Running a Different Race

Story by Ed Shank

Earl Granville was less than halfway through the 2011 U.S. Army 10-Miler and already in excruciating pain. A month earlier the doctor who fitted him for his prosthetic leg warned that his bone density wasn’t yet strong enough for running, but the headstrong infantryman just laughed. “Don’t worry, Doc. I only plan to walk the 10 miles, not run it,” he said, omitting the fact that he’d also be carrying a 40-pound rucksack.

Now he was beginning to think he should have mentioned the rucksack.

At the beginning of the race, organizers moved all the disabled runners to the front of the pack. Soon after the starting pistol was fired Earl and his fellow “adaptive athletes” were encouraged by cheers of “Awesome job, man!” and “Hooah, soldier!” from able-bodied runners as they passed by.

But those words of encouragement began to fade as the others pulled forward, eventually becoming too far ahead for Earl to catch up. Now he was on his own. Any motivation from this point forward would have to come from whatever thoughts he could muster in his head.

As he reached the top of the Interstate-395 on-ramp he looked to his right to see the Pentagon in full view. His eyes scanned the building looking for where the plane hit, thinking of the men and women who died there and how chaotic the scene must have been that warm September day.

When he returned his attention to the road ahead he saw a police car several meters away, blue lights flashing to ensure the lane remained traffic-free until the final runner moved past.?

It was at that moment Earl realized that final runner was him.

Leaning against the car was a uniformed officer, arms folded with a bemused look on his face. Earl stopped in front of him to catch his breath.

“Hey, buddy—how you making out?” the cop asked.

“I’m good,” Earl lied. “Little sore, I guess. But I’m OK.”

“That’s good,” the officer replied, “but I can’t keep traffic tied up all day. The way I see it is you’ve got two options. One, you get in the vehicle and you can call it a day. Or two, I gotta escort you down this highway so we can open this road up. Which one will it be?”

Earl paused as his mind switched between the pros and cons of each option, the stump of his left leg throbbing in synch with his elevated heart rate. No one would blame him if he jumped in the cruiser, rode back to his truck and cracked open a cold beer. Maybe the doctor was right—maybe it was too soon after his injury to attempt something this big.

Then another thought crossed his mind. “This isn’t about you. Suck it up.”

Earl’s eyes returned to the policeman. “I appreciate the offer, but if you’re giving me the option, I’m gonna keep going. I’ve come this far. I can’t quit now.”

The officer shook his head, fully aware of how he would now be spending the next few hours. Still, he couldn’t help but admire the young man’s dedication. “Alright, then,” he said as he climbed into the driver’s seat to begin his new mission—driving at a snail’s pace behind a stubborn, one-legged staff sergeant as he hobbled down the D.C. beltway.

Earl adjusted the straps on his backpack as he took a step forward, wincing in pain as the stump of his leg made contact with the socket of his prosthetic. He closed his eyes and repeated aloud to himself: “I’ve come this far. I can’t quit now.”

Born Into a Team

Earl Granville and his identical-twin brother Joe grew up in a small, blue-collar town just outside of Scranton, Pennsylvania. Though he was only born 35 minutes earlier, Joe assumed the role of older brother almost immediately, acting as the more mature, responsible sibling and setting the standard that his brother (often reluctantly) followed.?

Earl adored his brother, considering him as much a best friend as a family member. The two were inseparable.

Such was the case when, as high school seniors, Joe decided to join the military.

“Joe and I had a car that we shared,” Earl recalls. “It was Tuesday and I had the car and Joe wanted to talk to an Army National Guard recruiter, so he asked me to give him a ride. I had absolutely ZERO interested in joining the military—that was totally Joe’s thing—but then they started talking about college, which was something I WAS interested in, but knew I couldn’t pay for. Before I knew it, Joe and I were both signing the paperwork and getting ready to leave for basic training.”

Though they enlisted together, the brothers had very different motivations for joining.

“What drew me toward it was the education,” Earl says. “It had nothing to do with serving my country or something bigger than myself—that was all Joe. For me it was more selfish. It was ‘what can I get out of this?’”

After graduation the Granville brothers spent the summer of 2001 hanging out with friends before leaving for boot camp at Fort Benning, Ga. Sept. 1.

Ten days later terrorists attacked the United States.

“We didn’t have access to TVs or radios,” Earl remembers, “so rumors were circulating like crazy! Things like all the monuments in D.C. had been blown up. It was just chaos. People started going AWOL and I thought ‘what have I gotten myself into?’”

A few months later, the Granvilles finished their training, each receiving blue chords on their uniforms designating them as U.S. Army infantrymen. When the newly-minted soldiers returned to Pennsylvania, Earl enrolled at a local college while Joe took a job in construction, both reporting for monthly drills at the armory and waiting for the day they'd be called to deploy.

