Haunted by military past and leg amputation, Army veteran fights back to run marathons
DETROIT — He decided to kill himself.
"I had everything that was needed," said Kevin Bittenbender, of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. "I had the rope. I had my letters written. I had a plan to go to the woods and hang myself and direct my family there and say, 'This is what I'm doing and this is where I went.'"
The 59-year-old veteran, who spent 34 years in the Army, served on more than 200 combat missions over two tours in Afghanistan. One day, in an Afghan combat zone, he was talking to his team leader, Maj. Henry Ofeciar, who asked him something that touched a nerve.
"He turned to me and said, 'What do you want your legacy to be?'"
Taken aback by the question, he replied simply that he wanted to leave things better than he found them. But before he could really think through the question, he had work to finish elsewhere. He promised to continue the conversation later.
"He said, 'I totally understand. We can always come back and talk about this, but I appreciate your candid answer,'" Bittenbender said. "I wanted to be able to think about it a little more because I wanted to give him an answer he justly deserved."
Bittenbender never got the chance. The very next day, Ofeciar and two other soldiers were killed in an ambush.
Long after coming home, Bittenbender remained haunted by that unfinished conversation, tormented by his incomplete answer to the question. "For about eight years that word 'legacy' drove me to a great state of depression," he said. "I questioned my self-worth anytime I heard the word, anytime I read the word. It just put me into a funk that I didn't ever think I would come out of."
Even worse, his body was falling apart and he was suffering from PTSD. Like many Afghanistan and Iraq veterans, he'd been exposed to the smoke from the burn pits in which the military burned away all sorts of trash and refuse. "Our team would incinerate a lot of unexploded ordnances, IEDs, caches of weapons that we'd find," he said. "And we were breathing in those ferrous metals and breathing in those toxins."
After a while, he couldn't feel his feet or his fingers. His immune system was destroyed. A small infection led to the loss of a toe, then part of a foot, then the amputation of his whole leg.
"When I started losing body parts I started to really question even further my ability," he said. "And it drew me to a point of suicide."
After his leg was amputated, his doctor asked Bittenbender what his goals were. He said he wanted to run a marathon. It was like someone losing an arm and saying he wanted to do pushups — a seemingly impossible task.
But his doctor surprised him. "She said, 'I'll tell you what — if you run it next year, then I'm gonna run it with you.'"
It wasn't easy. He was never a runner. And now he had to learn just to walk on a prosthetic. From there he was taught to skip. The first time he went for a jog on his prosthetic leg he barely made it a couple hundred yards. But this year, just two years after his leg was amputated, he's running in 12 marathons, including the 47th annual Detroit Free Press Marathon on Oct. 20.
The marathons gave him a goal. The training slowly pulled him out of his psychological abyss. All of it motivated him to talk to others about all he'd been through, including coming back from the brink of suicide, in the hopes that it would help save the lives of other veterans facing a similar depression. And finally, it helped him find a satisfying answer to the question posed by his team leader the day before he was killed in combat.
"If he were to ask me that same question today, my reply would just be a simple 'I want to live a life worthy of their sacrifice,'" Bittenbender said. "And I try to do that by pushing myself to the extremes; to accomplish things I set my mind to. But it's also a way for others to come behind me to say if he can do it, I can too."
