The Armored Heart

The story

Two Green Berets run a series of marathons tied together by a shoelace. One of them is blind, the other a man who carries death without feeling it, which is part of why the Army kept promoting him. Fred "Doom" Dummar was ten when he watched his house burn, twelve when his brother John died, and he later lost his beloved sister, too. He enlisted at seventeen and stopped feeling much of anything. One night as he perched on the open ramp of a C-130, soaring over the Black Sea towards the invasion of Iraq, he felt a hand on his shoulder and then a voice telling him not to be afraid. It was the most real thing that had ever happened to him, and he kept it to himself. But he led from it anyway, through Kurdish fighters and Afghan commandos and a task force pulling people out during the fall of Kabul. He began to call it leading with love, words the Army never used. A few years later another Green Beret, blinded in Iraq, handed him one end of a shoelace and asked him to run a marathon. For the next eleven years and in every spare moment, Doom served as Ivan Castro's guide human, and together they ran more than forty races: marathons and ultramarathons over mountains and across deserts, through Boston on the day of the bombing, and among the bulls at Pamplona. Ivan's blindness was an injury from outside himself, while Doom's was a discipline he could no longer find his way out of. It took thousands of miles on the other end of a shoelace before the guide could see.