In 2014, White House speechwriter TSzuplat made a brain-injured soldier a national symbol of resilience. Now he finds that Cory Remsburg's story didn’t end so neatly. Photographs by PeteSouza
President Obama greets Army Ranger Cory Remsburg at Bethesda Naval Hospital in February 2010. Photo: Pete Souza This article was featured in One Great Story, New York’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.On the evening of January 28, 2014, Cory Remsburg, an elite Army Ranger grievously wounded in Afghanistan, sat next to First Lady Michelle Obama in the balcony of the House chamber as President Obama delivered his annual State of the Union address.
To me, Cory was perseverance personified — a living symbol of American resilience. For a touch of daily inspiration, I had hung a poster-size photograph of him on the wall of my windowless office in the basement of the West Wing. In it, Cory is standing with the help of a walker, proudly showing Obama that he was learning to walk again. If my two young children ever grew frustrated with homework or soccer, I’d tell them about a soldier they had never met and everything he had to overcome.
We sat and talked for a few more minutes, but I was unnerved. Cory’s injuries were far more severe than I had imagined. What if, when recognized by the president, he couldn’t stand up? What if he stumbled and fell in front of a live television audience of millions? With more than 30 million Americans watching, the ovation went on for nearly two minutes. In this young Army Ranger, our country had found, it seemed, a perfect metaphor for how we so often wish to see ourselves — resilient, ever hopeful, triumphant no matter how overwhelming the odds.
Every telling of Cory’s story followed a now-familiar arc. Ten deployments. Explosion. Nearly killed. Years of rehab. Slow, but steady recovery. In late 2017, Cory invited me to his high school, outside St. Louis, where he was being inducted into the school’s hall of fame. On a warm September evening, I took my seat in the school auditorium with a few dozen of Cory’s family and friends.
The glare of the national spotlight had, at times, been “very awkward,” he admitted to me, pushing out his sentences in slow, staccato bursts with deep breaths every few words. “I hope to display … the image” of a wounded warrior “as positively as possible.” But all the attention over the years had left him feeling “somewhat pressured” to show that he was still making progress. Now, he hoped being more candid about his own struggles would help other veterans see “you are not alone.
“I thought … I’d be farther along,” Cory acknowledged as we began our conversations last year, “I thought … I’d be walking by now.” I had seen how difficult it was for him. One morning, I awoke to emails that he had sent to me in the middle of the night — old photographs of himself in full battle gear heading out on a mission. At one point, he was watching a History Channel documentary about his final mission just about every day. He once showed Annie a picture of himself at the beach before the explosion, tanned and muscular. “I want,” he said wistfully, “to look like this again.
Cory, I learned, had been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress. He was eating less and had lost weight. Annie believed that, despite several inconclusive sessions with therapists, he was also suffering from depression, rooted in the life and friends he lost to war. At the same time, neither Craig nor Annie could recall Cory ever shedding a tear since his injuries — a lack of outward emotion, perhaps linked to his brain injury — that concerned them as much as his outbursts.According to his parents, Cory has never tried to hurt himself, but they refuse to take any chances. A refurbished M1 rifle from World War II hangs on a wall in his house, but high enough that it can’t be reached, and his parents object to having any working guns in the house.
Cory had shown me a photograph taken in the operating room of his skull partially removed and his brain spackled with muddy debris from the canal where he landed. Dr. Kenneth Harris, Cory’s neurologist at the VA in Arizona, had pointed to black-and-white scans of Cory’s brain on a computer screen and explained to me that “nearly a third of his brain has been damaged or removed.
Cory arrived in a wheelchair — pulling himself along with his good right leg — certainly not walking, but essentially independent. When two therapists helped him stand and shuffle down the hallway — catching him when he stumbled — he was arguably walking, but not independent. “Most likely,” he replied. “I’ll try harder … just hoping I’m intelligible.” In fact, a few hours later at the dedication of the hospital’s new guesthouse for visiting families, I watched Cory lead a crowd in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance, quite intelligibly.
Over the next ten hours, I saw how even the smallest task requires every ounce of energy and concentration that Cory can muster, making even the mundane seem miraculous. Getting out of bed — sitting up, sliding on slippers with one hand, swinging his legs to the floor, standing up while keeping hold of the bed rail, turning his body and lowering himself into his wheelchair — took him five carefully coordinated minutes.
Craig and Annie are under no illusions of how difficult the years ahead will be for their son. The brains of people with traumatic brain injury are known to age faster, increasing the risk of Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and dementia. Veterans with post-traumatic stress are at a higher risk of accidental injuries and suicide. Craig and Annie are in their sixties; he has two bad hips and her hands shake from essential tremors.
Remsburg shares a beer with some fellow veterans during a birthday party in his honor in Tampa, Florida, on March 2, 2019. Photo: Pete Souza Cory’s stepsister Shelby helps blow out candles. Photo: Pete Souza I’ve often thought of something Cory said years ago during one of his many TV appearances: “There are people … [who] would have been happy in their wheelchair. Me, oh no,” he declared, wagging his finger in disapproval.
For the first time, he acknowledged to me that he had suffered a fall that day in the park. “They say I regressed a year or more,” he said. Finally accepting that he has a disability is “a new feeling…I realize…there are certain aspects…I physically cannot change.”
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