Dropping from the sky: Mark Colburn

April 20, 2008

Nearly 11 years ago, Marcus Colburn fell 3,000 feet from the sky, his chute shredded by a fellow Navy SEAL skydiver. Nearly every bone in his body was broken. Even worse, his brain was slammed against his skull and badly injured.
Marcus was fortunate in one way, though. The ground was soft from rain the night before. Doctors induced a coma to aid recovery, but couldn’t revive him back to consciousness.
His doctor gave him five chances out of 100 of ever waking up.
Mark started coming back to life after four months, but with the abilities of a six-month old. He had to re-learn even the most elementary skills—rolling over, moving his toes, and drinking liquid.
Today, it’s hard to believe he competed in a triathlon in California, just two years ago—running 12 1/2 miles, swimming two miles, and bicycling 13 miles.
Yet he is not the same Marcus Colburn.
Because of the injury to his brain, he has a distinct gait. His speech is close to normal, but it’s not as clear or complex as it was. He tends to crack joke after joke—a few not so appropriate. It’s hard to get a straight answer from him.
“Do you have short-term memory loss?”
“Ahh, what did you just say?”

MOJO FROG
A lot of attention is paid to Colburn’s physical feats. But there’s a lot more to Mark. He writes songs and plays blues harp as “Mojo Frog.” He paints dramatic oil portraits that hang in his living room. He works as a personal trainer at Bay Tennis and Fitness, where he tells clients he had a long history with pain, but it never stopped him from achieving his goals. He gives motivational speeches to at-risk kids in northern Michigan schools. He ends his speeches by asking the kids to shout the Navy SEAL promise: “I will never quit!” and “The only easy day was yesterday!”
Colburn is a fixture in Petoskey, where he and his mom, Liliane Colburn, share a home.
Residents have seen him evolve both mentally and physically since he moved there in 2000. Most react kindly, although a few have been shaming or intolerant. Liliane says she’s had to serve as his protector, although it’s less necessary as her son has improved.
Indeed, Colburn’s story is as much about his mother as it is about himself. Her unwavering commitment is a testament to the power of unconditional love.
Liliane tells of their journey together in her gripping, self-published book, “The Green Room: A Mother’s Truth.”
And truthful it is.

AN UNHAPPY ROCK STAR
The Colburns live in an elegant home near downtown Petoskey. The walls are covered with art, including Mark’s painting, “Dew Drop In,” which won the top award at the local college. Knowing Mark, it’s a pun.
Colburn is dressed immaculately in work-out clothes and astonishingly white tennis shoes (“He washes them all the time; It’s a SEAL thing,” Liliane explained.) His long limbs are pure muscle.
Liliane is a youngish 80 and speaks with a beautiful French accent. She was born in Paris and moved to this country at the age of 18 as a war bride.
Mark spent his early years in Birmingham. His father died suddenly from a heart attack at the age of 37, the same age that Mark was in the skydiving accident.
In school, Colburn was an intensely disciplined athlete who had no fear. Those characteristics gave him an edge into the elite Navy SEALS, at the relatively “old age” of 29.
He won’t say much about his military engagements, except that he served in Desert Storm. After he married in 1995, he joined the SEAL’s sky-diving team. The move required hundreds and hundreds of practice dives with a line attached, and then hundreds more of training dives.
The sky-diving team, like the Blue Angels, is a recruiting tool for the SEALs. The 14-man team performs in stadiums across the country, jumping from 12,500 feet and falling at speeds as high as 180 mph. Mark was like a rock star—handsome and incredibly fit. After the stadium shows, fans lined up for autographs.
But all was not well. He was unhappily married and confessed in a phone call to his mother in April of 1997 that he planned on filing for divorce with his wife Eva (not her real name). Then on May 17, Liliane received a far more disturbing phone call. Her son had fallen 3,000 feet into a field near San Diego. They didn’t know if he’d live.
THE HIT
Colburn doesn’t remember falling. He learned later that another skydiver had dropped into the sacred space above his own free fall. So when Colburn pulled his chute, two things happened. His own chute shot up, while the other skydiver ripped through the chute at 90 mph. The diver’s knee hit Colburn’s hand and drove it into his head. The hit rendered him unconscious, so he was unable to open an emergency chute. A SEAL who saw him land had to dig the dirt out of his mouth so he could breathe.
Colburn remembers a dream. He wanted to use the phone to call his mom, something he’d often do after landing. But an EMT told him he had to wait. Someone had “just burned in,” and they needed an ambulance. He remembers men crying.
He was raced to the hospital, where his body was stabilized with a halo, which a doctor screwed into his head and attached to a vest. He broke his neck and many bones, but wasn’t paralyzed.
Liliane and her daughter, Michele Sturt, flew from Petoskey to the San Diego airport the next day. Jacki Colburn, his other sister, flew in from Florida. They and his SEAL friends took turns visiting him, most stumbling away from the hospital room in shock.
A few days later, a good-looking man in crutches came into the waiting room. He was the SEAL who had crashed into Colburn. “He was very sorry and I felt bad for him. It’s always sad to see a man crying the way he was, so we hugged each other. He said he had passed out, but had come to after going through Mark’s parachute and had been able to land okay,” Liliane wrote.
Liliane learned that her son had been training the man and one other SEAL that day to jump from 20,000 feet with oxygen. They were about to go home, but then the three of them decided to jump once more. It was Mark’s 501st official jump (but amazingly not the last).

