The Man Who Refused to Be Spoon-Fed

On April 10, 2012, six weeks into his third deployment to Afghanistan, Staff Sergeant Travis Mills set his pack down on a patch of ground his team had just swept for IEDs. The ground wasn't clear. In an instant he was a triple amputee. Two days later, doctors took his remaining arm. He woke up on his 25th birthday a quadruple amputee — one of only five soldiers to survive that wound in the entire Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

We didn't come across this story looking for tragedy. We came across it looking for what comes after tragedy, because that's the part nobody puts on the news crawl. Thirteen surgeries. Over thirty blood transfusions. Two nurses took turns pumping air into his lungs by hand for nine straight hours just to keep him alive long enough for the next surgery. That's not a motivational quote. That's two human beings standing over a stranger's body, refusing to let go, hour after hour.

Here's the part of Travis Mills's story we needed to sit with: he didn't come out of that hospital bed with his faith intact. It got shaken, badly. Somebody hung a plaque on his wall with Joshua 1:9 on it — "be strong and courageous" — and he was angry enough at it that he asked his mother to take it down. He wondered if God hated him. He wondered what he'd done to deserve four limbs gone and a daughter who was six months old and wouldn't remember him whole.

That's the line we try to hold onto in everything we build at Grit With Faith: grit without faith can still carry a man through thirteen surgeries. We've seen it. But it's grit with faith that gets him to the other side of the anger instead of leaving him stuck in it — bitter at the plaque on the wall, bitter at the ground, bitter at God. Mills got there. Not fast, and not by pretending the anger wasn't real. He worked through it, the same way he worked through learning to walk again, drive again, hold his wife's hand again. "Yes, I was injured," he says now, "but I'm healed."

His wife told him she wasn't leaving, when he gave her the out. His daughter is five now, and he drives her to swim lessons — in a body that has no legs and no arms of its own, behind a wheel, because he decided a long time ago that gratitude was going to win the argument against self-pity. In 2017 he opened a retreat in Maine, built through his own foundation, so other wounded veterans and their families could get a week of rest and normal life together, the way he'd had to fight to get his.

We're a small shop built on four points — Faith, Grit, Love, Patriotism — and Travis Mills's story touches all four without us having to force a single one of them. The patriotism is obvious: three deployments, a body given almost entirely in service. The love is his wife and daughter. The grit is thirteen surgeries and a refusal to be spoon-fed. And the faith is the part that took longest and mattered most — not a plaque he could stand to look at on day one, but a God he came back to on his own terms, in his own time.

We started this brand because we believe everybody's got grit. Not everybody's got it without the hate. Travis Mills is proof that the second kind is possible — and that it's worth the fight to get there.

As reported by Guideposts and We Are The Mighty.

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.