My Final Paper for “As Tough As They Come”
The book Tough As They Come was written by SSG Travis Mills, who served in the 82nd Airborne
Division. During his third tour of duty in Afghanistan on April 10, 2012, he dropped his bag on a
unrecognizable IED( improvised explosive device) which went off and left him without both arms and
both legs. This made him one of the five quadruple amputees from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.He
went on to tell his story as a testimony to other people. In this paper I will be giving my point of view on
SSG Travis Mills and his book Tough As They Come.
This book has changed my mind about how the world views amputees( preferably how media
shapes it). Many of the depictions of amputees being filtered through mainstream, news broadcast, and
online or printed articles deal with worldwide military conflict, which makes it” difficult to talk about
perception without entering these depictions into the equation”. It seems as if Americans who watch the
news or read the paper are under this impression that they are seeing a new portrayal of amputees. When
the Civil War included engravings, photographs, and video of amputee veterans as part of the way that
media deals with war. Most of those images were censored, which limited the exposure to the public eye .
We were only shown the positive images of prosthetic rehabilitation and other promising images of
hopefulness. A lot of the gruesome images and moments were censored by the State Department and
hidden away in the National Archives. This was done in order to dilute the negative effects of war,
making the world senile to the real effects of war. By me reading Tough As They Come, it open my eyes
to the real impact of war and the real world of wounded amputee veterans and their struggle.
I consider SSG Travis Mills and hero due to the fact that he was a “soldier” all through his
journey before during and after his injury. To me he is more than a hero.To start off , he is a hero for even