Finally they did receive the call, but not to the Middle East like they expected. Their unit had been activated for a mission in Bosnia where they would spend a year supporting U.S. peace-keeping efforts in that country.

“I was a little nervous at first,” Earl recalls, “but Bosnia turned out to be a nice, easy deployment. Joe and I went together and it was towards the end of the conflict, so there wasn’t much going on there at the time. It was nice and chill.”

As missions in Europe began to scale back, America’s involvement in the Middle East ramped up. In addition to the on-going combat missions in Afghanistan, the scope of the Global War on Terror had expanded to include deployments to Iraq. With active duty forces stretched thin, the reserve component was increasingly called upon to fill in the gaps. Shortly after the Granvilles’ unit returned from the Balkans they received another warning order, this time for Iraq.

“Since we’d just gotten back from Bosnia, we didn’t have to go to Iraq,” Earl says, “but that didn’t matter to Joe. He volunteered right away. At first I was thinking of staying back, but I sat on it for a few days and thought, ‘God forbid something should happen to him over there.’ So I decided I’d go too. That turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.”

Prior to Iraq, Earl planned to leave the military at the end of his enlistment, utilizing his free education and veteran’s status as a stepping stone to a career elsewhere. His time in Iraq, however, changed those plans.

“Before that deployment it was all about me,” he recalls. “I played sports in high school, but I never thought about ‘us’ at the level we faced in Iraq. While we were there I became an NCO and began taking on more responsibility, which made me realize this wasn’t about me, my education or what I could get out of the Army.

“This was about being there for my fellow soldiers. Their lives depended on me and my life depended on them. That made me love wearing the uniform.”

While Bosnia may have been “chill,” Iraq was anything but. The Granvilles’ unit was part of “The Surge” of American forces President George W. Bush hoped would result in a quick end to the war. The Taliban responded with an increased number of lethal attacks on coalition forces. And while Earl feels his unit’s presence made a difference in the area, it came at a high cost.

“We arrived in June of ’05 and in August we suffered our first casualty—a soldier from my unit who was killed by a sniper,” he remembers. “The next month, September 19th, another soldier was driving a Bradley and hit an IED. And then, September 28th, we lost five Pennsylvania Guardsmen from one IED, which is pretty heavy, especially for a Guard unit. To have five from the same small community back in Northeastern Pennsylvania happen all at once...trust me, it was tough.”

By the time they returned home from their 18-month deployment, the brigade Earl and Joe were assigned to suffered more than 80 casualties. Despite those losses (or, perhaps, because of them), Staff Sgt. Earl Granville found his calling.

“Even though all that stuff?happened,” he says. “I knew that this was a job that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. So I reenlisted over there and that was that. We came home and I went back to school and one-weekend-a-month drills, but I couldn’t help but wonder ‘OK, what’s next?’”

What came next was something that would change his life forever.

Less than a year after Earl and Joe returned from Iraq, the Pennsylvania National Guard began preparing for yet another deployment, this time to Afghanistan. As was the case with their trip to Iraq, recently-returning combatants were exempt, but could volunteer if they chose to do so. Energized by his newly-discovered sense of purpose, Earl decided he wanted to go again.

Joe, on the other hand, wanted to sit this one out. He had recently been hired as a corrections officer at a local state prison and just found out his wife was pregnant with their second child. This was not a good time for him to be out of the picture for another full year.

But Earl had no such obligations.

“I knew this was a job I wanted to do and I just loved what I did at the time, so I volunteered,” says Earl. “Joe decided to stay back. He wanted me to stay home too, but I was like ‘no way, man. I’m cutting this cord! See you later, dude.’”

Going it Alone

In Afghanistan, Earl’s unit provided personal security for a civil affairs element whose mission was to reconstruct parts of Afghanistan destroyed by the Taliban.

“We were working with civil affairs teams and engineers who would meet with local village elders and politicians,” he says. “They were doing things like providing wells to local villages and renovating hospitals and rebuilding schools. We were there to provide them with security in case things went sideways. It was a pretty awesome assignment. I became a staff sergeant over there. Life was pretty good.”

On June 3, 2008 Earl’s unit was assigned to escort a civil affairs team to a school in the village of Zurmat. The visit had gone well and the soldiers were returning to base.

Standing in the gunner’s hatch with his head and chest above the HUMVEE, Earl was enjoying the warm breeze and blue sky, remarking over his headset that he’d just spotted green grass for the first time since arriving in-country.

Then everything went black.

When Earl came to, he was covered in blood and lying in the grass several feet away from his vehicle, now a smoldering hunk of metal and shattered glass. His fellow soldiers ran past him, weapons drawn, frantically trying to assess the situation.

“You’re going to be OK” one of them said. Another knelt down next to him, saying a quick prayer before running off to help secure the perimeter.

Earl tried to stand up—tried to help defend against a possible attack—but his legs wouldn’t move.

