His latest invention was a fully computerized ankle-foot system called the BiOM, which imitated a flesh-and-blood foot, propelling the user forward with each step. While completing a master’s degree in mechanical engineering at MIT, a doctorate in biophysics at Harvard and postdoctoral work in biomechatronics at MIT, Herr had developed an increasingly sophisticated array of artificial knees, feet and ankles. Herr himself was a double amputee: In 1982, when he was just 17, he’d lost both legs to frostbite sustained during a mountaineering expedition. In the spring of 2010, he read about a new type of prosthesis being developed by Hugh Herr, head of the biomechatronics group at MIT’s Media Lab. “I thought, I live in an era where the technology is only expanding-every year, there’s a revolutionary breakthrough,” Gadsby, now a husband and father and social-worker-in-training, told me recently. Every step sent a shock wave up his back. It was a foot made from carbon fiber-top of the line, his doctors had assured him-and although it had some flex to it, the device still felt overly stiff. After he was transferred to a base in Southern California, he took to spending his afternoons hobbling up and down the beach, because walking in sand took real effort, and he thought it would speed his recovery. Gadsby, 29 years old, faced it all head-on. Months of pain followed: the endless physical therapy, the fitting of a prosthetic, the challenge of learning to walk again. Miraculously, a trauma surgeon had preserved his left leg-but the right had been sawed off above the knee. He awoke a day and a half later in the medical wing of a base in Germany. At the field hospital, a priest read him his last rites. His breathing was ragged and dry, and he flickered into and out of consciousness. Once the insurgents had fled back into the farmland, his men flagged down a passing truck and loaded him into the back.
Gadsby hollered out orders, even as liters of blood poured out of his body. As he lay in the dirt, with a corpsman applying a tourniquet to his right leg, a sniper’s bullet pulverized his left knee. Ears ringing, he rolled and jerked away from the site of the explosion until he reached the side of the road. He tried to run and he got nowhere: A remotely detonated bomb had turned his right leg into a mass of gore and gristle. They’re probably tracking us.Īround 10 a.m., he heard a deafening bang. We’ve been out here too long, he thought. Karma is pancake-flat, with sightlines for miles, and after a few hours on patrol, Gadsby grew worried. William Gadsby helped lead a team of infantrymen into the farmland surrounding Karma, an agricultural hub in Iraq’s volatile Anbar Province. At 5 o’clock on a blistering morning in June 2007, U.S.
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