On the day Canada’s combat mission ended in Afghanistan, Capt. Trevor Greene sat under a cloudless sky half a world away. Strong. Content. Grateful. Making plans. Cracking the odd joke, even.
Here on Vancouver Island, the country’s best-known war casualty is just steps away from being his old self, after 64 at times hellish months of surgery and therapy.
And those steps — to walk again is the ultimate goal in an odds-defying recovery from his devastating 2006 axe attack — Greene, 46, now describes with certainty.
“I’m going after it. I’ll walk. I’m positive.” The statement is persuasive, given how hours earlier he rose to his feet repeatedly during an iron-pumping session in his home gym on the outskirts of Nanaimo.
But as he rewrites conventional medical wisdom, awakening his body, limb by limb, movement by movement, Greene is now thinking beyond simply walking. He’s looking to pick up where he left off in Afghanistan. Not as a soldier, but as a humanitarian.
A charitable foundation aimed at the education of Afghan girls is what Greene and his equally dedicated wife, Debbie, have in mind. And it is far from an idle notion ....