The Guy Next to You

May 7, 2007. Baghdad, Iraq. Lieutenant Colonel Gregory Gadson's vehicle was rolling back from a memorial service — two of his own soldiers, killed days earlier — when an IED went off under the truck on Route Jackson. The blast took both of his legs above the knee and tore nerves in his right arm. He lay in the road bleeding, and the words that came out of him weren't a scream. They were a prayer: "God, don't let me die here."

We keep that detail close, because it's the whole point of this brand in one sentence. A man doesn't reach for grit in a moment like that. Grit gets built later, in the surgeries and the learning-to-walk-again. In the moment itself, with nothing left to fight with, Gadson reached for God.

He made it to Walter Reed. Coming out of anesthesia, he swore he saw his father and an old friend, Rodney Anderson, riding the elevator with him into surgery. His wife, Kim, told him afterward that couldn't be — Anderson was deployed in Afghanistan at the time, half a world away. Anderson didn't argue the vision away. He told Gadson his spirit had been there. The two had known each other since 1993, when Anderson handed a young Lieutenant Gadson a career plan scratched out on an index card and, in Gadson's words, "taught me to love myself, taught me to love the Lord." That's the kind of friendship that doesn't need a hospital room to show up in.

Four months after the blast, Gadson was still relearning how to get through a day without legs when his old West Point teammate Mike Sullivan — by then a coach with the New York Giants — called and asked him to talk to the team. The Giants were 0-2, looking for anything. Gadson rolled into their locker room and told a room full of grown men built to be tough that toughness isn't the whole story. "You can do nothing without the guy next to you," he said. Before the NFC Championship that January, he came back and gave them one more line to carry onto the field: "Believing is better than knowing." The Giants won the Super Bowl that year — an upset nobody outside that locker room saw coming.

We don't bring up the football to make this a sports story. We bring it up because it's the same lesson twice, once on a battlefield and once on a sideline: nobody gets through the hard season alone, and the ones who get through it well are usually leaning on somebody — a soldier in the next seat, a friend praying from another continent, a God who hears a man bleeding out on a dirt road in Iraq. That's Love and Faith working the same shift.

Gadson retired a full colonel. He's spent the years since as a speaker, an author, and — in one of the stranger turns in all of this — an actor who played a wounded veteran on screen, a role he didn't have to imagine his way into. He says it plainly now, the kind of sentence that only means something once you've paid for it: "I am freer today without legs than when I had them." And when he's asked what carried him from that road outside Baghdad to where he stands now, he doesn't credit toughness alone. "My faith in God has been my guiding light," he says. "It has sustained me through the darkest times and propelled me forward when all seemed lost."

That's the whole compass, really — Faith, Grit, Love, Patriotism — standing in one man on one road on one bad day, and in every day since. Grit got him off that road. Faith told him which way was up.

As reported by Army.mil, AARP, and Military Times.

Been through a season like this yourself — the kind that could've left you bitter but didn't? We'd love to hear it. Tell us your story.