Earl’s vehicle had been struck by a roadside bomb, blowing him through the gunner's-hatch where he landed several feet from the road. Had he been wearing his harness as he was supposed to, he would be dead.

He was lucky. Others were not.

His driver, Spc. Derek Holland, a fellow Army Guard member from Pennsylvania, and Maj. Scott Hagerty, a civil affairs officer and reservist from Stillwater, Oklahoma, were killed in the explosion.

The next few months were a blur of medivac flights,hospitals and surgeries. Army doctors amputated Earl’s left leg above the knee. They determined he could keep his right leg, but explained the metal rods and screws they used to hold the bones together would likely cause him pain for the rest of his life.

All things considered, though, he was lucky to be alive.

“The fact that I wasn’t wearing my harness, the fact that I was blown clear of the vehicle, even the way I landed on my leg doctors said kept me from bleeding out,” Earl says.

“Maybe it was just one big coincidence, I don’t know, but everything lined up right to keep me here and I’m not complaining.”

Discovering a New Normal

After months of surgeries at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, Earl was finally transferred to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in the U.S. where he could see his family. The reunion was a happy one for everyone but Joe, who was visibly shaken.

“My reunion with my brother was kinda heavy,” Earl remembers. “He didn’t say much. Sometimes he’d come to visit but wouldn’t even come into my room. He’d just stand in the hallway. Eventually he says, ‘I shoulda gone with you, dude.’ And I’m like, ‘Why? There’s nothing you could have done. I’m here, I’m alive. I’m trying to be optimistic. Let’s just move forward with this.’”

By winter of 2010 Earl had moved forward. He’d been released from the hospital and living on his own in a house not far from his family. Fitted with a prosthetic leg, he slowly began adjusting to a new definition of a normal life.

Joe, however, was not able to reconcile. Suffering from survivor’s guilt—a mental condition that occurs when a person believes they have done something wrong by surviving a traumatic event which others did not—Joe sank into a deep depression, isolating himself from his friends and family until one day Earl received a call from his mother telling him that Joe had taken his own life. He was devastated.

“It was absolutely the worst day of my life,” he recalls. “I felt like, how did I get this second chance at life and Joe took his only one away?”

All the energy and enthusiasm Earl had been putting into his rehabilitation was now gone. Prior to Joe’s death he’d been struggling with finding a purpose outside the military. Now he’d lost his twin brother—his best friend and role model.

“I started feeling sorry for myself,” he remembers. “I started making it all about me again, just like when I first joined the Army. I started reminding everybody ‘look what I did for my country.’ I wore a T-shirt that said ‘dysfunctional veteran’ and that’s what I became—just some guy with a shitty attitude. I was miserable, I was unhappy and I felt like the world owed me everything.”

In the months that followed Joe’s funeral, Earl became depressed, angry and increasingly out of shape. In the military, he had a sense of purpose, belonging to something bigger than himself and was surrounded by like-minded people. Now he was completely alone with no plan for his future.

Just as he’d hit rock-bottom he received a visit from one of Joe’s best friends, Chris. Joe and Chris were corrections officers together, passing many long hours on their shift talking about their lives outside of work. Earl was surprised to hear that he was one of their main topics.

“Chris told me that Joe used to talk about me all the time,” Earl says, “He said he was proud of my positive attitude and how I was moving forward after my injury. Hearing that made me think, if Joe could see the way I’m treating myself and other people now, would he still be proud of me? Absolutely not.”

From that day forward Earl used the memory of Joe, Derek Holland, Scott Hagerty and the other soldiers he’d known and lost as motivation to?begin the long, difficult process of getting back into shape, training in the same way he once had as an infantryman—ruck-marching.

With a backpack full of weights from his home gym, Earl slowly began?his journey, measuring his progress first in feet, then in meters, then in?miles. Over time, walks with his dog through his neighborhood evolved into weekend hikes in the woods, meeting people along the way and sharing stories of tough times they overcame. Eventually Earl became part of a group of outdoor enthusiasts he enjoyed being around, which made him feel like he was part of something again.

Reaching the Finish Line

By the time Earl reached the end of the 2011 Army 10-Miler there was no finish line. It had been torn down hours earlier. It had taken Earl more than five hours to ruck-march 10 miles, more than three hours beyond the overall average. But he didn’t care. He ran a different race than the others did and he’d come much further than 10 miles.

As he limped toward his truck parked in the Pentagon lot he was not alone. A woman who worked in the rehabilitation department at Walter Reed stayed with him throughout the course. Several others who'd finished hours earlier waited for?him in the parking lot. Earl now belonged to a new team of like-minded individuals, sharing stories of overcoming loss and encouraging each other to test their limit.

Today Earl Granville is a public speaker and ambassador for?Oscar Mike and Operation Enduring Warrior, organizations dedicated to honoring, empowering and motivating America’s wounded military and law enforcement veterans.

This story first appeared in the July 2019 edition of "At Ease" magazine.