Chris Rosenblum

Matt Fedorko and other volunteers Monday planted American chestnut hybrids in an orchard owned by the State College-based Pennsylvania/New Jersey chapter of the foundation. On Penn State land, they filled in a grove of 150 trees, part of the foundation’s efforts to breed American chestnut hybrids resistant to a fatal blight more than a century old.

It’s Thursday afternoon in the Military Advanced Training Center gym inside the vast Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Everyone who is here, grunting and yelling over the pop and country music in the background, was robbed while in uniform. Their limbs, their past lives, are long gone. Now, with the help of ace physical therapists and state-of-the-art equipment, they’re fighting to regain what explosions and bullets took.

It’s called calcium ammonium nitrate, a substance with a Jekyll and Hyde nature. Used as a crop fertilizer, it helps feed people. But during the war against the Taliban, CAN produced in factories in Pakistan flowed into Afghanistan and became the primary ingredient in improvised explosive devices that killed or maimed hundreds of U.S. service members.