Photo Credit: Getty ImagesHe’s somewhere in the South today. Could be Mississippi. Could be Georgia by now. It would be easy enough to call Mike Viti and talk to him again, but it’s better this way. It’s better to not know for sure, to imagine this former Army fullback — this former U.S. Army captain — in any number of states, because to isolate him to any one state or one town, or even one roadway, wouldn’t do justice to the magnitude of his mission.
His mission? Walking across America. More than 7,000 kilometers, one for every US soldier — Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines — who has died serving you and me in the wake of 9/11 and our country’s subsequent war on terrorism. Your politics are your politics, and you have the right to them, but Mike Viti’s mission is pure and selfless and staggering.
On April 26 he left DuPont, Wash., and headed down the West Coast. Oregon. California. Then a left turn into Arizona, then New Mexico and into Texas. He walked through the hottest states in America in the hottest months of summer, 120 degrees one day in Yuma, Ariz., where Viti was joined by 49ers linebacker Dan Skuta, who wanted a small piece of this gigantic love offering submitted by Mike Viti. Skuta walked 12 miles alongside Viti on July 23 in honor of US Army Spc. Joseph D. Johnson, Skuta’s boyhood friend from Flint, Mich., who died in June 2010 in combat in Kunduz, Afghanistan. What’s your job? Mine is writing about sports. Johnson? He disarmed improvised explosive devices.
He wasn’t able to disarm his last one.
That’s just one fallen soldier. There had been more than 6,800 when this former Army fullback started walking in their honor in April, but the sad truth is he knew his journey would last nearly eight months, and that the number would rise along the way. He planned to walk 7,100 kilometers, or 4,144 miles. He hoped that would be enough. He hoped that would be too many.
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