When we speak of the sacrifices that veterans make in service of their countries, we tend to picture them in absolute terms of life and death.
And while that covers an important part of what their often dangerous jobs can have in store for them, we often see that veterans who do come back alive undergo significant changes as a result of what they’ve experienced.
RELATED STORIES
Although there is a growing awareness of how combat effects veterans mentally through conditions such as PTSD, conflict situations can also have some dramatic physical effects for them.
And there is a lot of love and support in the hearts of communities nationwide for disabled veterans, but that doesn’t make the challenges they have to overcome any less difficult.
Nonetheless, the spirit of people like one man we’re about to learn about serve as powerful reminders that even our worst situations aren’t always as impossible as they seem.
After years of serving as a cook in the United States Navy, Aaron Hale transferred to the army and became a member of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal team in the early 2010s.
And as WKRG reported , he was about eight months into a 12-month mission in Afghanistan when a member of his convoy detected a roadside bomb.
By this point, he had just returned from a vacation to see his family for Thanksgiving. And while that meant a lot to him at the time, it would become even more meaningful to him after dealing with that bomb in December of 2011.
As Hale put it, “Seeing my family for Thanksgiving — it was a great last page in the photo album.”
This was because his life would change forever after his team’s robot assistant defused that bomb.
Hale had intended to examine the remains of that explosive for evidence leading to its creator, but soon learned that there was a second bomb nobody had noticed.
That one detonated, which destroyed Hale’s eyes and permanently robbed him of his sight. And his situation would become even worse in 2015 when he lost his hearing due to a severe case of meningitis.
At first, he felt both defeated and like he had failed. And while dark feelings like these still haunt him from time to time, he felt he had a duty to overcome them.
In Hale’s words, “I was still a father, still a solider. My life doesn’t belong to just me, so I can’t give up on it.”
This led him to take stock of what he could still do and he found that he had cooked so frequently before the incident that he could do it largely from memory.
From there, he started experimenting and creating different flavors of fudge. And not only did his wife Mikayla notice that he became happier while doing this, but the results left the family with more fudge than they knew what to do with and a lot of friends asking to buy it.
This gave them the idea to start a fudge business called Extra Ordinary Delights in December of 2015.
And once Hale started running the kitchen while Mikayla ran the business, things started looking up for him.
Hale now says he has no regrets and he has even been able to regain his hearing since then thanks to a cochlear implant.
In addition to growing Extra Ordinary Delights with Mikayla, Hale has also amassed a following of over 146,000 people on TikTok through his Cookin Without Lookin series.
In his words, “I decided if I was going to be blind for the rest of my life, I’d be the best darn blind guy I could be.”
h/t: WKRG
