A wounded Iowa vet who was lost faced a bear and a mountain and found himself in the process

Eric Johnson was at the tip of the spear in wars that for him never really ended.

He did multiple tours in Iraq and Afghanistan during his 11 years in the U.S. Army infantry and suffered the consequences: guys dying in front of him; concussions from explosions; nightmares that sent his wife to sleep in a separate bed.

Sixteen years after Sept. 11, the terror that started it all, Eric Johnson of Des Moines stood last week on an Alaskan mountain range with eight combat-scarred veterans and a mama grizzly bear with her cubs just 300 yards away.

“Hey, bear, pop your lungs!” he shouted.

Johnson, a loan adjuster for Wells Fargo, was in Alaska with other veterans to heal.

With Mount Brooks hanging like a giant picture in the distance, he lifted his 100-pound backpack above his head to show the bear he is even bigger than his 274-pound frame.

“Most of us are combat ops,” he said. “We know dangerous situations.”

If the bear charges, you don’t run. You play dead.

For Johnson, it was the best day.

Rocked by war

Johnson's worst day was 11 years ago.

He was in fighting in Iraq as a Bradley gunner. Half the time was spent traveling around to engage the enemy, he said.

His longtime buddy from Iowa was running to a truck when he collapsed from a genetic heart problem.

“He was a stud,” Johnson says. “Smoked cigarettes and outran everybody. He died in front of me. That was the hardest.”

Johnson picked up pieces of other guys from explosions that concussed his own brain. Then he’d go right back to work, without asking for help.

Those soldiers loved their families so much, he said. They were always talking about them.

But every time the soldiers drove a convoy through, it seemed they lost guys. Some slid right off the mountains in Afghanistan.

Gone.

Learning to cope

When he returned from his last combat tour to Afghanistan in 2009, Johnson trained soldiers until he started to forget their names.

He began to stutter and couldn’t express his thoughts. He went on a Father’s Day hike with his wife, Brooke, and their children — now ages 3 to 12 — and the next thing he remembered was lying in the hospital.

He was diagnosed with traumatic brain injury and post-traumatic stress disorder and told he wasn't going to be in the Army anymore.

All those firefights. All those explosions. Memories of soldiers who committed suicide and one who was murdered.

He had nightmares. He was lost.

“He didn’t know how to cope,” said Brooke, his wife of 12 years. “Every time something popped up, the VA gave him another medication. The meds gave him side effects that would require another medication.”

On top of it, some friends didn’t believe PTSD was real, “like it was something you could fake,” Brooke said.

Johnson said he got to the point where he could barely get out of bed.

He bloated to 311 pounds while working from home as a loan adjuster for Wells Fargo, a company that has supplied $75 million toward veterans’ transition programs and housing.

(Johnson and his family were given an Easter Lake home with a foundation supported by the company in 2014).

Something had to change.

'It's time to fill it up'

John Tosh listened to Johnson and knew what was going on.

“The first time he spoke to me I could hear the need in his voice,” Tosh said.

Tosh is part of the nonprofit No Barriers USA, of which Wells Fargo is a sponsor. One of its programs is Warriors to Summits.

Wounded vets, physically or mentally, get together and climb a mountain with a rope team. It reminds them that what’s within them is stronger than what’s in their way.

These are rough cookies. No Barriers wanted guys who looked at a mountain in the most rugged of backcountry and needed to face it.

Johnson, 34, who grew up in the small Iowa towns of Alden and Panora, ventured out on his own at age 16 when his parents divorced and signed up to shoulder the hardest duty of this generation.

No Barriers plucked him from 150 applicants.

“My pitcher has been empty for a long time,” Johnson said. “It’s time to fill it up.”

'I started talking'

Johnson said he took himself off most of the medications a year ago and signed up for the No Barriers program. He hiked the trails around his home.

He loaded a pack and climbed the steps of the Iowa State Capitol. He worked out at the gym.

He lost 35 pounds and started coming out of the fog.

The group’s first training for the Alaska excursion was in Colorado, and even in his improved condition, he wasn’t prepared for the strenuous hike up Mount Elbert near Leadville.

It was tough and was made worse by a sore parting at home.

He hadn’t talked to his wife much before he left. They were going through tough times. He was trying to bury it all inside.

During the training trip, he was asked to talk. He was around fellow soldiers who understood.

“I started talking about my kids, the guys I lost,” he said.

He began to analyze it all. It wasn’t about religion or the almighty dollar, he said.

“It’s how you feel inside. If you are not feeling good you should analyze it and do something different," he said. "Do you want to be grumpy and mad, asking why you have this stupid meeting? You can look at it as an opportunity.

“Colorado gave me a new lease on life.”

By the next training in Wyoming, Johnson was leading the pack down the trail, a rugged mile-long boulder field. He kept telling himself not to give up.

A magical sight

The veterans on the Alaska trip were told those in the program come back a different person.

Seventy-five percent of the participants in the expeditions — there were 17 in 2017 — have PTSD.

Some come back to start their own nonprofits or find other ways to give back.

Alaska might do that. Johnson said its backcountry landscape is sobering, compassionate and hostile and no place to take casually.

It's where he needed to go.

The mama grizzly he encountered there was just one of nine bears that came into their path on the way to Mount Brooks, an 11,890-foot peak in the central Alaska range in Denali National Park and Preserve.

It is wild country and took a five-hour bus ride just to get to what seemed like a beautiful end of the Earth, with a giant wall of ice, the Muldrow Glacier, just one of its barriers.

The bear saw the large group, with eight veterans and five guides, and decided to leave them alone.

Above them at base camp, the bear lingered with a group of sheep framing the mountain background. A light snow fell.

Johnson said the scene was magical with a first snow. It was Sept. 11.

But harsh weather was on the way, with temps dropping to 20 degrees near the glacier and wind gusts kicked up to 60 miles per hour.

Turning 'lead into gold'

The Alaska weather grew harsher.

They traveled across a treacherous glacier and ran low on water in the fast-freezing landscape. The wind howled and it took the entire team to set up and tear down each tent.

By Sept. 12, the leaders called it. The weather wouldn’t allow them to summit. There were threats of hypothermia and trench foot.

Nearly 50 percent of their expeditions end without a summit. They don’t consider it a failure.

“Part of the program is being alchemists, who turn lead into gold,” Tosh said. “So the weather wasn’t good. How do you respond to that instead of wallowing in despair?”

They took day trips instead, uniting with their rope teams to climb, forming deep bonds through communication and trust.

The summit, Johnson said, is just hard rock. His purpose wasn’t physical.

“To get out there and face those barriers, that was the real summit,” he said.

He realized he had put up small barriers in his life, minor inconveniences that didn’t matter in the long haul.

He didn’t talk about it because soldiers soldier on, and he’d been doing that since he was on his own at 16.

When you don’t communicate with your rope team, he said, that’s when you fall into a crevasse.

His communication has already improved with his wife. His purpose is refined, and one small goal is to get outdoors with his children more, let nature’s magic wash over them, too.

The barriers will be there, just like one last one on this trip. On the steep approach back to camp the wind was raging, his pack seemed heavier.

“I can’t make it,” he told himself.

Pain seared his lungs. Others urged him up the hill.

Surrounded by soldiers who had been there, who knew what it took to take those steps, he finished.

“I was crying,” he said. “I didn’t care. Just give me this piece of freedom.”