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Op-Ed Contributor

Travis Mills Will Never Quit

Credit...Leslie Herman

Belgrade, Me. — It was a golden day in late summer, and there in my town’s general store stood a dozen veterans missing arms and legs. Some of them wore high-tech prostheses that made them look superhuman.

I wanted to throw my arms around them. I wanted to bake them pizzas. Instead, I told myself my silence was a form of respect. But it was really that I just didn’t have the words.

These vets would tell you they’re not superhuman. “I don’t think the challenges in my life are any greater than anyone else’s,” Travis Mills says. “I’m just thankful I was able to serve my country.”

But Mr. Mills, who served with the 82nd Airborne Division, was the reason the wounded veterans were here in my hometown, Belgrade, Me., in the first place.

On April 10, 2012, during his third tour of duty in Afghanistan, Mr. Mills placed his backpack on the ground. A mine lay just below the surface. “The backpack touching the dirt was all it took,” he says. “Such a simple act of war. My world erupted. I saw a flash of flame and heard a huge ka-boom.”

Only five soldiers in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have survived the loss of both arms and legs. Mr. Mills is one of them.

His journey back from that day tells the story not only of one man returning to life. It’s also a story of how a small town has been transformed, and with it, given new hope to wounded soldiers and their families.

Maybe Mr. Mills is already on your radar. His autobiography, “As Tough as They Come,” was a best seller. A movie is in the works, with Adam Driver as Mr. Mills and Sylvester Stallone as his unsinkable father-in-law. A documentary, “Travis: A Soldier’s Story,” is available on Netflix.

I first met Mr. Mills at, of all places, a writers’ conference in California. Even though we come from the same small town, and we’re both authors, we’d never met before.

He told me about his project to transform an old estate into a place where wounded veterans and their families can gather, free of charge, for a week of community and conversation on the shores of a lake in Maine. Once, he said with a luminous grin, it had been owned by Elizabeth Arden.

Everyone in town knows about the old Arden estate. From the 1930s to the 1970s it was called the Maine Chance resort, not only the glamorous home of the cosmetics magnate but a kind of Betty Ford Center of its day, a place where society ladies and Hollywood celebrities, among others, could escape to for the summer to dry out. Judy Garland stayed there. So did Mamie Eisenhower. The elegant mansion on the hill over the lake was once an essential part of the town’s economy, not to mention an essential part of its mythology.

But the Maine Chance fell into disrepair. Its tattered shell overlooked Arden Cove on Long Pond. A dirt path leading into the woods was still marked “Elizabeth Arden Road” on a few old maps, but it was virtually impassable except by mountain bike or A.T.V.

On a sunny Saturday in October, the new Travis Mills Foundation center for wounded veterans held an open house, and the elegant old grounds were full of vets and their families.

“Look, the V.A. does the best it can,” a Vietnam-era mess sergeant told me, as we waited in line to have our photographs taken with Mr. Mills. “But it stays with you forever, once you’ve served. You’re never the same. People need places like this, places where vets can feel like they’re not alone.”

Now, in rooms once graced by celebrities of yesteryear like Lilian Gish and Ava Gardner and Edna Ferber, wounded veterans and their families have that place. It has been made possible because of the support from donors, including the Barbara Bush Foundation, Wayfair and New Balance — but most of all because of the charisma of Mr. Mills.

I left the open house wearing a bracelet imprinted with Mr. Mills’s mantra: “Never Give Up, Never Quit.” Later, I took a bike ride through the woods along the old Elizabeth Arden Road. As I headed deeper and deeper into the woods, the road deteriorated until it wasn’t much more than a gnarled footpath over the shoulders of McGaffey Mountain.

At one particularly difficult hill, I got off of my bike and began walking it. Until I met Mr. Mills, I hadn’t given much thought to the fact that I have two arms and two legs, that no one has ever tried to kill me, that there are millions of Americans who have given their lives to make my life possible. But I was thinking about it now.

And then, just off to one side of the path, I saw a single grave, surrounded by a beaten split-rail fence. I put my bike down and walked into the woods to look at it.

“John Rogers,” it said. Sgt. Continental Line. Revolutionary War. 1756-1849. A small American flag fluttered by the stone.

I had been so certain that I was all alone on the old Elizabeth Arden Road. But there, in the heart of the deep Maine forest, was this well-tended grave. Someone had been here before me, and remembered.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.”

Jennifer Finney Boylan (@JennyBoylan), a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.”

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A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 21 of the New York edition with the headline: Travis Mills Will Never Quit. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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