Ten battlefield deployments ago, before the grenade clattered down the open hatch of his vehicle and nested inches from him, before the Army was painting his chest with medals and ribbons, Joe Kapacziewski was an aspiring soldier happy for any distinction that came his way.
When he came back from Ranger School with a new blue ribbon, “he was really proud,” said his wife, Kim, beginning a story from before they were married.
“He thought it meant he had done something well. But, really, it marked him as a weak swimmer. He was a weak swimmer before he lost his leg. Then add in his missing leg and the arm injuries he has.”
So, of course, what was Sgt. First Class Kapacziewski — pronounced Capa-CHESS-ski — doing on a bright autumn lunchtime a dozen years later? Laps. In an indoor pool, at Columbus State University near his Fort Benning station.
Kapacziewski would rather march 10 miles with a 50-pound pack than swim 500 meters. Still, there he was digging into water with long, constant strokes, his kick incomplete thanks to that Iraqi grenade. Why? Because he has it in his head he wants to do triathlons. And water is an unavoidable consequence of that quest.
“I think he lives in a constant state of proving himself,” his wife said.
“You adapt, you adjust, you overcome,” said Shannon Gaither, the Columbus instructor who since last year has helped Kapacziewski become an adequate swimmer.
There is weighty metaphorical value to every lap that the sergeant has swum, every step he has run, every battle he has fought over the past eight years. He never set out to become anyone’s symbol of determination; the role was forced upon him by the 2005 attack that eventually cost him half his right leg and left him with nerve damage along his arm. The rest afterward was a byproduct of his own cussed stubbornness.
As Gaither, himself ex-military, put it, “You recognize what the goals are that you want for your life, you continue to work towards those goals say, ‘I’m not going to quit until I attain them.’”
“‘Being content’ are not words you use to describe Joe,” said Nico Marcolongo, Kapacziewski’s contact at the San Diego-based Challenged Athletes Foundation, the group that planted the idea of trying the triathlon.
The pull of the Army life
Swallowing a little pool water should be a lark compared with his life as an Army Ranger.
Signing up during the summer of 2001, just before the Sept. 11 attacks, Kapacziewski found a sense of family in the Army. Growing up in Connecticut, he was without his father — who died in a car accident — for much of his youth. He found all the authority figures he needed in the service, and then became one himself, rising to the assignment of squad leader.
The 75th Ranger Regiment is a salty bunch. One of its three battalions has been in Iraq or Afghanistan every day since the winter of 2001. Kapacziewski regularly rotated in, his fifth deployment ending with the rending explosion of a grenade at his feet.
Back stateside, as doctors did everything possible to save his leg, Kapacziewski kept telling anyone in his room that he was going to return to the field one day. Sure you are, yes, he heard back from all those who were only humoring him.
Had he kept the leg, there never would have been even an argument about returning to a war zone. It was held together by pins and screws, forever weakened beyond the point of scrambling up Afghan hillsides. He gave up that fight in 2007, opting for amputation, coming to look back on the two years of trying to hold onto his battered original equipment as time wasted.
In his home near Fort Benning, Kapacziewski has a closet-full of legs.
He has a couple of everyday, walking-around legs, with the prosthetic feet that look passingly real.
He has his running legs. Man, can he run. When Marcolongo heard about his story and recruited him a couple of years back to join a group of wounded soldiers and first responders in a 5K in Canada, Kapacziewski “ran so fast he finished before they got around to putting down the finish line,” he said.
Kapacziewski has war legs, too. Legs that adjust to the weight of whatever weaponry he’s carrying. He requires the spares in case one is shot out from beneath him.
Proving himself through the same tests every Ranger faces — the timed runs and endurance hikes, the parachuting, the repelling down a long line from a helicopter — he became of first of his branch to return to combat with a prosthesis.
He has been to Afghanistan five times since losing his leg and earned a medal for valor in 2010 when he and another soldier dragged a wounded comrade to safety through heavy machine-gun fire.
At 30 years old, with a wife and two small boys, he finds himself in a position of wanting to be home when he is over there and wanting to be there when he is at home. The tug is constant. Stateside since April 2012, “I’m sort of chomping on the bit to get back at it,” he said.
“I’ve always been supportive of Joe’s military adventures. It is what has driven him to where he is,” his wife said. Still, for the first time Kim found herself telling her husband that she was nearing the end of her resolve, this last month after an attack on a 75th Ranger Regiment patrol killed four and wounded 13 others.
Kapacziewski has since visited the more severely wounded from that attack, bearing a message that comes straight from experience:
“There’s light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “It’s very frustrating for someone still in the hospital who wants to get up and move around a little bit. I try to explain there is going to be plenty of time for physical therapy and rehabilitation. I tell them they need to save their energy because when they’re able to start doing it they need to put 110 percent into it if they want to be productive and to reach their potential despite whatever their injuries are.”
Challenges on multiple fronts
He is a walking compendium of messages and possibilities. The stories are too big to keep contained within the fences of Fort Benning, where he assesses and trains would-be Ranger leaders. Many of the tales he included in the book he was convinced to write — “Back in the Fight.” Other messages he hand delivers every time he competes in an event, taking his personal challenges public.
The power of his story is irresistible. Kapacziewski was among the soldiers honored during this year’s baseball All-Star game in New York. Closer to home, he was introduced during a Sunday Braves game as part of their Hometown Hero salutes.
Not that he’s real keen on the whole celebrity soldier thing, but, “If I can reach a handful of people, I sort of feel like it’s my obligation to do it,” he said.
His greatest competitive success has come out of the water — last month he had a personal bests in the Army 10-Miler road race in Washington (70 minutes) and at the Paraduathlon (run-bike-run) Nationals in Arizona. Having competed in a few shorter distance triathlons with modest success — defined as not drowning — Kapacziewski is setting next year’s Paritriathlon Nationals as a goal.
There is one glitch, however, in his training regimen.
“The Rangers beat you up,” said Gaither, his swim coach. “Sure you’re in great physical condition, but it’s a totally different kind of physical condition than you’d have if you were athlete.”
The cross-training of getting up before dawn to prepare to fight insurgents and then squeezing in time for a swim or a bike ride is not the most efficient method of building a better triathlete.
But Kapacziewski soldiers on, determined to spend so little time on his couch as to never leave an imprint.
“I like the competitive nature of triathlon,” he said. “I like the challenge of it. It keeps me in great shape which is one of the things I really need to be able to do to maintain my status as an Airborne Ranger.
There it is, the confusion that might really cost him some precious seconds in his next race. For how is Kapacziewski going to become an elite athlete so long as his priorities are to his regiment rather than himself?
Think of how his training is going to suffer if he gets his wish and is sent off again to a land very short on swimming pools.
“Duty comes first. The Army comes first. This (triathlon training) is sort of a hobby, an extracurricular activity,” he said. He’ll never make it big in the sports pages with an attitude like that.
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