THE EARTH MOVED under her feet. That is Lauren Montoya's memory of war -- a constant rumble from the ground on up. Every sound, human or otherwise, was guttural, and she always had this sixth and seventh sense that someone was watching her, trying to kill her. For most of her stay in Afghanistan, she was a gunner stationed in an armored truck, her finger on the trigger of a 50-caliber machine gun, her job to have four eyes in the back of her head. There was no mental break allowed. The stress of it all was supposed to be trained out of her at boot camp, but that's only in theory. The reality was that Montoya's insides were always rumbling along with the earth. Until nighttime came.
Gunners get to shut their eyes, too. Montoya would slip into her sleeping bag each night at 3 a.m., in the middle of a Kandahar desert, and stare up at the stars. The sky seemed wider, brighter and more 3D in Afghanistan, almost mystical. The air felt fresher. She says maybe it was the juxtaposition between beauty and hate. But for whatever reason, the ground stopped moving for her at night. "We were in a war zone,'' she says. "There are enemy dudes watching us, and we can hear them over the radio. But it was probably one of the most peaceful and tranquil moments that I've ever had.''
All these months later, in San Antonio, Texas, that is the vision that keeps coming back to Lauren Montoya. Safe in her apartment, along with her wife, her daughter and her prosthetic, she lives for those Afghanistan nights. They are in her dreams and daydreams. They fuel her.
It is why she runs.
HER FIREBASE IN Kandahar had a makeshift running track -- just in case war wasn't enough to make the soldiers sweat and they wanted a workout, too. One lap was only 294 feet, a pittance, so Montoya would run around the track 18 times to get in a full mile. "Was like a little hamster,'' she says.
Her energy knew no bounds, which is how Montoya had always been. Now 25 years old, she grew up in a barrio of East Austin, Texas, where she remembers seeing gang and drug activity. Her parents, Rudy and Carol, each worked for the state attorney general's office and had grand aspirations for their children. Laziness wasn't tolerated. Athletics were required.
In high school, Montoya was barely over 5 feet tall, but there wasn't a sport she wouldn't take on. Softball might have been her favorite; she was a middle infielder who could hit to all fields. She was also a point guard in basketball, a setter in volleyball, a hard server in tennis and a master of every stroke in swimming.
She had a quiet independence about her. When she enrolled to attend Texas A&M, her friends and family just assumed she'd join the school's Corps of Cadets. Generations of her immediate family had enlisted in the military. A great aunt was a nurse in World War II; a grandfather fought in the Korean War; an uncle fought in Vietnam; a cousin fought in Desert Storm; more cousins were in the initial invasions into Iraq and Afghanistan.
Don't think she wasn't paying attention. The military was always a career waiting to happen for her (softball was the unofficial sport of the Army, and she was going to love that), but not yet. She declined to enroll in the Corps of Cadets and instead secured a full-time job in the town of College Station. She wanted to experience undergraduate life, wanted to do it her way.
Halfway through her junior year, though, she was ready. Without telling her parents, she went to the Military Entrance Processing Station in Houston and enlisted in the Army. When she called home to fill them in, they were livid -- not because she was joining, but because she hadn't finished school first. They wanted her to go in as a lieutenant, not a private. But her fear of the military journey ahead was negligible. She wanted to see a front line, preferably in Afghanistan.
At first, she aspired to be an MP, but instead Montoya was offered the job of human intelligence collector -- a fancy title for an interrogator. But as the U.S. began slowly pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, fewer and fewer interrogators were being deployed overseas. She was spending most of her days in a classroom, learning to drag information out of imaginary people. "Boring," she says. She was annoyed until her first sergeant had a novel idea that could enter her into battle: a cultural support team.
The team was for elite female soldiers only, and it could plant her in Afghanistan as a liaison to the Ranger Regiment and Special Forces. But first she would have to survive an intensive 10-day boot camp with 95 other women, competing with them both mentally and physically. She would have to do pullups with weight on her back. She would have to stay up all night, then ace difficult intelligence tests. It was 10 days of trying to function at a high level through sleep deprivation -- in other words, it was an absolute simulation of war. When it was all over, Montoya was one of only 34 women to earn the job.
"You're more than likely going to be on the front line now," Montoya says. "That's what we thought we were doing when we joined the Army, and this was our chance."
By November 2013, Montoya joined a Special Forces team in Kandahar. Her mission was to extract information from Afghan women, which was tricky. From a cultural standpoint, it is considered inappropriate for Afghan females to speak with unknown men in public, much less American soldiers in battle fatigues. But they could talk to other women, which is where Montoya came in. When she would encounter Afghan women, they would answer her questions, and, often, they would approach her unsolicited to talk, as well. They needed help making clothes, and Montoya helped supply them with sewing machines, via the military. She was invited once inside an Afghan home. She reported it all back to Special Forces.
Back at her firebase, Montoya heard there was a need for soldiers who could operate different weapon systems. She volunteered and exceled at shooting machine guns. She was quiet with a calm pulse -- a prerequisite for being a sniper. She lifted weights, had a strong core. She was a prodigy. By early 2014, the lieutenants pulled her off of the intel missions and turned her into a gunner. "That's where I kind of flourished,'' she says.
