 My name is Kenneth Lee. I'm the Chief of Spinal Cord Injury Unit at the Milwaukee VA Medical Center. I came from South Korea when I was age 10. My father, his big thing was that every person should be serving their own country in some ways. You know, I joined the Illinois National Guard to start within the infantry unit and transferred over to the Wisconsin Army National Guard. I just got my job as the Chief of Spinal Cord Injury about a week before getting a call that I'm getting deployed. I volunteered to join. I knew there's always a chance to go to war. I never thought I would go to war, but I did. But the biggest thing was notifying my wife that I would be gone for almost a year or more. At that time, I knew it was kind of coming. You know, you just have that sense. You know, he's in the medical unit. But it was still hard. My son was five years old. My daughter was eight years old. I don't think they quite understood. Life in Iraq was a little different. So as a medical unit, we adapted to running our own missions without any MPs or infantry support. We had absolutely no tools, nothing. And Dr. Lee single-handedly took that responsibility and came up with tools, parts, and also got us facilities where we could adequately do maintenance and repair. The intel that we had prior to leaving the United States to go to Iraq was that the roadside bombs and attacks were starting to get heated up. This particular day, we put a three-vehicle convoy together and started heading out to the green zone. And I normally never stopped. But this particular day, they found an ID. So they stopped us and we dismounted it. And I heard a car screech turned around. And this big car was just heading straight towards me. And then detonated. There were quite a few individuals that were hurt. And currently was one of them. The only thing I know is how my soldiers told me that they found me under a car. So they had to drag me out and notice that I had an open head injury and a shrap nose all over my legs and arms. For me, the first thing I do remember is waiting to be transported to Germany. Certain parts of my bodies weren't moving. My legs weren't moving right. So, you know, am I paralyzed or is this because of my head? And somebody just gave me a cell phone and said, Call your family. Around 2 or 3 a.m., the phone rang in the house. And I just had that sense there's something wrong. My daughter answered the phone. I don't think she remembers it, but she basically said, You know, you say you're going to be a doctor and help people not go and fight. If you got injured, that means you were fighting. So you lied to me and then she hung up. Of course, it was like nightmare came true. Rehabilitation for me was really hard. I'm a rehab doctor myself. So going through the rehab, what my patients are going through, Man, do I feel for them now? Coming back home from Walter Reed after all the treatment and rehab, it was kind of surreal. The combat wounded guys coming home, it's a lonely business because, you know, you don't come home with the rest of the unit. You're coming home alone in so many ways. He felt he needed to go back to his troops because there was no closure for him. He got hurt and he felt that he left them behind. So he kept saying, I need to go back. I need to go back. But he needed to go through a lot of rehab himself. They did a neuropsych testing on me. They said you're a TBI. It affected me more than I thought. They said it wasn't safe for me to go back and leave the unit. I do remember the mood changes that happened in our family, especially like my mom when she first found out. She was very distraught. Colonel Leah, in my opinion, was kind of a little reserved. He was not as outgoing. It was miserable two years for me, my kids and my wife. She suffered the most. A lot of times I saw that he was depressed. He sat down maybe at a window or something and looked outside for maybe many hours sometimes. As a physician, I did not want to accept that I had PTSD. I felt embarrassed to have it. So I denied it quite a bit. But my daughter and I was playing a board game and I wasn't really into it. But she just stopped playing the board game and just said, Daddy, you don't smile anymore. And then I just started crying. Dad, I remember and she just ran away. I felt like he was going through the motions of things but wasn't actually present. It just made me realize I got to do something, otherwise I'm going to lose all my family. I decided to look at what I do for a living, a rehab physician and sports. So I started looking into that as an avenue for my recovery. So I started running, I started biking. One of the interns came up with, why don't we do an adaptive cycling clinic? So this club actually sprouted as few veterans riding together and then on a weekly basis it just kind of grew. His dealing with the challenges that he has had has really been inspiring to the veterans that he cares for. Once we get out on the trail and they're just moving along through the woods, part of it is just simply seeing the joy on the people's faces when they get to go out on a bicycle ride on a beautiful day. That became the seed that started our entire adaptive sports program. Adaptive sports is a growing area of activities. We all know that it does positive things for their mental health as well as physical health. I got hurt in a landmine driving a Humvee inside of a Baghdad Iraq. The ability to be active again, to be a part of a team, to compete, it's nothing better, man. We're trying to get the wheelchair softball running, wheelchair bowling. We also have the sled hockey and also wheelchair basketball. He is very invested into recreation therapy, primarily adaptive sports, because he sees the carryover value and what it can do to a veteran. The patients and their relationship with Dr. Lee, they totally enjoy working with him. They just feel honored that this veteran that is a physician and is head of a division will also just kind of interact and kind of be right with them as a peer or an equal. He is committed to the mission. In fact, the building that we're in right now only came about because of Dr. Lee's advocating for spinal cord injury patients here in Milwaukee and really within the states. The spinal cord injury building that we have in Milwaukee is one of the state-of-the-art. The building is unique in that sense that I really thought about adaptive sports to be part of it. Chapter 19 nominated Dr. Lee for this award because we felt that his story represented what the award was all about and that as an individual goes into harm's way as a dynamic situation happened and is able to actually resume their career and excel in their career after overcoming difficulty. It's no longer just going to work for a job. It's actually going to work and making a difference with this particular veteran or that particular veteran. Over time, it definitely got better. He went to rehab and he was slowly recovering, finding his passions again, and that was definitely noticeable. I told him before he was a double A, now he's a triple A personality. So he's very active. He gets up 3-5 in the morning and just going to work, going to a lot of veteran service things, especially the disabled and paralyzed individuals he's very passionate for. Everything that he does at work or just even at home in his spare time is about the veterans. They support what I do now and doing everything with me is a huge testament to what a family bond can be. Meeting Dr. Lee here, it's just like an instantaneous kind of a flight back to where we were, time and place. The Dr. Lee that I met today was more like the pre-deployment and deployment Dr. Lee of old. Yeah. So in my eyes, what is my biggest accomplishment? I think it has to be my veterans introducing them to adaptive sports. The next thing I know within a year, they're national championships, school, they actually have jobs. They're contributing positively to society. That has to be, from my standpoint, the biggest success.