60 Minutes - 8/7/2022: Death in Training, An Island Off An Island, Flying Blind

Episode Date: August 8, 2022

On this edition of “60 Minutes,” Lesley Stahl speaks with parents of service members killed in training, and reports on why so many vehicle training accidents occur in the U.S. armed forces. Jon Wertheim takes us to a remote Canadian island that is trying to reinvent itself. Sharyn Alfonsi speaks with Jacob Smith, the first legally blind person to ski the Big Couloir. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Where's your playlist taking you? Down the highway? To the mountains? Or just into daydream mode while you're stuck in traffic? With over 4,000 hotels worldwide, Best Western is there to help you make the most of your getaway. Wherever that is. Because the only thing better than a great playlist is a great trip.

Life's a trip. Make the most of it at Best Western. Book, direct, and save at bestwestern.com. Meet Tim's new Oreo mocha ice caps with Oreo in every sip. Perfect for listening to the A-side or B-side or bull-side. Order yours on the Tim's app today at participating restaurants in Canada for a limited time. 60 Minutes has been looking into an alarming amount of military casualties, not in combat, but in training that involve armored vehicles. What's being done about it? All right, let's go.

We found there are solutions, but an important one is stuck between the Pentagon and Congress. Oh, my God! The saying here goes, you'll know the Newfoundlanders in heaven. They'll be the ones who want to go home. And the adage comes to life on Fogo Island, a 90-square-mile patchwork of 10 minuscule fishing villages where clapboard houses the color of jelly beans cling to rock 400 million years old.

Among its quirks, Newfoundland has its own time zone, half an hour ahead of the mainland. But wander through Fogo Island's villages and you might as well set your watch back to the 18th century. Three, two, one. Jacob Smith drops into the Big Cool R, a narrow, rock-walled, 1400-foot chute. That dot is him, making his way turn by turn. A wrong move can be catastrophic. The run has a 50-degree slope, which means if you slip down the couloir, there's little chance you can stop yourself.

We thought you should see this, because he cannot. Jacob is legally blind. I'm Leslie Stahl. I'm Bill Whitaker. I'm Anderson Cooper. I'm Sharon Alfonsi. I'm John Wertheim. I'm Scott Pelley. Those stories tonight on 60 Minutes. As a parent or partner of someone in the military,

you're far likelier to get the dreaded call only to learn your loved one was killed not in combat, but in an accident. And as we first reported in February, far too many of the accidents involve armored vehicles and happen during training. First Lieutenant Connor McDowell, a platoon leader in the Marines, was out on a training mission in a light-armored vehicle like this at Camp Pendleton, California in May 2019 when he hit an unmarked ditch covered in brush.

Describe what happened. He called out to his men, roll over, roll over, roll over. Pushed his gunner in the turret next to him down under the armor, but he couldn't get himself down in time. And it careened into that ditch, rolled over, and crushed him. Connor was Susan Flanagan and Michael McDowell's only child. At first, I thought that this was what happens when you train like you mean to fight.

But when we went to San Diego to bring him back, I had a couple of idle moments in the hotel and I googled rollover and military. And I discovered that at Pendleton, a month before, a Marine raider had died in a rollover. So I googled further back, the army, etc. And suddenly I saw a whole series of deaths in rollovers of military vehicles, all kinds, Humvees, light armored vehicles, Bradley fighting vehicles. And then I realized this is not a single incident. This is a systemic problem. During training? During training. I can accept people dying in combat, but if you're training in your own country and you're dying needlessly in preventable accidents, this is a massive problem which has to be fixed.

To fix it, McDowell kept digging. And what he uncovered, he says, was so serious and yet so routinely neglected that it led to this scathing report by the Government Accountability Office. The GAO found close to 4,000 of these accidents in the Army and Marine Corps from 2010 to 2019, resulting in 123 deaths, nearly two-thirds of which involved rollovers. And shockingly, most occurred in daylight on regular roads, even in parking lots. It's the tragedy of low expectations, that it's expected people will die in training. Are you saying that they expect this? What are you saying? It's regarded as that's the price of being a soldier or a Marine.

In training? Yes. They expect... Training is dangerous. These things happen. But they don't just happen. The GAO concluded there was often improper supervision, that drivers were poorly trained, and vehicles inadequately inspected. Some accidents involved multiple factors,

as was the case with Christopher Bobby Nem, a Navy sailor. These are screams of joy from Bobby's mom, Nancy, when he surprised her one Christmas. A year and a half later, in the summer of 2020, he and 15 Marines were training off Camp Pendleton in amphibious assault vehicles, or AAVs like these, giant armored vessels Marines used on both land and sea. His stepdad, Peter Vienna, says the Marines had no business sending out the AAVs used in his son's drill. They're 40 years old, and they were in terrible condition. And instead of asking for better condition AAVs, which there were, there were plenty of them, they had gotten these, all of them that were in poor condition. So they're sitting in a parking

lot on Camp Pendleton, baking in the sun. They're deteriorating. Peter Ostrofsky's son, Jack Ryan, was also on that mission. A week prior to the mission, we were speaking on the telephone, and he made the comment that AAVs sink all the time. They've called them, and he called it a floating coffin. Do you think he was worried? Oh, absolutely. Two AAVs broke down, and their son's designated vehicle sprang an engine leak. And yet, the mission was not aborted. What was the drive to go forward with faulty equipment? They're trying to keep a schedule, stay on time.

