Christopher Lee / Getty Images Europe

Lt. Brad Snyder, blinded in Afghanistan after stepping on an IED, spent his first "Alive Day" winning gold at the 2012 Paralympic Games in London.

One year to the day after Lt. Brad Snyder lost his vision to a bomb explosion in Afghanistan, he swam ferociously across a pool. Then he stood atop a podium at the London Paralympics, wore gold around his neck and beamed to the national anthem, savoring the moment but seeing none of it. 

Exactly eight years after Tammy Duckworth lost her legs to a rocket-propelled grenade in Iraq, she met the Army medic who revived her inside a mangled helicopter. Amid that reunion, she had an extra reason to smile: Six days before, Duckworth had won a seat in the U.S. Congress.

During the otherwise dark anniversaries of their devastating combat injuries, both veterans chose to cherish the warm light of survival on what has come to be known, throughout the military, as “Alive Day.”

Their numbers are growing more slowly though still rising: Seventy American service members were wounded in Afghanistan during December, according to new Department of Defense figures. That made 2012 the third-bloodiest year of that war in terms of the tally of U.S. troops hurt in action — 2,951.

“Choice — that word means a lot here,” said Snyder, 28, a former Navy bomb-disposal expert. “‘Choice’ puts everything on a level playing field. Each of us faces a plethora of daily choices — when to get up, what to eat for breakfast, what to say to your family before leaving for work. You can choose to be positive. Or you can choose to be a victim.

“You can choose to move forward with grace. Or you can choose to succumb to negativity.”

How Snyder capped his initial Alive Day made some people cry, including his mother who watched from poolside. It made thousands more cheer at London’s Olympic Aquatics Centre. Twelve months after stepping on an IED, he dove blindly into water for the 400-meter freestyle Paralympics final. He won by nearly six seconds — an eternity in competitive racing.

Slideshow: Blinded warrior has visions of gold

Lt. Brad Snyder lost his sight in an IED explosion in Afghanistan in 2011. In September, the Navy officer once again represented the U.S., this time at the London 2012 Paralympics.

Launch slideshow

“Every (survivor of severe combat wounds) flirts potentially with a much more dismal outcome,” said Snyder, one of more than 50,000 U.S. troops wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. “To be in a situation where you can still do something great, that’s the way I look at Alive Day.”

But the concept isn’t an easy mental fit for every disabled veteran, admitted Snyder, who lives in Baltimore and who will remain a Naval officer for a while longer. During a recent public-speaking event, he chatted with former service members and discovered that “some of them just don’t even acknowledge Alive Day exists. Some look at this as a day when they only wear black, mope around and think about how miserable they want to be.”

The notion of trying to transform the anniversary of a nearly-fatal battle injury into an annual day of triumph was hatched before the Vietnam War, said Dr. Sydney Savion, a retired military officer, applied behavioral scientist and author of “Camouflage to Pinstripes: Learning to Thrive in Civilian Culture.” She is based in Texas.

Alive Day, Savion said, is “on some level, mind over matter." But she believes the concept serves as an effective mental-health salve and can be part of a path to lasting recovery.

“One of the most important things a veteran can learn to do in life is to reframe negative events that have happened to them. This is not to deny the close escape from death or the permanent wounds, sanitize them or hide them,” Savion said. “Instead, look at them like creating a piece of art. Michaelangelo once said, ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set it free.’ Even the ugliest events, when looked at with fresh eyes, (can carry) newfound meaning, opportunities and answers.”

Many veterans try, through reunions, phone calls, emails and letters, to retain the tight camaraderie they formed with their unit buddies. Alive Day, Savion added, offers another way “to rekindle that connection.” 

“If things are going to turn out well for any veteran, one thing (that) is paramount is redefining who one is and repurposing one’s life,” she said. “One must mentally and emotionally surrender the old situation and experiment with new ways of being, doing, (and) thinking.”

Duckworth, a former Army chopper pilot, this week took that advice to Capitol Hill. In her second bid for Congress, she won a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives on Nov. 6, serving the suburbs north of Chicago. She was sworn in Thursday.

Getty Images

Newly elected Congressional freshmen Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., arrives to pose for a class picture with other new members of the 113th Congress on the steps of the U.S. Capitol on Nov. 15, 2012, in Washington D.C.