The job was more dangerous now -- the incessant rumble of war began -- and those nights in the sleeping bag under the brilliant desert stars kept her sane, kept her life in perspective. "This is who I am," she would tell herself.
She was at her peak. To be a gunner, she knew she had to be in pristine condition, and she would run mountains to stay fit, would run her 18 laps at the firebase. In fact, her last memory of running on two legs came on her 18th lap on March 21, 2014. She remembers finishing that lap and eventually heading out to her sleeping bag.
The sky was so clear she could almost see to Texas.
THE MISSION ON March 22, 2014, was relatively routine. Montoya's mine-resistant RG-33 truck was on its way back to base after a day in and around Kandahar. The only difference this time was that her armored truck was in the front of the team's caravan rather than the rear. So as she scanned the desert, her finger on her machine gun, she was more exposed than normal.
About 20 minutes into the ride home, an improvised explosive device (IED) detonated in the team's path. Montoya's truck was the one that took the brunt of it. At impact, Montoya was literally lifted off her feet, a sensation that must have felt otherworldly.
"I remember being up in the air and looking around," Montoya says. "You just have that, 'Oh s---' moment that there's nothing I can do at this point except wait for it to be over."
She landed in a heap, pinned underneath heavy equipment that had avalanched onto her left side. She couldn't dislodge herself and had the instant fear that one of her body parts had been blown off. Of the seven soldiers in the truck, five were seriously injured -- leaving two people free to clear the wreckage.
As soon as they dug Montoya out, she inspected herself and found her leg intact. That is, until she attempted to move. "I tried to walk, and I couldn't walk," she says. "I just fell to ground. I knew something was really wrong."
There was an emergency call for a medevac helicopter, and, while lying on her back, one of her team members tried administering morphine. But he inadvertently held the needle backward and instead gave the shot to himself. It was a much-needed moment of levity, because as the helicopter lifted her away over Kandahar, she looked down below and was overcome with grief. The injury was bad enough, but now she was leaving her spectacular desert.
The next 15 days were a blur. All she knew was that she underwent surgery in Afghanistan, another operation in Germany and then more surgery after she was airlifted to San Antonio. She had crushed her heal bone and suffered nerve and muscle damage from her left foot up to her left knee. Forget running 18 laps -- the pipe dream now was whether she'd again be able to walk.
Her friends in Texas were unaware, other than a cryptic text Montoya had sent to a friend named Rachel: "Got hit by an IED, but we're fine." Either way, word had traveled among her friends that she was hospitalized at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Visitors started trickling in, including an acquaintance of Montoya's named Sarah Wylie.
She had met Sarah via an internet dating site in 2013 before leaving for Afghanistan. They were still relatively new friends, but, when Sarah -- who lived in nearby Fredericksburg, Texas -- kept stopping by the hospital after work, their connection grew.Lord knows, Montoya needed the moral support. Just the process of rolling over in bed, much less standing up, was taxing. She had suffered a leg infection and now needed a fourth operation. She had been Superwoman just a month before, a lead gunner in the Army, and now she was an incapacitated. "All of a sudden, I can't take care of myself anymore," she says. "I couldn't. I was stuck in a hospital bed and I couldn't move. It's no longer a choice of do I want somebody to help me. It's now: I need somebody to help me. And that was probably the hardest part: letting people help."
Her parents were by her side at first. But when she left the hospital in a wheelchair -- holding a pair of crutches -- it was to live with Sarah, who also happened to be the mother of a 3-year-old. "It was really a hard time," Sarah says. "We dealt with depression and all the meds she was on. It was like zombie Lauren. It was like a shadow of who she really was.
"The injury wasn't the hardest part; it was being taken away from Afghanistan before she was supposed to. There wasn't the transition time of, 'OK, I'm going home now, I'm ready, I've finished my job.' Now her job was just to lay in a bed. She's a go-getter. She can't just lay there. That's just not how she lives."
The lowest point in that first year, post-explosion, were the nights Montoya needed to use the restroom -- and couldn't bring herself to tap Sarah for assistance. In Afghanistan, she would be under the stars at 3 a.m. Now at 3 a.m., she was crawling on her hands and knees alone to the bathroom, unwilling to wake up Sarah for help. "It makes me emotional just hearing that," Sarah says.
Something had to be done to improve her quality of life. Her recovery was going on nine months, and she'd had a total of nine surgeries -- an average of one a month. She was either in a wheelchair or on crutches. Eventually, Montoya was referred to the Center for the Intrepid in San Antonio to obtain an IDEO (Intrepid Dynamic Exoskeletal Orthosis) brace, which at first enabled her to walk gingerly. But it also caused her leg to swell and the scars on her leg to re-open. It was of no use.
Her only refuge was her daily swim at a local pool. Through the Military Adaptive Sports Program (MAPS), she had been urged -- almost ordered -- to get back in the water. Doing the breaststroke with one leg took some getting used to, but just the act of exercise was invigorating. MAPS also offered shot put and discus throwing out of a wheelchair, which was just as novel.
