Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, November 6, 1994 TAG: 9411080029
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: From The Associated Press and Knight-Ridder/Tribune
DATELINE: FORT BRAGG, N.C. LENGTH: Long
Sgt. 1st Class Dana Bowman took his oath Friday in an airplane belonging to the Golden Knights parachute team at the base that is home to the Army's elite 82nd Airborne Division and the Special Forces, known as the Green Berets.
Then the 32-year-old Ohio man shoved himself out the door, 10,000 feet up, and followed his comrades to the ground, nearly nine months after losing his legs in the accident that left a friend dead.
When Bowman landed, the wind ruffled his pants, exposing his metal artificial legs. He took a few steps, sat down, and helped himself up.
``Well, I did it,'' Bowman said after receiving kudos from a colonel and a three-star general at a ceremony. ``I'm just glad to be here standing on my feet.''
Bowman is the first double amputee to re-enlist and remain on active duty in the U.S. military, said Lt. Gen. Hugh Shelton, commander of the 18th Airborne Corps.
He's shown the ``never-say-quit attitude that makes world-class athletes and world-class soldiers,'' Shelton said.
Bowman wore the Golden Knights' outfit: black stretch pants and a black tunic with the unit patch and his name sewn on it.
He has been reassigned to the Golden Knights and may return to performing with the team, base spokesman Gene Sexton said. Bowman's determination left no doubt the military would take him back, Sexton said.
``When you can run two miles in less than 13 minutes on those legs, I don't think you're too disabled,'' Sexton said Saturday. He was eligible for 100 percent disability and could have quit the Army he had served for 13 years and drawn monthly checks for the rest of his life, Shelton said.
He made his first jump 188 days after his accident, astounding doctors and parachutists.
``His enormous drive and determination ... will keep him going,'' Shelton said.
Even as he woke in the hospital after the accident, groggy and flanked by machines and tubes, Bowman promised himself he'd be back.
``Nobody's surprised,'' says his mother, Donna Bowman, back home in North Ridgeville, Ohio. ``That's just Dana. He gets what he goes after.''
Bowman is, after all, a decorated soldier of the Special Forces and the 82nd Airborne who fought in Panama and Grenada; who last year joined the elite Golden Knights stunt team; who has caught alligators bare-handed in the jungle canals of Central America; made hobby and sport of hang gliding, hot-air ballooning and bungee jumping; and who, now, with artificial legs, will grab a prickly holly bush for balance before he'll reach out for the arm of a friend.
Even before he left Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, Bowman inspired others, encouraging the disconsolate amputees on Ward 57 to buck up and move on with a spirit that isn't as much military bravado as determination not to let the loss of two limbs define who he is or what he can do.
A mere day after leaving intensive care, he persuaded his physicians to let him go to his partner's funeral in Texas. Doctors told him he'd be on crutches for six weeks; he was off them in four days.
And within six months, Bowman was skydiving again.
``Right after I lost my legs I figured, `I'm just going to have to deal with this the best I can,''' he says. ``And that's all I've done ever since.''
He speaks of the Feb. 6 accident unflinchingly. How, for instance, his buddies found his left leg lying in a field and his right leg hooked on his partner's gear.
Many times, Bowman has watched the video a spectator shot that day, the video ``A Current Affair'' later bought and broadcast to the nation.
The footage shows two fuzzy figures free-falling toward each other, streaming decorative smoke across a clear sky, and then, unbelievably, colliding as the man operating the camera breathes, ``Oh my God, they hit, they hit ... Oh no ...''
It was a scene reminiscent of the Challenger space shuttle disaster: the crazy plumes of smoke, the stunned crowd staring heavenward, the utter horror and helplessness as two expert paratroopers drop, drop, drop until their chutes mercifully open.
The Golden Knights had been practicing at their winter training grounds in Yuma, Ariz. Bowman had joined the team just six months earlier, but had eight years' experience skydiving.
``It's the most exhilarating sport,'' Bowman says. ``I've done hang gliding, ballooning, I've done everything. But skydiving, it takes something out of you every time.''
This, this kind of thrill, was why Bowman signed up for the Army as a restless teen-ager looking to get out of North Ridgeville, a Midwestern town where families work the same jobs for generations and live within five miles of one another. He wanted more than the Bowman excavation and construction business, more than all of Ohio even had to offer.
He found the glory in the Army, and the glitz in the Golden Knights.
These 95 men and women are among the best paratroopers in the world. They come from different Army backgrounds but wear the black and gold armor of the Knights.
They are, in many ways, a sort of fraternity, with secret handshakes before each jump and the team cheer before boarding.
In the team's 35-year history, six have died in accidents.
Bowman and his partner were considered two of the Golden Knights' best.
With more than 1,500 jumps, Sgt. Jose Aguillon of San Antonio, Texas, was a veteran paratrooper and the senior partner of the Aguillon-Bowman team.
They were together almost every day of the year, training, performing, sharing rooms on the road.
``He was my best friend,'' Bowman says. ``He was a part of me. Everything we did, we did together.''
Aguillon's instinct for precision made him a natural for the dangerous maneuver called the Black Diamond.
Bowman would jump out of one side of the plane and Aguillon out of the other at the same time. They'd shoot in opposite directions, bodies rigid and straight, heads tucked, until about 30 seconds later and 11/2 miles apart, they'd reverse directions, trailing red smoke that would paint a giant diamond in the sky.
A body in this position is little more than a human missile. Bowman and Aguillon traveled at a combined 300 mph.
Their goal was to pass each other as close as possible, within 20 feet, to close the diamond. They'd done it more than a dozen times, to perfection.
Everything seemed normal Feb. 6. Bowman and Aguillon had reversed directions and started zooming toward each other when they realized something was wrong. They were too close, and it was too late.
``He tried to veer off to one side,'' Bowman says. ``He tried to stop it. He put his arms out and tried to roll off it but he rolled off on me.''
The impact took Bowman's legs off, one above the knee, one below.
He blacked out. So did Aguillon. Aguillon was wearing an automatic opening device, so his chute opened. Bowman wasn't, because he was new on the team and there weren't enough to go around. Miraculously, the collision triggered his canopy, which deposited him in a parking lot, face down and unconscious.
Aguillon landed in a tree and died, apparently of a heart attack.
During his month at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, Bowman astounded and sometimes infuriated the staff by pushing himself to recover and his doctors to find prosthetics that worked. He wouldn't settle for them bringing him reports. He'd do his own research and ask his own questions and wheel himself down to the lab to see prosthetist Jim Cloud personally.
Bowman progressed faster than any amputee they'd ever seen, and in his condition, this was no small thing. The knee is crucial to control and balance, so, next to losing both legs above the knee, the most difficult amputation is losing one above and one below, as he had.
Yet it didn't stop Bowman.
``The first time I heard about him, the chief nurse was mentioning being concerned about him spending so much time on the treadmill,'' recalls Dr. H. Thomas Temple, Walter Reed's director of orthopedic oncology.
``I must say, I've never had anybody quite like Bowman.''
When Bowman told his doctors he was going back to Fort Bragg to jump out of an airplane, they thought he was kidding.
In August, Bowman jumped for the first time after his accident, during the wedding of the brother of a Golden Knight.
In practice, he fell upon landing. For the real thing, he stood tall, his new legs equipped with shock absorbers. He's jumped several times since then. Every time, it's worth the pain.
``A lot of people don't want to go through the pain so they just lay down and they don't get back up,'' Bowman says.
``It's going to be difficult the rest of my life. It's always going to be difficult. But I'm not going to let it get me down.''
by CNB