And Then He Drank His Lemonade

Nobody could blame him if he went through the rest of his life bitter and angry, but:

NEW YORK — John Fernandez should not have been playing lacrosse in the Army-Navy alumni game at Madison Square Garden.


By all rights, the former U.S. Army first lieutenant should be dead. But luck intervened.

"It was just a matter of chance — pure luck," said Fernandez of Shoreham, Long Island, who was severely wounded in Iraq after a U.S. plane dropped a 500-pound bomb on his Humvee in a case of friendly fire on April 3, 2003. Shrapnel from the explosion shredded his legs.

"I crawled," Fernandez recalled. "I couldn't walk."

More than five years later, the soldier can do more than just walk. He can play lacrosse thanks to prosthetic limbs as he demonstrated during the Heroes Cup, which preceded the New York Titans professional game Saturday night.

Well, doesn't that just slap all my petty little complaints in the head and shove them into place?

Yes, indeed it does.