https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WV6AawKbCPs
(Video above: Noah Galloway’s latest “Dancing with the Stars” performance)
Alabamian and Iraq War hero Noah Galloway, who lost his left arm and leg in a roadside bomb blast, delivered an incredible performance on Dancing with the Stars (DWTS) Monday night, bringing at least one judge to tears, and the audience to its feet.
“You want a super hero?” one of the judges asked after Noah Galloway and his partner Sharna’s short contemporary dance to Toby Keith’s “American Soldier,” “There it is.”
Monday night Galloway told the story of his “most memorable year;” sharing the night in 2005 he was nearly killed by a roadside bomb in Iraq.
“My most memorable year was 2005, on my second deployment to Iraq.”
Galloway and his former platoon leader, Lieutenant Jerry Eidson, then told the story of being out on a patrol in the night, attempting to see their surroundings in a hostile country with night vision goggles, when their Humvee rolled over a trip wire.
“It detonated a roadside bomb large enough it threw this 9,000 pound armored Humvee through the air.”
“Noah’s injuries were catastrophic,” said first responder Major Dennison Segui. “We didn’t think he was going to make it.”
Galloway woke up six days later on Christmas morning in Walter Reed hospital in Washington, D.C.
“I was a physical person before the military. Once in the military, I had fallen in love with the job that I had, and suddenly I woke up and all that was gone,” Galloway said. “The career was gone, two of my limbs were gone, so I thought, ‘Well, there goes me ever being physical again.'”
Galloway said he tried to make it seem like he was ok, burying his grief, and drinking away his pain. Until one day he realized he couldn’t do that any more.
“I really looked in the mirror and quit looking at what I was missing, and paid more attention to what I still had left,” Galloway said, fighting to hold back tears. “I realized I had to make a change, and it had to happen fast; my kids were growing up.”
“This dance represents the journey of acceptance from the man I was, to the man I’ve become,” he concluded.
Check out Noah and Sharna’s moving contemporary dance in the video above.
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— Elizabeth BeShears (@LizEBeesh) January 21, 2015
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