Our conversation was mostly smoke, hiding any real information. We ended with “love you” and a promise to keep in touch.

It was dark outside when I finally left the garage. What rush hour there was had ended, and traffic had thinned. One lane in either direction was closed for military traffic. Every few minutes a Humvee ferrying troops would speed by. Cher cautioned me when I went more than five miles over the listed speed limit. When I got outside the city, feeling very Bournish, I tossed the burner out the window into the brush.

I drove to a McDonald’s in Bethesda, about two miles down Rockville Pike from Walter Reed, one that no one in my phone book knew about. Well, it was a McDonald’s, everybody knew that, but not my connection to it. This was one of the first places I’d gone on my own during my recuperation. There had been no Mighty Chair, my chair was the manual Rollie-wheel drive, so just getting there represented significant progress for me. I went there often enough to get to know the manager, a Mexican immigrant named César Hernández. I walked in one night as three guys were giving a double amputee from the hospital a hard time, grabbing his food and tossing it back and forth. When César tried to stop them, two of them turned on him, knocking him to the floor and holding him down. The third guy went for the cash registers, their real purpose in starting the fight.

There were six people in the restaurant, but none of them made any move to help. Then a pretty amazing thing happened. My instincts kicked in and I reacted. Picking up as much speed as I could (it was a confined space, so it wasn’t much), I slammed the chair into one of them from behind. That sent him tripping forward headfirst into the soda dispenser. I spun the chair around and leveled a Bruce Lee arm block right into the second thug’s midsection. He doubled over and I hammered down on the back of his head. He hit the ground; I must’ve hit some nerve because he started flopping around like a landed fish. By then, the other customers had jumped in and grabbed the third guy before he could get away. Sirens blasting, the gendarmes arrived a few minutes later.

Everything had happened so quickly it took my thoughts several minutes to catch up to my actions. It was the complete battlefield experience: act first, think later. Depend on your training. I had no idea where that reaction had come from. But in those few moments I had glimpsed the possibilities of my new life.

To show his appreciation César had made his store the most accessible McDonald’s in the country, good enough to earn a cover story in Franchise Times magazine. But he went even further, installing power, water, internet access, and waste hookups in the back of his parking lot for two vans or properly equipped SUVs, then limiting its use to wounded vets and their families. Both spots were open when I got there. I backed in, safe for the night.