How momentum took Dan Cnossen from Afghanistan battlefield to Paralympics

Dan Cnossen had woken up gradually, and he knew something was amiss.

He was in an unknown hospital room, sedated and intubated but still in excruciating pain, and standing by him, his mother — with a tear in her eye and a smile on her face — beamed as he came to from his medically induced coma.

Although the rural farm kid and 1998 Shawnee Heights High School graduate had gone through several mental and physical challenges, particularly as he trained to become a Navy SEAL, he started to realize one thing.

This was the beginning of the rest of his life.

Cnossen — a battle-wounded veteran, double amputee and gold medal-winning Paralympian — on Wednesday returned to his high school alma mater for the first time since he graduated more than 20 years ago to encourage juniors from Shawnee County high schools to set and achieve goals by taking little steps.

He shared two stories from his life to model to students how they could approach any challenge — little, big or monumental — and reach their dreams.

How a telephone pole taught Dan Cnossen about grit

Ever since he was in high school, Cnossen knew he wanted to become a Navy SEAL, but he faced one seemingly insurmountable challenge to that dream

A lifelong farm kid in landlocked Kansas, Cnossen had never actually learned to swim. But still, he had excellent grades and a high school resume to be one of a few high school seniors in the nation selected to the U.S. Naval Academy.

There, he put in the work to learn to swim, and throughout his time at the academy, he prepared for SEAL training.

“I’d say I spent 95% of my days in my four years there finding time to go to the swimming pool, working on my floating, and working on my stroke,” he said.

In 2002, Cnossen became one of just 16 members of his class selected to undergo Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL training at the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado on the other side of San Diego Bay.

It was exactly like a five-star hotel experience, he joked — Cnossen and his fellow SEAL candidates got to stay in fancy rooms (barracks), attend spa therapy (crawling through the mud) and even go boating (marching through the surf with an inflatable boat overhead).

But what set the tone for that several months of training was just hours into the first night of Hell Week, when Cnossen and his fellow teammates were charged with carrying a long, waterlogged telephone pole across a sandy beach. They’d be racing other teams of SEAL candidates, but to what was anyone’s guess. The instructors kept that ambiguous, and the ordeal would be over when it would be over.

As Cnossen and his team picked up the pole, it suddenly felt heavier than he would have expected. Water had seeped into the pole, making it impossibly heavy, Cnossen and his team struggled to take even a few sinking steps in the soft sand, and they quickly fell behind.

That’s when thoughts of quitting began to gnaw at Cnossen’s mind. About two-thirds of Navy SEAL candidates fail to make it through training — whether it be through disqualification from instructors, injury or quitting — and Cnossen began to seriously think about the third option, especially if the rest of SEAL training would be like this first challenge.

But then he looked up at the twilight sky, and saw the stars, even as pain began to cloud his thoughts. He forgot about the long-term challenges he would face, and focused on the task at hand — each small step he took with teammates along his side.

If he could get through that log race, he could overcome anything that would come his way.

“I learned an incredibly valuable lesson under that telephone pole that night that I think can help you in the rest of your lives,” Cnossen said. “That there’s a way to take your mind away from long-term thoughts and doubts about the future… and then prioritize and focus on what you actually need to be doing right now to improve your situation and work your way through difficult moments, one step at a time.”

Momentum took Dan Cnossen from dying on an Afghanistan hill to the top of an Olympic podium

After Cnossen graduated from SEAL training in 2003, he embarked on several tours to Iraq and Afghanistan, ultimately being given officer-in-command status over a group of a SEAL platoon. It was a lot of responsibility for someone still in their 20s, Cnossen said, but one he took with great honor.

In early 2009, Cnossen had been sent to Afghanistan at a time when heavy combat was taking its toll on Afghani citizens and U.S. troops. But Cnossen understood their mission as one to ultimately make the lives of those citizens better, while protecting their and American lives.

He and other SEALs prepared for an assault operation, in which they would assault a compound to forcibly take members of the Taliban. Cnossen would lead a detached element to first secure a nearby hill before others could begin their assault on the compound.

He remembers the 45-minute helicopter ride in pitch black, seeing only green-shapes through his night vision goggles, and hearing only radio chatter through his headset.

He remembers moving forward to the top of the hill, before seeing a flash of light underneath his goggles.

He remembers laying in the ground, with only his arms seeming to work, before his teammates swooped down on him.

“They responded,” Cnossen recalled to the auditorium of students. “They responded like they were trained to do, and they assessed the situation.”

That situation was this: Cnossen had a double femoral artery bleed, and he would be dead in 90 seconds if they did not act.

But they did, quickly and decisively, and within a minute, his teammates applied six tourniquets — they’d be sacrificing his legs for his life — and had called the helicopter back and he was being raced off back to the base.

The next thing Cnossen remembers is waking up in that room at the Naval Hospital in Bethesda, Maryland, with his mother and sister at his side.

Doctors explained to him that yes, his legs were gone, but he had also suffered a shattered pelvis, and he’d still require several surgeries in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, he’d be intubated, while medical bags and IV connections would handle most of his bodily functions.

That’s when Cnossen began thinking long-term — that he might be stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of his life. It was his ground zero, he said.

But thinking back to his experiences at SEAL training, he realized he had also been lucky. The IED that could have killed him had malfunctioned and not exploded entirely. His teammates knew exactly how to respond and got to him quickly. While he had lost the lower parts of his legs, Cnossen’s torso and arms were relatively unscathed. He still had much of his thighs, and he would be able to wear prosthetics.

He had much to be thankful for.

“I could focus on what I had, and not on what I was missing,” he said. “I could focus on what I could control, or at least try to influence.”

It was momentum, Cnossen said, that started with his teammates carrying him up the hill for rescue that ultimately got him out of his hospital bed and into a wheelchair. It was momentum that allowed him to begin walking again on prosthetics, and ultimately running. And it was momentum that allowed him to train and ultimately stand at the top of the 2018 Paralympic Games, with a gold medal in cross-country skiing.

“Momentum, in my life, came through these two things,” he said. “It came from perspective, and it came through focus.”

For Dan Cnossen, it’s humbling to return to Shawnee Heights High

Since graduating, Cnossen has often returned to the Topeka area to see family, but he hadn’t been back to the hallways of Shawnee Heights High School until Wednesday.

He said Shawnee Heights High was instrumental in molding him into the man he is today, and that it was surreal to be back in the school.

“Everything I talked about today — it all began here in Kansas, and I had the foundation of growing up on a farm that’s been in my family since the 1870s,” Cnossen said. “The foundation I had came from Shawnee Heights, in my classmates and friends, my teammates on the soccer team. It came from my coach and my coaches, and my teachers.”

Several of Cnossen’s teachers, both currently teaching and retired, attended his speech Wednesday, among them retired science teacher Mike Balint and current chemistry teacher Bob Wells.

“He’s accomplished so much throughout his life,” Balint said. “From the determination and kind of kid he was when I had him, I’ve just gotten to see that blossom and bloom. He’s very much a humble guy.

“He was a leader when he was here, and he continues to lead.”

Rafael Garcia is an education reporter for the Topeka Capital-Journal. He can be reached at rgarcia@cjonline.com or by phone at ‪785-289-5325‬. Follow him on Twitter at @byRafaelGarcia.

This article originally appeared on Topeka Capital-Journal: Paralympian, Navy SEAL Dan Cnossen back at Shawnee Heights High School