Two men sit over a lunch of Vietnamese noodles in Virginia Beach and talk about a secret world they are leaving behind.
The restaurant is a big open room - good for men who speak intently to each other but make it a point to watch everything around them.
The younger man listens with a quiet focus. He is muscular and, at 31, has thick dark hair and a tattoo poking out from under his left shirt sleeve. There's an easy intelligence to him that gives little hint of the adversity he's overcome.
He's never met his lunch partner until today, but he knows of him. In their world, everybody does.
That man is 16 years his senior, bald, with piercing eyes and a commanding urgency. He walks briskly despite a pronounced limp, and he speaks with a fierceness that alludes to his world of experiences.
Though strangers, they have each earned the other's respect. They recognize in each other a rare resolve that stems partly from being a special breed of warrior and partly from being in that more obscure realm of survivor.
These two men were Navy SEALs, part of America's most secretive and elite group of fighters, serving their country at a time of war.
Both were in peak condition when they were wounded in Afghanistan 18 months apart. They were stripped of the very essence of their warrior creed - being "physically harder and mentally stronger" than the enemy.
For many people wounded in war, recovery is a quest to regain some sense of a normal life. But these two men discovered that they needed something more. Still burning within them, even though they could no longer run with the fastest or fight with the strongest, was an unyielding drive for excellence.
Over lunch, they relive the intensity of getting hurt and the difficulty of finding the right care. They describe the gaps in a system that's supposed to take care of them and of the abiding power of determination, generosity and love.
Robbie was standing on an embankment in eastern Afghanistan in October 2010 when two grenades misfired inside a launching canister right in front of him. Three years into his career with the SEALs, the job had been everything he'd envisioned: challenging, intriguing work that took him away from his desk position as a mechanical engineer and put him on the front lines.
The blast sent him flying off the embankment and back several yards. He stood up, reached his hand to his face to wipe the gravel out of his mouth. But it wasn't gravel. Those were his teeth, broken and loose.
Then he noticed blood pouring from the other hand, as if someone had run a can opener the length of his left arm, then pulled the sides apart.
Instinct - and adrenaline - kicked in. Robbie pulled out his tourniquet and wrapped it around his ravaged arm.
Robbie was taken to Bagram Airfield, the main hub for NATO and U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan, with a sophisticated hospital. By chance, specialists on deployment included a hand surgeon and vascular surgeon. They spent 14 hours operating on him.
When he woke up, his arm was still there. It was still there after surgeries at the U.S. military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany, where doctors also cleaned up his shattered cheekbone, and it was still there at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.
For six weeks, doctors operated frequently while the wound stayed open, filled with drains and tubes. His mother came down to be by his side.
In the blur of morphine and anesthesia, Robbie knew one thing: His arm was still there.
In July 2009, Jimmy's team - part of the Navy's Special Warfare Development Group - was on a search mission in eastern Afghanistan. The warriors landed in the dark and were hit with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades as they made their way across a field.
Jimmy was an old hand at this kind of mission. He'd become a SEAL in 1990 and joined his elite unit in 1994, back when there was no war. After six years, he left the unit to teach parachuting. When war broke out, he pushed hard to get back to Virginia Beach.
That was in 2004. Now, five years later, Jimmy was a senior chief, a leader of expert commandos, strong and alert and brimming with confidence. He was one of the toughest guys in the world.
The bullet that found his leg exploded through his femur just above the knee. It exited with pieces of bone and flung him through the air.
The pain was exquisite. In the seconds it took him to land, he told himself not to scream because that would give away the location of the men around him. Then his lungs filled with air, and he couldn't help it. He screamed in agony.
Two SEALs shot their way through the firefight, stabilized him and shot their way back out to pull him to safety.
A week later, Jimmy was at Bethesda. He underwent 17 surgeries - to clean the wound, to repair the damage, to clear out infection. Surgeons repaired his knee, reconstructed his femur and grafted nerves.
Lying in a hospital bed with a cocktail of powerful painkillers and too much time, Jimmy started to replay the moment, over and over.
He heard himself screaming in that Afghan night. He hated that sound. He hated himself for putting his buddies in danger to come to his rescue.
"The drugs, the inability to sleep - those things conspire against you," he says. "And I was embarrassed. I felt like I completely dishonored my crew."
Robbie is not a religious guy. Yet he couldn't help thinking it was more than coincidence that the day he arrived at the battlefield hospital in Bagram, hand and vascular surgeons were deployed there.
"They were able to take that," he says, pointing to a picture of his open wound, "and put it back together."
Most days at Bethesda, he'd walk down the hall to the physical therapy room and ride a bicycle or walk on a treadmill, using a table with a pillow to rest the arm.
It didn't take much to wipe him out - a tough adjustment for a guy who could once back-squat 400 pounds and run sub-6-minute miles.
As the weeks passed, Robbie's Navy doctors grew pessimistic. The arm is dead, they told him. It has to come off.
The young petty officer said no, defying the authority of his senior ranking doctors. He did his own research and learned that nerves can regrow, but that it could take months or even years.
A friend put him in touch with a doctor in Tucson, Ariz., who sent Robbie information about nerve regeneration.
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