DESPERATE VIGIL
The months-long vigil was complicated by the simmering acrimony between Mark’s wife and the other family members.
Colburn’s vegetative state seemed eternal. After days of watching him sleep and survive on tube feedings, Eva suggested that her husband wouldn’t like to live as a vegetable. Liliane ignored her, but even she despaired. She prayed to God to give Mark back to her.
“I could think of no other way that he’d ever get better than to ask God. I started to cry and cry. One of the nurses heard me and came into the room and she said, ‘Mrs. Colburn don’t cry. Your son is looking at you.’
“… I sniffled and said, ‘No, he’s not,’ and she said, ‘Yes I’m telling you — your son is looking at you!’ I looked up and I saw that one of his eyes was way open and he was looking right at me! I grabbed his hand tighter and looked at him again and I could tell there was a look of recognition there.”
The doctor said that if Colburn could respond to commands, he had hope. Several months after the accident, the nurse told Colburn to open his eyes. He opened an eye. “If you can hear me, blink.” And he blinked. “Move your toes,” she said. After a couple of minutes, Colburn moved his toes.
Liliane wept with joy. Later, she celebrated with a sheet cake with friends that said, “My son opened his eyes today!”

FIRST WORD
One night, Colburn fell out of bed. When the doctor asked him if he was hurt, he answered, “No.” That was his first word.
After four months, Colburn was transferred to a rehab facility. But therapy pained his brain, and soon he refused to leave his bed. So Eva called one of his SEAL buddies who showed up the same day. “He went to Mark’s bed and said: ‘Okay, Mark, let’s go. You have to get up and walk. Now!’ They pulled him out and to everyone’s delight, he offered none of his usual resistance. They put his clothes on, then each took an arm and guided him to the end of the hall. I was thrilled,” Liliane wrote.
From that day on, the SEALs showed up daily at 5 p.m. and worked out with him in the rehab room.
He eventually picked up speech and evolved into an agitated state, where he would assault visitors with profanity — even his closest friends.
Today, Colburn remembers little. His memories begin with Liliane pushing his wheelchair to an MRI test. He remembers thinking, “I’m supposed to see a white light when I die, but this is ridiculous.” He remembers his mom changing his sheets and feeding him. He remembers calling her Mrs. Colburn because that’s what everyone called her. And he remembers listening to the tapes of his favorite songs. “I felt happy and safe. I got to know exactly which song was the final song on a tape and the tape would need to be turned over,” he wrote in the book.
“I also remember seeing myself in the bathroom mirror, this skinny guy with a long plastic tube staring right back at me. He had this nutty look in his cocked eyes, like one of the guys I used to see in movies about concentration camps. Man was I pissed. Is that me?”

