Skin deep, where perception is sometimes mistaken for reality, Shawn Morelli remains pretty much the same elite athlete she’s always been. The same swift and savvy competitor who once starred on the Penn State soccer team. The same strong soul who ran marathons. The same Energizer Bunny who started racing around Meadville, Pa., on her bicycle when she was 4 years old.
Even an IED (improvised explosive device) unleashing its terror eight years ago on the then-Army major while she was on a supposedly routine engineering mission in Afghanistan couldn’t change that.
Not that the roadside bomb didn’t try to leave her confined to a wheelchair, or worse, for the rest of her life. It left her permanently blind in her left eye. It damaged her right arm and right leg so severely they will never again be perfectly normal. It twisted and tangled nerves into a knot at the base of her skull by driving her C4 and C5 vertebrae toward her brain, which probably should have killed her but somehow didn’t.
And overcoming all that savagery to make Morelli somewhat whole again required more than three years of hospital stays, then a daily dose of at least seven pills filled with miracle drugs to keep her that way.
“They told me I’d never walk again, they told me I’d never ride a two-wheel bike again,” she said this weekend in Chattanooga, just before she went out and defended her para-cycling national championship in the C4 class (how appropriate) USA Cycling time trials, completing the 15.5-kilometer (9.63-mile) course in 24 minutes and 38.69 seconds.
“But I’ve always been an athlete. It took me a year to learn to ride again, but I’ve been competing for four years now and I’ve won five national championships and three world medals — a gold, a silver and a bronze.”
And that alone is special and inspirational, athletics at its best, another sterling example of an elite athlete’s unbreakable will to win.
But on this day above all others, Memorial Day, the lone day out of 365 we set aside to honor all those men and women who have died to keep us free and safe from all those mad men with IEDs, it’s the rest of the 39-year-old Morelli’s story that deserves our attention, respect and praise.
“I didn’t think twice about joining the military,” she said, noting that everyone from a great-grandfather (World War I) to a grandfather (World War II) to her father and uncle (Vietnam) have served our country with honor and distinction.
“And I wouldn’t change anything about joining the service, despite what happened to me. I love my country.”
But that doesn’t mean she’s always been happy with how veterans are often treated in this country.
“I went through a phase of anger and resentment,” she said. “Not so much toward the country, but for all I’ve given, for all so many of us have given, to see so many people not care. Just to see people have utter disrespect for what they’ve been given freely because of the sacrifices of others.”
Though the backlash from those wishing us out of the Middle East has never remotely approached the way the Vietnam War divided the country, Morelli said her father, Dave, could see similarities between her hurt and anger and his harsh feelings more than 40 years ago.
“We talked a lot about it after I was injured,” she said. “My internal anger. When we were growing up, my dad had a lot of that, too.”
Which brought her thoughts to Memorial Day, and what veterans such as herself most wished they could see or feel or hear from those of us who’ve never been asked to do anything more for our country than vote and pay taxes.
“We’re not asking for a million dollars or something,” she said. “Just support. Just show some respect for the men and women who’ve given so much for our nation.”
You wonder where she could have been today without the injuries. She played semi-pro soccer in Europe right after college. She still coaches the sport at the youth league level around her Kansas home, where she has season tickets for Sporting Kansas City, an MLS team.
“I loved being on a soccer field,” she said. “I still love coaching it.”
She loves so many things, from her husband, Carl Dick, who’s still deployed in Afghanistan, to Roscoe, the couple’s labrador mix, to her parents, Jacque and Dave, to the subject of history, which she majored in at Penn State, to the master’s degree she got in public administration in order to, in her words, “run a small city.”
Morelli is even working on a Ph.D. in public and community service, though that will have to wait until her para-cycling career ends.
“For whatever reason, I believe I was given a second chance,” she said. “I feel like it’s my duty to do the best I can … not just in my sport, but with my life.”
If there’s been a sporting best to this point, it was her world championship gold medal in Greenville, S.C., last September with her family on hand to cheer her.
“My mom was crying, my dad was cheering, I was screaming,” Morelli recalled. “But I crossed the finish line, I started veering off to one side and my right side started spazzing. I was in trouble.”
Indeed, in spite of her remarkable recovery, there are still times when that knot of nerves in her neck goes haywire, firing wildly and wrongly. Whenever that happens, Morelli can lose control of her legs and fall to the ground.
“Right when I was about to fall, my nephew Nick — who’s 14 but wrestles at 220 pounds — picked me up and started swinging me around,” she recalled. “I had to tell him, ‘Don’t let go. If you let go, I’m going to fall to the ground and hurt myself.'”
There are still times when a different hurt overcomes her, a hurt for those military personnel not so fortunate as her, a hurt we should all certainly feel today, if not every day.
“I had friends who didn’t come home,” Morelli said softly. “Friends who’ll never walk their daughters down the aisle. Or again celebrate their wives’ or children’s birthdays. I race for them.”
Any American who can’t respect and support that on Memorial Day, if not every day, needs to move elsewhere.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com.