He was 25 years old when the IED detonated. When he woke up in the hospital, he had no arms and no legs. The doctors expected him to struggle with the will to live. Instead, he asked when he could go home — and then spent the next decade proving that the question was the right one.
2026/07/27
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"The Night Ranger Sergeant Travis Mills Lost All Four Limbs — And Chose to Live Anyway"
On April 10, 2012, Staff Sergeant Travis Mills of the 82nd Airborne Division was on patrol in Kandahar Province, Afghanistan, when he set his rucksack down on a pressure-plate IED.
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The surgical and rehabilitation record that followed is documented extensively, and Mills himself has written and spoken about it with a directness that is both unusual and clearly deliberate.
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