The Monday after her election victory — her most recent Alive Day — Duckworth met the man who pulled her back to consciousness after she and her co-pilot managed to land their damaged, smoking Black Hawk helicopter in 2004.

“I don’t remember being in the ER. I just met the flight medic who revived me in the helicopter. We just spent Alive Day together,” Duckworth told NBC News in a recent interview. “He said, ‘You looked up at me. You were completely calm.’ ”

Duckworth often spends her Alive Day with the five men who were aboard the chopper with her in 2004 as they skimmed treetops in Iraq at about 135 miles per hour. The group has sometimes gathered in St. Louis. She sees that anniversary, she said, as a “celebration” — and a moment when she can show appreciation to those who helped save her life.

But Alive Day also provides veterans with a unique bond, she added. After a photo shoot of Congressional freshmen snapped last November, Duckworth met a new lawmaker from California, Paul Cook, who was wounded in Vietnam.

“There’s a subset of us who have seen combat action,” Duckworth said. “That’s the reason I was able to talk to this man. He started talking about walking into a trip wire in Vietnam and wanted to know what hit me, what that was like.’ When you’ve actually not just been deployed, when you’ve both seen combat action, you have this common place.”

Duckworth’s 2013 Alive Day likely will be spent in the House of Representatives. It falls on a Tuesday.

Snyder’s 2013 Alive Day comes on a Saturday. He has resolved to “raise the bar” on the feat he pulled off last Sept. 7. But he knows that will not be easy.

“I want to do something that’s more outstanding or more ridiculous,” Snyder said. “Maybe I’ll climb a mountain or jump out of an aircraft. We’ll see. Certainly, it will be a day about moving forward. I’ll try to make the most of the fact that I’m still here. I’ll enjoy life to its fullest. That’s something I try to do every day — but especially on that day.”

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Jason Reed / Reuters

Tammy Duckworth, D-Ill., U.S. representative-elect for Illinois' 8th Congressional District, is pictured with other female members of Congress on Capitol Hill in Washington on Nov. 14. Duckworth, a helicopter pilot in the Iraq war who was shot down and lost both her legs in the attack, is the first disabled woman to be elected to the House of Representatives.

When Tammy Duckworth steps into Congress this January for her first term, she’ll be carried by two prosthetic legs – and the potent notion that if she can survive a grenade blast while piloting a chopper, she surely can endure any political flak on Capitol Hill.

“The worst day for me in Washington on the floor of the House is never going to be as bad as me getting blown up. So bring it,” said Duckworth, a Democrat who represents Illinois’ 8th Congressional District, the suburbs north of Chicago.

One of the first women to fly combat missions in Iraq, Duckworth’s Black Hawk was hit by enemy fire in November 2004 as the aircraft skimmed tree tops at about 135 miles per hour. The explosion vaporized her right leg, smashed her left leg into the instrument panel, sheering it off, and tore away most of her right arm. Before losing consciousness, she used her remaining arm to try to land the sputtering chopper. On Nov. 6, she won election to the U.S. House.

“There’s nothing anyone can say to me or do to me — short of actually pointing a gun and shooting at me — that’s going to be as bad as it was in Iraq and that year I spent recovering. So it’s really freeing,” Duckworth told NBC News. “Had you talked to me 10 years ago, before I served and got hurt in combat, I would not have the courage to do what I’m doing now.”

The sudden violence of her final mission — followed by months of surgeries, (doctors reattached her arm), and rehab at Walter Reed Army Medical Center — imbued Duckworth, 44, with an intimate understanding of warfare’s true cost, a sensibility that’s fast vanishing from both chambers of Congress.

**

In 1977, the 435-seat U.S. House of Representatives contained 347 veterans (almost 80 percent of that body) while 65 former service members filled the 100-seat U.S. Senate.

In 2013, 84 fellow veterans will join Duckworth in the House (19 percent) while the Senate’s cadre of ex-military personnel has dwindled to 18, according the American Legion.

“That’s incredible,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder and executive director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America, a nonpartisan and nonprofit group with more than 200,000 members. “The volunteer military has been great for our military, but maybe it’s not great for our democracy.”

The rapidly shrinking corps of congressional veterans threatens to dampen the attention Washington pays to tens of thousands of men and women yet to return from Afghanistan and, Rieckhoff added, to more than 2 million post-9/11 veterans — many of them tormented by combat-related stress and troubled by sluggish hiring rates, Rieckhoff said.

