Brian Aft was rolling his wheelchair through a strip-mall parking lot in Dallas with a Styrofoam cup of juice perched on his lap when a pickup truck screeched to a stop in front of him. Out bounded a tall, muscled man with shoulder-length hair.
“Hey there!” he shouted.
Aft figured he was about to get robbed.
It would have been yet another bad turn in his life since stepping on a Taliban bomb buried in an embankment in Afghanistan in 2011 during a tour with the Marines. He had lost both of his legs. In the three years since, he had been wracked with painful pressure ulcers. When the pills dispensed by VA doctors failed to help, he turned to heroin – enough of it, every day, he told friends, “to kill a horse.” He was jobless and disheveled. And he was sleeping with a loaded gun next to his head.
But the man in the truck didn’t demand his money.
