The Warrior Rides Again

FIVE-AND-A-HALF YEARS AGO, IN JANUARY OF 2012, MARINE CORPS GUNNERY SGT. THOMAS McRAE STEPPED ON A 20-LB. IED.

- G.R. Schiavino

“Both of my legs got blown off above the knee, and then my left arm was amputated above the elbow. I got hit in the face, and so, initially, I was blind in one eye because the nerve got torn, but they cut that out, eventually. Where I got hit in my head, in my eye socket, a bunch of bone fragments shot back into my brain, which means I’m lucky I’m not drooling on myself.”

This is Tom. He is a single dad raising his 9-year-old daughter and he served our country for 14 years, joining right out of high school in 2000. He deployed six times—to Japan, Bahrain, Kuwait, Portugal, Iraq, and finally Afghanistan, “to a sweet little hell-hole called Sangin,” Tom adds, which, in 2017, continues to be a war-torn city, with the Taliban recovering control just this past March. For the first many years of his service, Tom was a machine gunner in the in fantry. Then he elected to go to the Explosive Ordnance Device (EOD) school to continue his service as an EOD team member. And he might be one of the few men in the world with no legs, one arm, and one eye who considers himself some version of lucky. But that really is Tom.

“I don’t want other people running my life. Right now I can’t drive; that’s one of the things I can’t do. I have a hard time with a lot of other things, but there are very few things that I actually can’t do. Except for walking on prosthetics, but I’m working on that one.”

In the meantime, Tom has another goal: To chase cattle through Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains in July with the Jinx McCain Horsemanship Program (JMHP).