Click here for more military-related coverage from NBC News.

“A low number of veterans in Congress is bad for everybody. It’s bad for the veteran community. It’s bad for the active-duty military. It’s bad for America,” Rieckhoff said. “I am concerned that as the number continues to decline, we will have fewer advocates.”

At the same time, however, Duckworth’s election gives what Rieckoff calls the “new veterans movement” a truly historic moment and some vital momentum.

“That’s not just because she is a woman and it’s not just because she is a disabled vet,” he said. “It’s because she’s become such an important spokesperson for our entire community — beyond politics.”

**

Inside the cockpit of the crippled Black Hawk, all internal communications were dead.

Duckworth wasn’t sure if she was the lone survivor. Smoke swirled. The floor of the helicopter had been ripped open by a rocket-propelled grenade. She spotted a field where she thought she could ease the aircraft down. She tried to work the controls. She didn’t know that Chief Warrant Officer Dan Milberg was alive as well, had glimpsed the same clearing and was steering the Black Hawk toward safe ground.

Duckworth also believed she was uninjured. She could still feel her legs. 

Before losing consciousness, Duckworth remembers completing a final task after the chopper had come to rest. She raised her left arm to perform an emergency shutdown of the electronics. She worried about a fire consuming the other five soldiers still strapped into their seats.

She has no recollection of arriving at the emergency room in Baghdad where — Duckworth later was told — she demanded that medics give her a full update on her crew. Her remaining memories are some of her worst, coming at Walter Reed, during a slow surfacing from her induced coma.

Before anybody near her bed realized Duckworth could again see and hear, she watched and listened for two days as doctors and nurses mentioned “a helicopter crash.”

"To a pilot, a crash is very different from a forced landing. At the time, I didn’t know Dan was OK. But I did know my crew chief was badly hurt and had almost lost his leg. I had been told I’d lost my legs,” Duckworth said. “But I kept hearing talk about a helicopter crash. I thought: ‘Oh my God, I crashed the helicopter. I didn’t do my job.’ I spiraled into a depression, laying there in that intensive care unit where I just thought: ‘I deserve to lose my legs. I must have crashed the aircraft. I am a complete and utter failure and I hurt my men.’ ”

Her husband, Maj. Bryan Bowlsbey, a fellow Army National Guardsman, was by then at her side. He noticed she was crying. He tried to cheer her with descriptions of amputees running atop artificial legs. She told him her misery was rooted in the crash, not her devastating injuries. Bowlsbey gently corrected her: She had been on the controls as Milberg had managed to settle the aircraft onto the Iraqi field. She had done her duty.

“I’ve been fine ever since,” Duckworth said. “Nothing you can do to me now can ever negate that. I just have this freedom in my life because of that day and what I’ve been through. In a very weird way, it’s a gift.”

**

The 2012 presidential election marked the first since 1932 in which no veterans held spots on the Democratic or the Republican tickets. The last time: When Herbert Hoover lost to Franklin D. Roosevelt.

But that trend has been speading inside the legislative branch for 40 years. 

“The declining population of veterans in Congress creates an even wider divide between our veteran community and the majority of the American public,” said Louis J. Celli, Jr., national legislative director for the American Legion.

“Congressional members who have worn the uniform of our nation tend to have a better understanding of the unique challenges and needs faced by the veteran community, especially those veterans who return with medical needs that extend beyond their active service period,” Celli added.

While veterans groups like IAVA acknowledge that civilian politicians can become champions of military and homefront causes, Celli said, however, “it is usually a long process educating them regarding the difference between earned benefits and sympathy legislation.”

**

As the highest-ranked amputee at Walter Reed, then Maj. Duckworth began handling personal issues for other wounded soldiers in 2005, including salary snags and the potential losses of their homes. 

She called Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin so often to ask for his help, he eventually gave her his business card scrawled with his cell phone number. Through her advocacy for other veterans, she also met then-Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

Paul Beaty / AP

Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth, representative for Illinois 8th District seat, talks to the media in Elk Grove Village, Ill., Tuesday, Nov. 6, 2012.

“I was just doing it because it was my job,” Duckworth said. “In August of ‘05, I get a call from Senator Durbin who said: ‘You know, if things are as bad as you say they are for veterans, then you need to do something about it.’ I said, ‘Well, yes sir, I’m calling you.’ He said, ‘No, you need to run for office.’ Barack and I think you should run.’ ”

She narrowly lost her first bid for Congress in 2006.

