Before the Olympics, though, Dodson will help lead the U.S. team at the first Reeve Hockey Classic on Feb. 19 in Boston. The event, which will take place the night before the 4 Nations Face-Off championship game, will see the U.S and Canada’s national sled hockey teams compete in a game put on by the NHL in cooperation with USA Hockey and Hockey Canada at Kasabuski Rink in Saugus, Massachusetts. The game will financially support the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation’s ‘Quality of Life Grant Program’ with the Reeve family participating in the ceremonial puck drop.
Each team will hold a practice open the public on Feb. 18, but capacity is limited.
Dodson will be with his teammates, showing his game to new and old audiences, all while the eyes of the hockey world are on Boston during the 4 Nations Face-Off, being held in Montreal and Boston from Feb. 12-20.
He will share what was apparent to him from the first time he laid eyes on sled hockey, back in Sochi. That this was the sport for him. That it was right.
“It’s been great,” Dodson said. “Our team has some of the best chemistry of any team, any international team, we just get along so well. No one really cares who scores. We’re all in it together. It’s been everything I had hoped it would be, and more.”
* * * *
Dodson doesn’t think the grenade could have landed in his lap, as reports at the time said happened. It seems impossible, that he could have made it out without the damage overwhelming his body.
But it couldn’t have been far, either, the weapon passing through the burglar bars on the second-story window of the temporary combat outpost where they were on Feb. 14, 2007.
“I don’t remember seeing the grenade,” he said. “I just feel like it would have done so much more damage to other parts of my body if that would have happened. But I think there’s a good chance that I saw it and maybe tried to kind of get away from it. I think the blast might have taken away that little bit of short-term memory.
“But there’s no way it went off in my lap. There’s no way I would have survived that.”
Dodson didn’t come from a military family, but the decision felt right. School wasn’t for him and, though he felt something of a call to service for the country, he wanted an adventure, an experience, a chance to travel. He joined the Marines.
“It just seemed like a such a no-brainer answer to me, to join,” Dodson said.
It was 2005. He was 19.
Dodson became a machine-gunner, stationed in Kaneohe Bay, Hawaii. Almost immediately, his unit, Company G, 2nd Battalion, 3rd Marine Regiment got the orders: They would be headed to Iraq in seven months for a seven-month tour.
The grenade landed six months in.
“We were occupying a house and we got contact, the house started getting shot,” Dodson said. “They ended up throwing a grenade into one of the windows. It blew off both my legs and killed one of my friends.”
It was 5:15 p.m., as evening fell, according to a “Stars and Stripes” story written at the time by a reporter embedded with the unit. Six people were in the second-story room, with Dodson on the floor, cleaning his rifle, and Morris near the window.
Dodson remembers being on the ground, that his head hurt.
“I got flipped over and then I had my hands, I was checking, so I was picking up pieces of my leg and stuff,” Dodson said. “Then people were on me right away, trying to work on me. I remember talking to them. I was actually pretty coherent during the whole thing.”
They wrapped a tourniquet up around his hip to attempt to stop the bleeding from the femoral artery, to keep him from bleeding out.
They were talking to him, trying to keep him conscious. He made it to the helicopter, where he asked for morphine. The scene goes black, after that.
When they arrived at Balad Air Force Base in Iraq, a call went out for O-positive blood.
They had run out.
Here, Dodson pauses in his story. His voice turns thick.
“People stopped doing whatever they were doing,” he said. “They’re at the mess hall or they were working out. And they put out a call and people went running, you know, to donate blood.”
The words stop, again.
“So when you hear about stuff like that, it’s just … yeah,” he said. “They didn’t even know me. They just knew that someone was injured and they had to go do it.”
He later learned, he said, so much blood was taken from those offering that some passed out. He needed, it was reported, more than 30 units of blood, nearly three times the volume of blood in an adult’s body.
Dodson was transported to National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, where there were surgeries, work to stabilize him and get him ready to head off, again, for the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio.
The Center, for newly injured amputees, helped with prosthetics and rehabilitation. Dodson would be there for two years, as he learned to live with his new reality.
“A lot of people when you get freshly injured like that, you kind of feel like you want to go into a hole and just not see the world anymore,” Dodson said. “They did a good job of forcing you to go out in public. You couldn’t just stay in your room all day. You had to get out and socialize and go try stuff.”
It was where he was introduced to adaptive sports. It was something to strive for every day, something to work toward.
“Adaptive sports gave me a new passion,” Dodson said. “Immediately I could go and work hard at doing whatever, whether it was wheelchair racing or cross-country. You get to go burn off a bunch of energy and just get a good sweat. It was just good for my mental health. I obviously attribute a lot of where I am now to disabled sports.”
* * * *
Dodson had been in a sled once before, before he fell in love with the sport.
“I couldn’t even stay in the sled and I kind of just wrote it off,” Dodson said. “I was like, ‘oh, that’s not a very fun sport. That sport kind of sucks.’”
But seeing that gold-medal game changed his mind. So when Dodson returned from Sochi, he made contact with a local club, the Chicago Blackhawks Sled Hockey Team, getting in touch with them in December, 2014. The team had a generic sled that worked, as a start. Though, because Dodson was a double amputee, it wasn’t an optimal setup.
“They’re not built for double amputees,” said Daniels, who works for the Shirley Ryan AbilityLab and coaches the Blackhawks Sled Hockey team. “They’re just a general program sleds so we had a great equipment manager whose son is also a Paralympian and he kind of built this sled that Travis could get started in. Literally because he didn’t have legs out from and the sleds are so long, we added extra weight to his sled at first, just to get him balanced.”
He started training immediately. Cross-country, at which he said he was “very mediocre,” fell away just as quickly. But it helped, still. The movements and the endurance between sit skiing and skating were similar, used the same strength, the same power.
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