But her personal life was mostly what kept her going, because of her burgeoning relationship with Sarah. In December 2014, the two were married at a Las Vegas wedding chapel by an Elvis impersonator. Only her injury kept them from dancing a jig afterward. She kept begging her doctors to amputate her left leg, from just above the knee on down. It was her last shred of hope. She had heard of amputees going back to the Army wearing prosthetics. So that became her new daydream.
Finally, on April 23, 2015, 23-year-old Lauren Montoya had her left leg amputated. Afterward, she celebrated.
THE MINUTE HER prosthetic arrived, in August 2015, she was out the door. Her first stop was a workout warehouse called 210 CrossFit, where she introduced herself to the owner and coach, Steve Galvan. He sized her up, all 5-foot-2 of her, and immediately noticed the missing lower leg.
"Yeah, I have this issue, right?" she said. "But I just want to train. I want to be an able-bodied person. I want to get back in the Army."
Galvan told her she had a home, that he would train her -- and that she wouldn't owe him a cent.
"What are you talking about?" Montoya asked.
"You almost gave your life and you lost a leg for your country," he said. "You don't have to pay. No. That's silly."
Grateful, her next step was to learn how to stay balanced on her prosthetic. She began showing up at 210 CrossFit early each morning with the express purpose of becoming a power lifter. Galvan helped her with technique, until soon she was telling him about her swimming, her volleyball, her cycling, her shot putting and, happily, her running.
He told her that training to dead-lift 200 pounds is not quite the same as training to swim and run. He was confused about what she was exactly trying to accomplish."It's all about the Invictus Games," she told him.
"The what?"
"The Invictus Games," she said. "The best wounded or injured military athletes from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines compete against the best wounded or injured military athletes from all over the world. The British Armed Forces, France, Germany. Afghanistan has a team. It's like an Olympics for wounded soldiers, in a way. I am going."
In her mind, preparing for the Invictus Games was tantamount to preparing for war again. At some point, if she were ever going to return to Afghanistan, she was going to have to be deemed "fit for duty" by the Army's medical board and the Department of Defense. And what better way to get fit than preparing for the Invictus Games' quasi-decathlon. "Having sports -- or adaptive sports, whatever you want to call it -- relit that fire in me to find myself again," she says. Still, all Galvan could do was scratch his head, as Montoya listed her Invictus Games events. She would compete in 100- and 200-meter sprints, the shot put and discus, the 50- and 100-meter freestyle swims, the 50-meter backstroke and breaststroke, power lifting and potentially sitting volleyball.
"Inside her heart and inside her head, she's got a lot to prove to herself," Galvan says. "People that go through loss and really adverse situations, they deal with it differently. Some people do nothing. Some people turn to drugs or drinking. And some people just immerse themselves in activity or sports and just drown themselves in something. I think it's a therapeutic thing for her. She doesn't want what happened to her to beat her.
"She might have lost her leg and people will be like, 'Oh, poor you.' And she's like, there's no poor me. She doesn't want to be pitied; she doesn't want to be different. So she works 10 times harder so people can see she's normal. She can do everything everybody else can do."
Month after month, she was literally training four to six hours a day for four different sports. Otherwise, she'd be in the gun range. She had photos taken of her doing dead-lifts, photos of her shooting pistols, photos of her dragging a 185-pound dummy. She sent the pictures to the Army's medical board, hoping to be reinstated to the military -- and waited patiently for an answer.
She never seemed more robust. Her now 5-year-old adopted daughter, Lillian, would see people staring at Montoya's prosthetic and pronounce: "Oh yeah, that's my mom. She's got a robot leg because her bad guys got the other one."
Montoya really did feel bionic. She dead-lifted 205 pounds. She competed in the Bataan Death March, a 26-mile run while carrying 30 pounds on her back, in March in New Mexico. It might have taken her 13 hours, 24 minutes and 21.9 seconds to finish, but she finished, without keeling over, without complaining one iota about the sun, the heat and the weight.
"When I crossed the [finish] line, I knew I'd be fine to handle the military," she says.
Soon enough, she received the news: The Army deemed her fit for duty. In other words, she was as qualified as any other able-bodied person to defend her country. She and her wife and her daughter celebrated. The upcoming Invictus Games (May 8-12) had served its purpose.
"Some people may look at it as chasing this unattainable thing," Montoya says. "Some will ask now, 'Do you think you're going to deploy?' Or, 'Why would you want to go back?' Or, 'Why do you want to stay in the Army?' I mean, my wife is going to kill me, but the Army was my first love. I loved my job. And I love that I found my place in the world through the Army."
All that is left is to wait to see where she will be deployed. It could be anywhere -- from South Carolina to the South of France. Or she could return to her desert in Kandahar, where there's that juxtaposition between beauty and hate, where the stars in the sky are three sizes too large.
She dreams and daydreams about the latter. It is why she runs. Just so she can feel the earth move under her.