On April 6, 2015, Army veteran Noah Galloway and his partner Sharna Burgess danced last on “My Most Memorable Year” night of Dancing with the Stars Season 20. The song was Toby Keith’s “American Soldier,” the routine was contemporary, and it opened with Galloway, shirtless, staring into a mirror. That mirror was not a random prop. It came straight out of the story he had just told the whole country about the hardest stretch of his life.
The year he chose: 2005
“My most memorable year was 2005, on my second deployment to Iraq,” Galloway said in the video package that aired before the dance. He had enlisted after September 11, 2001, and served with the 1st Battalion, 502nd Infantry of the 101st Airborne Division. He had already done one tour in Iraq and went back for a second.
On December 19, 2005, about three months into that second tour, an improvised explosive device went off under his Humvee near Yusufiyah, Iraq. He lost his left arm above the elbow and his left leg above the knee. His right leg was badly hurt, and his jaw was so badly injured that it had to be wired shut. According to Military Spouse magazine, he was flown to Germany and stayed unconscious for five days, waking late on Christmas Eve. He later told Live Happy magazine that he had no idea what condition he was in, and that it was his mom who told him he had lost his arm and his leg.
The mirror
In the package, Galloway was honest about what came next. He had always been a physical person, he said, and he had fallen in love with his job in the Army. Then he woke up and all of it was gone, the career and two of his limbs, and he figured that was the end of ever being physical again.
He did not pretend the change came easy. Over the following years he went through a long, dark stretch of depression. What finally turned it, he said, happened in front of a mirror:
“I really looked in the mirror and quit looking at what I was missing, and paid more attention to what I still had left.”
He said he realized he had to make a change, and it had to happen fast, because his kids were growing up. Then he summed up the dance in one line: “This dance represents the journey of acceptance from the man I was, to the man I’ve become.”
So when the music started and the first thing the audience saw was Noah Galloway looking at his own reflection, they already knew exactly what that moment meant.
Two people in the audience
Sharna Burgess had arranged for Galloway’s parents to sit in the Dancing with the Stars audience for the first time that night. “My parents and sisters and I have been through a lot,” he told Fox News afterward, adding, “I could see they were crying.”
His father understood more than most. When Noah was young, Andy Galloway lost a hand in an accident and kept working construction anyway, and Noah has said his dad was able to give him advice after his injury and understood the depression and the mistakes that followed.
Later in the routine, an American flag was projected across the ballroom floor. Galloway told Fox News that once he was out there, “I quit worrying about how it was going to go and just felt it.”
What the judges said
When it ended, the judges and the audience stood. Julianne Hough and Carrie Ann Inaba were both in tears. “There was something that was free and something that was so beautiful, and we all felt it here tonight,” Hough told him. Bruno Tonioli called him a superhero and “the ultimate role model.”
The score was 32 out of 40, sixth on the leaderboard that night. The couple had also paid a price in rehearsal that week, when Burgess accidentally kicked out one of Galloway’s teeth.
Why “American Soldier” fit
Toby Keith wrote “American Soldier” with Chuck Cannon, and it was released in late 2003 as a single from his album Shock’n Y’all. It spent four weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart in early 2004. Keith said he wrote it for the troops he met on his USO tours, and his goal was to show the human being behind the uniform. More than a decade later, a soldier who had lived the hardest parts of that song danced to it on national television.
Galloway and Burgess went on to finish third in Season 20 on May 19, 2015. But for a lot of viewers, the night that stayed with them was the one that started with a man looking into a mirror, with his mother and father watching from the seats, and a country song about soldiers playing while he showed everyone the man he had become.
Where were you the first time you heard “American Soldier”?