young Ben, the soldier with whom I’d flown back from Afghanistan in 2008, the soldier I’d visited and cheered as he climbed a wall with his new prosthetic leg. Six years after that flight, as promised, he was running a marathon. Not the London marathon, which would’ve been miraculous on its own. He was running his own marathon, along a route he’d designed himself, in the outline of a poppy laid over the city of London. A staggering thirty-one miles, he’d done the full circuit to raise money and awareness – and heart rates. I’m in shock, he said on finding me there. You’re in shock? I said.
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