"I can either curl up in a ball and cry or keep going," Kelsey told The Unknown Soldiers by phone from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., on May 8. "I choose the latter."

Amazingly, Kelsey's husband has also kept going. From the moment he woke up without his limbs after an enemy improvised explosive device detonated on April 10, Staff Sgt. Mills has been preoccupied with the well-being of his fellow 82nd Airborne Division paratroopers still fighting in Afghanistan.

"He worries about them constantly," Kelsey said. "He makes me message them daily to make sure they're safe."

While fellow soldiers were injured in the attack, Travis was relieved to learn they are healing. In this brave soldier's mind, if anyone was going to live out his life as a quadruple amputee, it was going to be him.

"He wouldn't have let this happen to any of his guys, and that's why it didn't happen to any of his guys," Kelsey explained. "He was always the first in line anywhere they went."

The 23-year-old Army wife had one source of comfort after the shocking news of her husband's severe wounds changed her life. Her brother, Staff Sgt. Joshua Buck, was also deployed to Afghanistan at the time of the attack and accompanied Travis home to the United States.

"I woke up in Germany, and I would have been alone," Kelsey quoted her husband as saying at Walter Reed. "I couldn't have faced it without Josh."

Through searing pain and the thick haze of medication, Travis' biggest fear wasn't death or adjusting to life as a wounded warrior. It was the panic his wife and their 7-month-old daughter, Chloe, would endure the first time they saw him without arms and legs.

Travis, 25, has spent his entire adult life putting others before himself.

"He'd give you the shirt off his back without hesitation," the soldier's wife said. "If you meet him, you'll never forget him."

Kelsey's quote is demonstrated by a national outpouring that started in the soldier's hometown of Vassar, Mich.