HOMECOMING
After eight months, Colburn returned to his apartment with Eva. Liliane reluctantly returned home to Petoskey.
Colburn was still not walking and told his neuro-psychiatrist that he feared falling. So the psychiatrist felt he could be “cured” by going back to the site of his accident and jumping again. He promised Mark a burrito if he did.
Colburn agreed to do the tandem jump, which earned him a spot on a TV show Extra. When he called to tell his mom about it, she was silently furious. She later watched the video and saw her son’s face was full of fear. His hands had to be pried off the open doorway. “I was absolutely destroyed,” she wrote.
Ultimately, Colburn and his wife broke up and he moved in with Liliane, who thought a small town like Petoskey would be more understanding of his strange behavior. She was mostly right.
It was a good thing, too, because Colburn would often do or say whatever came to his head. One day, he didn’t want to go into the hospital for an appointment, so he just laid down in the middle of the street. During a spinning class, he would yell out a Navy SEAL slogan from “hell week”: “Quit now! Quit now! Avoid the rush!” He was asked to drop the class. When he first started learning how to walk, he’d hold his arms straight in front of him, looking a bit like Frankenstein.

DRAMA CLASS
Liliane thought taking classes at North Central Michigan College would help and asked him what he wanted to study. His answer: drama.
“I wanted to learn how to talk. Every time I got on the phone to order pizza, no one could understand me,” he explained.
Fortunately, his drama teacher, Greg Baird, was supportive and understanding. “He coached Mark with his lines and saw to it that he fit in with the class,” Liliane wrote. “Mark still spoke impulsively and whenever somebody spoke, he had to put his two cents in. So Greg would tell Mark to keep quiet when he had to.”
Mark’s gym became a second home. He kept setting new goals for himself and achieving them.
“His motivation has always been at the high end. I really never had to motivate him to do anything. I just had to make sure he wasn’t doing too much,” said his former personal trainer and friend Scott Conti.
His latest success: getting his driver’s license six months ago.
“He can drive anywhere. He can do anything,” said Liliane.
Liliane’s book is honest. She laughs at herself – an old woman trying to help a 6‘1 man who could barely walk. She writes about the awkwardness of an early romantic interlude with a woman he met online. She describes the local Petoskey folks who mostly helped, but sometimes hurt Mark.

‘I WANTED MY FRIEND BACK’
Her most touching account involves Bill, his best friend and a Navy SEAL, who thought that Liliane was coddling her son. He took Colburn to Florida, planning to use a boot camp approach to bring him back to normal. The trip was disastrous.
“Mark told me that Bill tried to make him go in the ocean at night without a life jacket and wanted him to feel bad about not being like the Mark he once was. Mark’s reaction was to finally punch him in the face and fight him. To Bill’s surprise, they rolled on the ground until he (Mark) said to him, ‘Mark friends don’t hit friends,’” Liliane wrote.
Liliane was furious and called Bill, who tried to justify himself.
“But his last words broke my heart when he said, ‘I wanted my friend back.’ I think I reached him when I told him that I wanted my son back too, but you have to accept him the way he is day by day. I would never stay mad at Bill, he was part of our life and of course Mark could not either. … he is still Mark’s best friend.”
Now Liliane is at the point in life she only dared to dream of. She frequently travels to see friends. She knows that her son can live independently. It has been an arduous, but rewarding 11 years. She learned lessons by how others responded to him and vowed to show him all the goodness in the world.
“I drew strength from him… I made up my mind that I would never cry in front of him or be negative in any way. I would only show him all the good that was waiting for him.”
Colburn has changed, as well. He holds deeper and more complex values than his Navy SEAL days. He has changed politically, too, on the issue of war. Now he half-jokes that “most SEALS love a president who gives them war. Then they have a job.” All deadpanning stops when he talks about the decision to invade Iraq. “Bush ought to be impeached. This war is deathgate.”
He supports the soldiers though, and wants to help those who were brain injured. He cracks a joke: “It’s always darkest before it turns black.”
And then he puts kidding aside. “If I can do it, anyone can do it. I give people hope.”

“The Green Room” is available at amazon.com, iuniverse.com and Horizon Books.