Backstory: Leaping tall stereotypes in a single bound

To relieve the social strain when old friends visited, Swartz took to jokingly calling himself "goofy" and "stumpy." But to his bosses, his message was different and serious. If he couldn't wrestle a suspect to the ground, climb a fence, dash through a field, or carry a crash victim to an ambulance, then he was out – fair and square. All he wanted, he said, was a chance.

His approach to rehabilitation was methodical. He drew up lists of goals – "balance time on leg: 30 sec ... sprint 40 yds ... in+out of car really fast ... 100 lb backpack upstairs" – and worked, sometimes through tears, until he nailed them.

By March 2005, he was walking without a cane. By May, he was swimming. By June, he was running on a treadmill. When he and his physical therapist, Dawn Evans, noticed that he'd yet to sling a 140-pound body over his shoulders – a so-called "buddy carry" – Swartz squatted, grabbed her around the legs and ran her in circles around the gym.

"When you can run a mile-and-a-half," Captain Sprague told him on the phone one day, "you call me."

Swartz called in July, and the two started jogging on a local school track. "You couldn't help but be drawn into his campaign to get his job back," Sprague says. "He had a single purpose, and he devoted every ounce of his being to it."

"By September," he adds, "I couldn't catch him."

Swartz ran a 5K later that month and made sure his bosses saw the photo in the paper.

In his downtime, he surfed the Web for stories about American soldiers who'd lost limbs in Iraq. Many were reenlisting, he discovered. A few were returning to the front lines. The soldiers, young and driven, were shattering expectations – not least Swartz's own – about the prospects for a normal life after limb loss. Swartz began documenting his progress in a photo album emblazoned with an antique American flag.

In October 2005, Swartz filed papers to return to duty. He expected a long wait. He half-dreaded a court fight. He'd done enough research in the 11 months since the crash to know that never in the New York State Police's 88-year history had an amputee returned to full and strenuous duty.

Nearly as worrisome was that he'd never been anything but an average trooper. He'd made no headline-grabbing arrests. He wrote fewer traffic tickets than a lot of guys in his barracks.

"I know I'm not God's gift to police work," he remembers thinking.

The State Police superintendent, Wayne E. Bennett, himself a veteran of Troop G, had gotten a final assessment of Swartz on the Friday of Columbus Day Weekend 2005. A state-contracted physician had gone through a checklist and deemed Swartz capable of every duty of a state trooper, from directing traffic in bad weather to subduing unruly suspects. That evening, Bennett sent word from Albany: Swartz was to report to work Monday morning.

A group of troopers took him out to breakfast to celebrate. "Run, Forrest, Run," one of them teased, glimpsing parallels to the come-from-behind hero of "Forrest Gump."

Swartz's first year back, he says, has had its share of "bad leg days." But he hides those struggles from his fellow troopers, believing some battles should be fought alone. The people he talks to about his leg are elsewhere. Soldiers with legs blown off in Iraq. Other police amputees, from agencies as far afield as Arizona and Michigan. His own research suggests perhaps 40 police officers nationwide have returned to full duty after amputations. Many heard his story and called – some for tips, others just to vent.

This winter, Swartz begins training as a ski instructor. He wants to "pay back," he says, and hopes to volunteer with a ski program in the Catskills for disabled children and soldiers.

***

The 19-trooper Fonda Barracks occupies a square building next door to a John Deere tractor dealership, in the gray-green hills of the Mohawk Valley. On one recent afternoon, Trooper Swartz put on his gray uniform and rode out into the rolling landscape of barns and hay fields. He stopped cars for speeding and expired inspection stickers, then approached with the puffed-up swagger of a movie cop, cock-eyed stare at the ready. It was hard to imagine anyone guessing that the lower half of one leg was snapped-on carbon fiber and titanium.

"Typical day," he said during a break in the action, a small smile on his lips. "Riding around, waiting for something to happen."

Page: 1 | 2