Disabled troops used to have to leave the military. Now some compete for gold.

ORLANDO, Fla. — Master Sgt. Ivan Morera isn’t used to being in last place. He’s a Green Beret. A relentless competitor. But at the 2024 Warrior Games, with his prosthetic hand hooked into a rowing machine, he was trailing the pack.

So, he focused on increasing the rhythm of each pull: legs, body, arms. Arms, body, legs. When the buzzer sounded, he had passed everyone to win gold. “I do it to show my kids that everything and anything is possible,” said Morera, who lost his left arm in a 2013 convoy accident in Afghanistan.

Hundreds of wounded or disabled troops competed alongside him at the U.S. military’s Warrior Games in Orlando, Florida, this summer, in events including archery, swimming, seated volleyball and wheelchair rugby.

Since the annual competition was created in 2010, the Warrior Games have given the Defense Department a new way to support and rehabilitate a select group of wounded troops, helping them remain in the service and on duty. The event has also become an important symbol of the changing perceptions about who is fit to serve.

Facing a significant personnel crisis as they struggle to recruit and retain service members — a deficit on pace to be worse than any since just after the Vietnam War — some branches have begun to let more troops with disabilities remain on duty. Military recruiters are also accepting more people with asthma, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder and other previously disqualifying conditions.

The Warrior Games were designed to give some of those wounded service members a chance to be part of a team and work toward common goals, said David Paschal, assistant deputy chief of staff with the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, which oversees the branch’s recruiting efforts. “I think those two things are critical to supporting the recovery of our athletes.”

The competition has also become a prime source of athletes for the U.S. team at the Paralympic Games, which kick off Wednesday in Paris. One of the most successful Paralympic swimmers, Sgt. 1st Class Elizabeth Marks, was injured as an Army medic in Iraq, which led to an amputation of her left leg several years later.

Marks said Warrior Games athletes introduced her to adaptive sports during her initial recovery. “Swimming just became a place of peace for me,” she told the military publication Stars and Stripes in 2021. “It was the one place where I got to create my own pain, and push my own body and not just have to exist in that pain.”

She has won five medals so far, including two golds, and will swim again in Paris.

About 200 athletes, some of whom might hope to make the next Paralympics, competed at the Warrior Games this year. Their disabilities include post-traumatic stress disorder, cancer, limb loss and traumatic brain injuries. About 70% of participants remain on active duty.

The slots are coveted. Athletes are drawn from the thousands of people in each branch’s “wounded warrior” program, who are given more time for medical appointments and additional access to specialists, although many say they still face long wait times and end up spending their own money for special care. About 40 competitors a year qualify for the Warrior Games from each service branch, with a separate delegation from Special Operations.

Giving injured service members another outlet for recovery is something the military has gotten better about in the more than two decades since the start of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Paschal said. Automatically discharging wounded troops who wanted to rehabilitate and continue to serve, he said, “was probably the worst thing we could have done.”

In past decades, for instance, Morera’s amputation would potentially have meant leaving Special Operations, because he could no longer perform one of the staple skills of a paratrooper: opening both the primary and emergency chutes by hand. The cords are on separate sides of the body.

To allow him to continue to serve in the job he wanted, the Army created gear that lets him use his right hand for both chutes. The first time he landed after trying it, he said, “I took a knee and I cried, because I was like, ‘I’m a Green Beret again.’”

Not all troops are allowed to remain in the same roles after amputations or other serious injuries. But leaders can approve it if, like Morera, accommodations allow them to do the job.

Similarly, the branches have reconfigured their regular physical fitness tests to give injured troops a better chance of passing. Alternatives to activities such as running and pullups are now allowed, such as using equipment including rowing and elliptical machines.

Opponents of changing physical standards over the years have denounced the moves as weakening the military, although most complaints are levied against differing standards for male and female troops. But the Pentagon has argued that some of the standards have become outdated as warfare has changed, and that more technologically advanced threats don’t require the same fighting methods as traditional conflicts.

Staff Sgt. Adam Proctor lost his left leg in a motorcycle accident in 2021. To stay in the Army, he chose the alternate rowing option for the fitness exam, instead of running 2 miles. He also completed the other requirements and passed a separate exam specific to his job as a combat medic.

“Every task on the list for medics that they gave me to do, I added a 20-pound weight, went five minutes longer or 100 meters further,” he said. “I exceeded every standard. I didn’t want there to be any question about whether or not I could do all the tasks.”

In this year’s Warrior Games, Proctor competed in track, seated volleyball and four other events. Training for the Warrior Games not only helped him stay in the Army, he said, but gave him a reason to keep going during recovery.

“You don’t have anything to really drive you forward,” he said. “That becomes really hard.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

© 2024 The New York Times Company