Navy veteran Lonnie Bedwell, who will become the first blind American to complete the Explorer’s Grand Slam, shares his journey on Tango Alpha Lima.
The shotgun blast came without warning. One moment, Lonnie Bedwell was turkey calling in the Indiana woods, a mile from his home. The next, his world went permanently dark.
Navy veteran Bedwell, a nuclear-trained submarine machinist who had served nearly nine years, lost his sight in a hunting accident in 1997. He was 30 years old, with three young daughters counting on him.
Bedwell didn’t retreat. He didn’t surrender to limitations. He talked his way onto a construction crew — blind — and spent the next 14 years helping build 20 or 30 homes, handling framing, wiring, roofing and siding. He raised his daughters alone.
“My girls were truly the ones that made me realize I still had value, I still had purpose,” Bedwell says on this week’s episode of The American Legion’s Tango Alpha Lima podcast. It is among more than 300 Tango Alpha Lima episodes available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube and wherever you listen. “To them, I was still the man. I had this duty to be a dad, to be their father and to show them not to give up.”
It wasn’t until his youngest daughter left for college that Bedwell finally visited the VA Blind Rehabilitation Center in Hines, Ill., 14 years after losing his sight. There, he met four young veterans who had lost their vision in combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. Staff asked if he’d be a guinea pig for a new adaptive snow-skiing outing.
“Twist my arm,” he told them.
That first run down a Wisconsin bunny hill ignited something. Within a few years, Bedwell had become the first blind person to kayak all 226 miles of the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, earning National Geographic’s Adventurer of the Year in 2015, and later stood on the summit of Mount Everest.
The Grand Canyon trip holds a special place in his memory.
“Every paddle stroke I make is an effort to pay them back — just a fraction — to pay them back for the sacrifices they gave me,” he said of the combat veterans who guided him through the rapids.
In the final four miles of the trip, those veterans took an American flag from a support raft, attached it to a piece of PVC pipe, and tucked it into the back of his life jacket. He paddled the last stretch of the Grand Canyon surrounded by wounded warriors, the flag flying off his back.
“I’m getting chills sitting here thinking about it,” he said, recounting the moment years later. “Too much has went into the freedom of this country that you just can never give up. Embrace it.”
A blind veteran’s Everest quest
The Everest summit — on May 22, 2023, just before Memorial Day — pushed Bedwell to his absolute limit. He navigated ladder crossings over crevasses, survived a rockfall that struck his right foot and heard helicopters ferry injured climbers off the mountain above him.
With 750 vertical feet remaining to go before reaching the 29,032-foot summit, his oxygen mask failed.
“Everything was running through my head,” recalled Bedwell, a member of American Legion Post 139 in Indiana. “Turn around, Lonnie — you have nothing to prove.” But then he thought of fallen servicemembers, of his fellow veterans, of all the people who had sacrificed everything. “I literally screamed at myself: Take another step.”
He made it. Four hours after his last full breath of supplemental oxygen, he stood on top of the world. When someone later asked if he’d climb Everest again, his answer was immediate: “What drove me up that mountain is done. If you paid me a million dollars, I couldn’t do it again.”
The Seven Summits
Today, Bedwell has summited all Seven Summits — the highest peak on each continent — and has skied to the South Pole.
The Explorer’s Grand Slam, one of adventure’s most exclusive achievements (fewer than 75 people have ever completed it), requires both poles and all seven summits. One expedition remains: the North Pole, the most dangerous and unpredictable stretch of the entire challenge.
When he completes it, Bedwell will become the first blind American in history to achieve the Grand Slam. His journey is being documented in a feature film called Beyond Vision — 10 years, seven continents, the world’s most unforgiving terrain.
“How do we overcome adversity?” he asked. “We break it down — A-D-V-E-R-S-I-T-Y. The A-D is always the hardest: the acknowledging and accepting the differences and difficulties. But once we truly acknowledge and accept — OK, here I am, I’m totally blind, there’s nothing I can do about it — then it empowers you to visualize every route you can take.”
In time, Bedwell has emerged with an inspiring outlook nearly 30 years after the hunting accident: “I lost my eyesight. I gained vision.”
Learn more about Bedwell and the documentary Beyond Vision at LonnieBedwell.com.
Also in this episode, co-hosts Stacy Pearsall, Adam Marr and Joe Worley discuss:
• VA’s new artificial intelligence tool.
• How three new laws will benefit veterans.
- Tango Alpha Lima