Army Special Forces soldier to appear on '60 Minutes’

Sgt. 1st Class Chris Corbin didn’t really prepare for his interview with Laura Logan of “60 Minutes.” He just put on a uniform and did it — much like how he has approached everything since both his feet were blown off in an explosion in Afghanistan two years ago.
The Army 7th Special Forces Group (Airborne) soldier and the story of his amazingly fast recovery will be featured on the news program next Sunday.
“I don’t know if a lot of people stress out about those types of things, but she was really easy to talk to and we just hung out and chitchatted,” Corbin said recently from the 7th Special Forces cantonment, where he returned to work just five months after he was wounded.
Logan and her crew followed Corbin through some obstacle courses and interviewed him in a makeshift studio at the cantonment several weeks ago. “60 Minutes” researchers found Corbin through a recent YouTube video of him putting on his prosthetic legs and skydiving with his bomb-detection dog Ax, a 5-year-old Belgian malinois.
Corbin and Ax were looking for explosives at a compound near the small town of Heydarabad in Afghanistan on Feb. 17, 2011.
“We found one … the hard way,” the 35-year-old said recently.
Corbin took one step and was blown across the desert sand. He lost both legs below mid-shin.
Ax didn’t have a scratch on him.
Corbin was sent to Walter Reed Army Medical Center, but he wasn’t prepared to follow the normal and expected recovery path. Long before therapists imagined, he was climbing stairs in his prosthetic legs. Soon, he was running.
“I didn’t want to be the invalid,” he said. “I didn’t want to be forgotten about, just dismissed as ‘ah, well, he’s handicapped. He can’t do that stuff anymore.’ I didn’t want someone to have to take care of me. That just kept making me want to do more stuff.”
That summer, he packed his truck at the hospital and returned to serve with his unit. Shortly after, he began training canines again and deployed to South America and to posts across the United States.
Corbin said before that day in Afghanistan, he couldn’t have imagined what it would be like to be hurt the way he was. He felt being wounded could make people not want to do anything, to crawl into their little shells and hang out there.
“But this happened and I was like, you know what? I’m not done living yet,” he said.
He still wanted to ride his motorcycle, go skydiving and travel the country.
“So I just keep doing it,” he said. “Anytime something gets in my way, I figure out how to get around it and how to get past it and go do it again.”
This exceptional drive and lust for life has motivated and inspired people Corbin has known for years and those he’s known for days or weeks.
“Several of them have mentioned time and time again that every time they think ‘I don’t want to do something’ or ‘I can’t do something,’ they just look at all I’ve accomplished since being technically handicapped and think, ‘Yep, I really have no excuses for not trying this,’ ” Corbin said. “They say, ‘Chris is not only doing this, he’s doing it with no feet.’ ”
Corbin said maybe some people he’s never met will see the “60 Minutes” interview and be motivated to push themselves to do whatever they want.
Corbin said it helped that he received tremendous support from his fellow soldiers when he returned to work.
They gave him a lot of latitude at first, which he said he needed to get used to what it was going to take just to show up for work, to put himself together in the morning.
“It took a lot of trials and tribulations to figure out what works for me and what doesn’t,” he said.
He said he hoped that he would be able to return to Afghanistan or serve in a combat zone, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen.
But for the most part he’s back, he said.
“When you wake up in the morning and put your shoes on, well so do I,” he said. “I just have feet attached to them.”