Wounded veteran athletes shine at Warrior Games
Brett Parks spent much of the summer working out and honing his swimming skills in a non-stop routine that became a "full-time job."
"It's wake up 6:30 in the morning, you're swimming, you're in the weight room, you're in the gym," Parks told CBS News. "You get everything you gotta do, you get home sometimes at 7:30, 8 o'clock at night. Just in time to kiss your kids goodnight and maybe eat some dinner and get back to bed."
Parks is a veteran who was injured while serving as an aircrewman in the Navy.
"I served for five years, and in October 2012 I was shot trying to break up a robbery off-base," he said. "And I was in a coma for 20 days and when I woke up I was missing a kidney a third of my colon and the lower part of my right leg."
The accident changed his entire life -- in ways he's still trying to grapple with each and every day. Parks says the challenges he faced in the wake of his life-changing injury "were very significant."
"One minute you have your whole life planned, your whole life ahead of you," he said. "The next you're clinging on to life, just fighting for your next breath. I woke up after a 20-day nap, I guess you'd call it, and I looked down and I didn't see my foot. I didn't see my leg."
Parks, 35, had been training to become an aviation flight engineer when his injury occurred.
"I had to make a choice right there -- what kind of person do I want to be? Do I want the injury to define me? Or do I want what I do after my injury to define me?"
Parks chose the latter. He decided to get up and "get going."
"I refused to quit," he said.
It's that mentality that pushed Parks to get involved in this year's Warrior Games, which took place from Sept. 28 - Oct. 4, 2014, at the U.S. Olympic Training Center and other facilities in Colorado Springs, Colorado. The annual event, presented by Deloitte, is a Paralympic-style competition organized by the U.S. Olympic Committee. Each year, some 200 wounded veterans taking part in seven sports: archery, cycling, shooting, sitting volleyball, swimming, track and field and wheelchair basketball.
The program, launched in 2010, aims to use sports as a way to help military members with physical and visual impairments during their rehabilitation.
"It's a big event that celebrates what athletes actually can do from the military," said John Register, associate director for community and veterans programs for U.S. Paralympics.
Register says the reaction he receives from Warrior Games participants has been "phenomenal."
"A lot of times sports is the impetus to get back into a healthy and active lifestyle," he explained. "And we see with the athletes what they can actually do again. They believe in the power of sport because it's now getting them back to their healthy and active lifestyle. Once they see they can do this the world opens up to them and they can anything from that."
The Warrior Games competition features five U.S. teams representing the Army, Marine Corps, Navy/Coast Guard, Air Force and Special Operations.
Parks had been training for all the this fall's swimming events (50-meter freestyle, 100-meter freestyle, 50-meter back stroke, 50-meter breast stroke and the 200-meter relay), along with sitting volleyball and discus and shot put events in the track and field category.
"You make a conscious choice. Every day -- all of us wounded warriors -- it's not something that we make a choice in our hospital bed that we're going to be OK and we go for a challenge," said the Jacksonville, Florida, native and married father-of-two. "Every day has to be a conscious choice to get out of bed and to say, 'I'm not going to let this beat me.' We all come together and even though we're competing against each and every branch, we're still one....I tell people all the time broken doesn't mean broke. And when it comes to us we are broken, but we still function and still contribute to society. We're not broke, we're just a little banged up."
