepted it and greeted me with a high-two. Rebekah, who had agreed to marry me several months earlier, thought my choice impudent but sexy and advised me on clothing to complement it--black was obviously best.
Half a year after I dismissed the suggestion from a Walter Reed doctor, the hook had become my trademark. It was brash, straightforward and pragmatic, virtues I cherished. I had left a lot of me behind in the Baghdad grenade attack. By its first anniversary, I was starting to reclaim it.
On July 3, Rebekah and I flew to Rancho Mirage, Calif., to celebrate my stepfather's 90th birthday. My mother hosted a party in the main ballroom of a swank hotel, the Lodge, for more than 60 family members and friends. Inevitably, when the subject of my accident came up and led to admiring comments, I felt a familiar twinge of guilt and embarrassment. I still couldn't embrace the notion of my so-called heroism.
Lying awake that night, I was reminded of a conversation I'd had with Hal Wain, a psychologist at Walter Reed. I had sought him out a few months earlier to discuss why I had grabbed the grenade. Wain said I had one overriding objective: self-preservation. "That's what all heroes are made of," he said. "I have learned from guys coming back that the instinct to survive, the instinct to take care of oneself or others, is incredibly potent. I really don't care if you did it for your needs or for others; you did it. The end result would have been the same--you saved people's lives."
Wain defined heroism as quick response to a changing environment, like a driver who swerves into another lane for the purpose of avoiding an oncoming car and, in the process, saves the life of his passenger. "That wasn't his intent," he said. "But being flexible and shifting is a higher level of intelligence. The people who can't change die."