Picking Up the Pieces
Ken Rutherford’s story is not a pretty one. After suffering huge injuries when his vehicle was wrecked by a land mine in Somalia, he was left with only his will. But with that will he survived to turn his story into one of hope and inspiration.
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“I looked toward Mohamed. He’s black, but he looked white covered with dust, and I thought to myself, ‘Is that your foot or mine?’
“He got out. I couldn’t follow him. I grabbed the steering wheel and pulled myself out. My right foot came out with me, it was hanging down to my right knee. The bone was sticking out. I just gave up.”
Ken Rutherford lay on the bare ground with what was left of his legs propped up against what was left of the Landcruiser he had been riding in.
Moments earlier, the Landcruiser had struck a land mine while traveling in rural Somalia. The mine had blown his foot from his leg and blew the vehicle perpendicular to the road. Rutherford and the vehicle were suddenly motionless in the ditch, lying in a heap of metal, dust and blood. The moment before the mine exploded, Rutherford was a credit union training officer thinking about his to-do list, and scribbling chores down on a notepad. Now, the notepad was covered in his own blood.
Rutherford lunged and grabbed his radio, pulling it close to him shouting, “I’m O positive! Get me an airplane in here! We’re down!”
Although today, 16 years later with a million memories squeezed between now and then, Rutherford sits in his east Springfield living room and remembers it like it was yesterday. “I started coughing up blood on my shirt,” he says. I was on my back and I thought, ‘This is it. I’m done.’ I just thought, ‘Lord, I love you. I love life. If you keep me around, I want to marry Kim, be a father, be a teacher like my dad, and everything else is just icing on the cake. If I get those three things, I’m never going to complain about life ever again.’”
That moment in Somalia was life-changing for Rutherford. It explains why he now has two prosthetics starting below his knees. It explains why he’s forced to sometimes crawl the entirety of his house. Yet, it’s Rutherford’s telling of the story that reveals what that moment did for his perspective.
To hear Rutherford explain it, it almost sounds like a positive experience. The dark-haired Missouri State University professor shifts his former offensive lineman frame in a brown leather chair with the disclosure of each detail. He speaks with passion and sounds to be on the cusp of smiling the entire time. It’s as if he is curious to hear himself speak a new element of the story “I call it the power of gratitude,” explains Rutherford. “I live it.”
After being rushed to a hospital in Somalia that had no pain medication, Rutherford was flown to Nairobi, to a modern hospital in Geneva, and finally to Colorado. In all, he had 19 blood transfusions, a right leg amputation (he had the left amputated three years later due to continued pain), and a handful of other surgeries.