The safety of our sons took a second place to completing a training mission. This isn't combat. This isn't got to do it right now. This is training. There should have been an all-stop at many points. But 16 young men crowded into the AAV, as seen in this video that one of the Marines sent his dad. It almost immediately started taking on water, ankle level, calf level, seat level, as one by one the AAV systems were failing. The communication system was down.

They were in the dark using the lights on their cell phones to try to see. Wait, wait, the lights didn't work? The safety lighting that's supposed to function didn't function. Were there lifeboats? No, so there's supposed to be two safety boats in the water. They went with none. This is the AAV at the bottom of the ocean, an underwater video we obtained through a Freedom of Information request.

Seven men made it out alive. Nine did not. Turns out most had received little or no safety training on how to escape. It doesn't make sense. There's so much of it that doesn't make sense. They were taken on water for 45 minutes, yet they were still found at the bottom of the ocean with all their gear still on, their body armor. And that should have come off. They didn't know what to do.

They were all looking at each other like, what does this mean? What do we do? You know, the Marine Corps did its own investigation. And the Marine Corps concluded that this, and I'm gonna use the direct quote, was preventable. The top-down incompetence, the lack of readiness, really the lack of duty of care for our sons. It was shocking.

Can you sue the military or the commanders for what happened? There's the Ferris Doctrine makes that impossible. The Ferris Doctrine makes that impossible. The Ferris Doctrine prevents anyone from suing the military for anything that happens to service members on the job, no matter how egregious. The biggest thing for me is these boys were not protected. I had this vision in my head, nightmares of the AAV going down. What was his last word? This was one of the worst training accidents in Marine Corps history.

But accidents keep coming, and the GAO states less serious ones are likely underreported. Christian Avila Tavares, an army combat medic, was on a training drill in 2018 when one vehicle broke down, so his vehicle had to tow it. This is around, wow, 1 30 a.m. maybe. It's dark, it's raining, it's muddy. The vehicle that we were towing just slid and hit us, and so we just rolled over. And I was expelled from the vehicle, and then the vehicle just landed on top of me, pinning me down from the waist down. So this giant monster vehicle rolls over on top of you? Yes, on top of me. His left leg had to be amputated above the knee. The right leg was so badly damaged, he spent the next two years in rehab learning how to walk again. Killing it, bro. Killing it. And we learned there was

another rollover during training at that same place, that same day as Avila Tavares's. The Army told us there were fewer vehicle deaths last year, saying most are caused by human error and inexperience. Nearly one in five enlistees join the Army with no driver's license. The Pentagon and Marines declined our interview requests, though the new defense budget mandates several new safety provisions, and AAVs will no longer be used in water drills. But there are more steps the military could take that they haven't, involving relatively inexpensive upgrades to the vehicle involved in most accidents, the Humvee. This test footage by IMI, a safety system supplier, shows what can happen inside a Humvee in a rollover. But watch, drivers could have a better chance when Humvees are retrofitted with

IMI's restraints and airbags. One reason there are so many Humvee accidents is numbers. Over 100,000 are used by the Army alone. Another cause is engineering. Their high center of gravity makes them prone to flip over. And because Humvees were easy targets for IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the military added extra armor that made them even less stable. Okay. We were invited by Ricardo Defense,

a small military contractor, to suit up for a demo of how unstable these vehicles can be while making turns. All right, let's go. We were going less than 30 miles an hour. The two yellow bars were there to prevent us from actually tipping over. Most Humvees do not have anti-lock brakes or electronic stability control that prevent rollovers. But eight years ago, Ricardo developed them for the Humvee.

Ricardo's president, Chet Gryson. Let's do the same thing with the system on, please. Here it comes. With the system on, all wheels remain firmly on the ground. My goodness gracious. The system works so well, it's now mandatory in all new Humvees. But what about Humvees already in use?

Well, Ricardo came up with a safety kit that could be installed for about $16,000 per vehicle in about 54,000 of the older Humvees. You could make 10 or more old vehicles safer for the price of one new vehicle. And yet the Department of Defense is asking for a lot of money for new Humvees, but only a fraction of what's needed to retrofit old ones. If the budget were to be approved today, as the numbers stand, we would have enough funding for about 545 vehicles. 545 vehicles out of 54,000? That's it?

That's it, yeah. And so that's about 1% of the fleet. At that rate, it'll take 100 years to get the fleet fit. A recent letter to the Pentagon from several congressmen endorses your kit. They calculated that the difference in cost between putting your kit on and building a new vehicle is about $13 billion. It sounds like a no-brainer. Yeah. Why wouldn't you do it? Chair of the Armed Services Subcommittee on Readiness, Congressman John Garamendi, told us that Congress and the Pentagon's preference for new over upgrades is often predicated on keeping defense contractors fed.