Days ago, as she and other freshman congressional members gathered for a group photo on Capitol Hill, Duckworth met former Marine Col. Paul Cook — the new Republican representative whose district covers Highland, Yucaipa, the San Bernardino Mountains, the entire High Desert.

“He’s a Vietnam vet. We just hit it off,” Duckworth said. “There’s a subset of us who have seen direct combat action. He started talking about walking into a trip wire in Vietnam and wanted to know what hit me. He asked: ‘What that was like?’ When you’ve both seen combat action, you have this common place.”

Simply put: War stories can trump political parties.

Duckworth lists two primary heroes: retired Republican Sen. Bob Dole and Democratic Sen. Daniel Inouye from Hawaii, both disabled veterans.

“They are two men who recovered in the same hospital after World War II and who went on to pass legislation nationally,” she said. “They found a way to come to middle ground because of their shared experience. So I hope that with the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans coming into Congress, we also will be able to work together.” 

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Paul Beaty / AP

Tammy Duckworth, seen celebrating with husband Bryan Bowlsbey in Elk Grove Villiage, Ill., on Tuesday night, defeated challenger Rep. Joe Walsh for Illinois' 8th congressional district seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

A record 16 veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan were elected to Congress on Tuesday night and two more veterans remained locked in races Wednesday that were too close to call.

The winners included nine first-time officeholders and seven incumbents.

All but two of the victorious veterans seeking U.S. House and U.S. Senate seats represent the Republican Party. They included Brad Wenstrup, who deployed to Iraq in 2005 as a combat surgeon. Wenstrup will represent Ohio’s 2nd congressional district which sits east of Cincinnati.

For the Democrats, Tammy Duckworth captured Illinois’ 8th congressional district, which spans Chicago’s northern suburbs. Duckworth, who served as a captain in the Army National Guard, lost both of her legs and partial use of her right arm when her helicopter was shot down over Iraq in 2004. She becomes the first female veteran of Iraq or Afghanistan to serve in Congress.

“It’s a very powerful moment. She also became the first severely wounded veteran to be elected,” said Paul Rieckhoff, founder and chief executive officer of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA), the largest nonprofit, nonpartisan group representing veterans of those two wars. “We are looking to her to really reach beyond politics and lead us all forward. She can be our generation’s John McCain or Max Cleland.”

McCain, an Arizona senator and the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee, was shot down over North Vietnam in 1967, breaking both arms and a leg and becoming a prisoner of war. Cleland, a former Democrat senator from Georgia, earned the Silver Star and Bronze Star during the Vietnam War, losing both legs above the knee and his right forearm to a grenade explosion.

The 16 veteran victories — the largest single wave of former service members heading to Congress since the 1980s, according to IAVA — represent “a huge step forward for the new veterans movement and a huge step forward for America,” Rieckhoff told NBC News. He called those collective outcomes "historic." 

“What we’ve seen from this community is an extraordinary focus on country as well as some pragmatic solutions. We believe these folks can work together across party lines and be a shot in the arm in Washington — exactly what America needs right now,” said Rieckhoff, who served as a first lieutenant and infantry rifle platoon leader in Iraq during 2003 and 2004.

“People think all we’re really doing over there is pulling triggers and dropping bombs. We’re also rebuilding schools, rebuilding infrastructure,” he added. “There’s no better testing ground for a political career than, say, helping the people of Fallujah (Iraq) get their water running again. Think about Staten Island right now — that’s (looking) like Fallujah.”

Overall, post-9/11 veterans competed for 42 Congressional seats on Tuesday night.

One of the most notable younger veterans to lose was Sen. Scott Brown of Massachusetts who had served in Afghanistan. He was beaten by Democrat Elizabeth Warren.  

Related: In costliest-ever Senate race, Warren beats Brown for Mass. seat

Rieckhoff predicted that at least one future U.S. president will emerge from the group of post-9/11 veterans who now hold congressional seats or who soon will head to Washington — “and maybe multiple presidents.”

“These aren’t professional politicians,” he said. “These are folks who served overseas who came who and wanted to continue to serve. This has happened all the way back to George Washington and was true of (John) Kennedy, (Harry) Truman and the first President (George H.W.) Bush. As George Washington said, ‘When we assumed the soldier, we did not lay aside the citizen.’ ” 

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