The former Army Ranger is pretty good at cutting green beans to a precise length.
He can whip up everything from fish tacos to southwestern coleslaw to pork tenderloins glazed with molasses and sherry — and he makes sure the presentation is just right.
Big deal, you may say.
And, yes, it is a big deal for Jeremy Feldbusch.
You see, Feldbusch — a former sergeant — is blind. He was hit by a 155 millimeter artillery round in Iraq in 2003.
The avid outdoorsman’s life was changed forever April 3, 2003, when an artillery round landed 10 meters away from him while he and members of his unit — 3rd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment out of Fort Benning, Ga. — were working to seize the Haditha Dam on the Euphrates River in Iraq.
The members of his squad had good cover. He was the only one hit.
Jeremy Feldbusch lost his right eye and the shrapnel severed the optic nerve of the other. Shrapnel embedded in the left frontal lobe of his brain and he spent six weeks in a medically induced coma.
Charlene Feldbusch, Jeremy’s [mother and] full-time caregiver, quit her job to tend to him. His doctors worked to remove the shrapnel and insert a titanium plate. When he awoke, he was blind and suffered some lingering brain damage in addition to occasional seizures.
Feldbusch, 32, never gave up. A co-founder of the Wounded Warrior Project, “he is the first blind participant in the Healthy Cooking Boot Camp, a new program run by the institute and the nonprofit. The former special operations soldier is testing the waters for other disabled veterans who could follow and join the institute’s distinguished rolls, which include television personality Anthony Bourdain.”
The six-day camp is “designed to honor veterans for their service, empower them and bring them together with other wounded veterans.”
After a week of disturbing news from Afghanistan, continuing political divisiveness and fallout from other unsavory events and characters, it may be good to start the new week with an uplifting, non-partisan story about a veteran who is succeeding against almost insurmountable odds.
Read more about this amazing Army Ranger here.
Image, courtesy shutterstock.com
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.