Have you made any move to say nobody should be in a Humvee that doesn't have anti-lock brakes? We have tried and I have lobbied. We want to increase safety in training because people are dying needlessly in preventable accidents. It won't cost that much, but it's got to be done. And that's for the American people to press their members of Congress. After we first aired this report, Congress increased the Army's funding to install the safety retrofit kit from $10 million to over $190 million, enabling some 11,000 Humvees to be upgraded, scheduling the work to start this summer.

Wendy's most important deal of the day has a fresh lineup. Pick any two breakfast items for $4. New four-piece French toast sticks, bacon or sausage wrap, biscuit or English muffin sandwiches, small hot coffee, and more. Limited time only at participating Wendy's taxes extra. When does fast grocery delivery through Instacart matter most? Limited time only at participating Wendy's Taxes Extra. So download the app and get delivery in as fast as 60 minutes. Plus, enjoy $0 delivery fees on your first three orders. Service fees, exclusions, and terms apply. Instacart. Groceries that over-deliver.

A remote jewel of land off the coast of Canada, Fogo Island floats in the northeast corner of the northeast province of Newfoundland and Labrador, the outstretched right fingertip of this continent. The place might be drop-dead gorgeous, but it wasn't immune to the fate befalling so many small and isolated communities in North America. Its one and only industry went into steep decline, and so in turn did its population. Then, about a decade ago, a local returned home, fresh off making a fortune in the tech sector. Her pockets were deep, so was her desire to lift up the place and bring people back. So she unleashed a sort of economic experiment.

As we first told you last fall, we took two planes, a long drive, and a ferry to reach Fogo Island and check on the early results. The saying here goes, you'll know the Newfoundlanders in heaven. They'll be the ones who want to go home. And the adage comes to life on Fogo Island, a 90-square-mile patchwork of 10 minuscule fishing villages where clapboard houses the color of jelly beans cling to rock 400 million years old.

Among its quirks, Newfoundland has its own time zone, half an hour ahead of the mainland. But wander through Fogo Island's villages, and you might as well set your watch back to the 18th century. Back then, all you needed to get by here was a pig, a potato patch, and something called a punt. A small wooden fishing boat used in pursuit of North Atlantic kai, the species that once kept this place afloat.

Seemingly every structure on the island was built in service of catching and preserving fish. With one gleaming exception, a $40 million luxury inn. Part edge-of-the-earth destination, part economic engine on stills, the inn is the brainchild of eighth-generation Fogo Islander Zita Cobb. And locals gave her a funny look when she first floated the idea.

What kind of reaction did that get? Why would anyone come here? We love this place, but it wasn't obvious when, you know, there are fancy places in the world that people go. Our assumption is everybody wants to go where it's warm. Someone suggested to us it looked like a ship. The architecture of the inn was obviously a topic of much conversation. I think about it as a metaphor.

It's about people from here and people from away. It's about the future and the past. The past looms large on Fogo Island. To fully appreciate the inn, even as a metaphor, you have to understand Fogo's history. Just something. Zita Cobb took us through dozens of tiny islands that dot Fogo's waters to a place called Little Fogo Island. And for those keeping track, that's an island off an island off an island.

Her ancestors landed here from Ireland in South England. They came for one reason. Fish, fish and fish. When you say fish, is it just a given? It's a given. So yes, when we say fish, we mean cod. Is it possible to

exaggerate the importance of cod to this place? No, it's not possible, because everything that you need to know about someone from here, you can figure it out by just studying that lowly fish. It's actually quite a noble fish. A noble fish? It asks very little and gives so much. They exist on almost anything. I mean, I think a cod could eat a rubber boot if it had to.

Not unlike the noble fish, Zita Cobb's family survived without fuss. In cod they trusted. Families worked side by side here, trading their fish for goods. No bank accounts, no cash. Cobb's parents could neither read nor write. She and her six brothers grew up in a house with no electricity. She says it was a happy childhood, until it wasn't. What happened?

The worst of the 20th century came down on top of us very quickly in the form of the industrialization of the fisheries. So these enormous factory ships showed up here, all along the coast of Newfoundland, and fished day and night until just about every last fish was gone. With one small punt launched from this one dock, Cobb's father couldn't compete with commercial vessels that had come to the North Atlantic from all over the world. How bad did things get for him? He would go out and come back with

nothing. But one day in particular, he came back with one fish. And he brought the fish into the house, and he slapped it down onto the kitchen floor and said, well, it's done. And it was the next day he burned his boat. He burned his boat? He burned his boat. It's almost like a sacrifice. It was. He did it as a statement.

He did it as an expression of pain and anger. Lambert Cobb made this sacrifice once he realized that those big boats were, in his words, turning fish into money. He said to me, as a 10-year-old, you have got to figure out how this money thing works, because if you don't, it's going to eat everything we love. He wasn't wrong. As fish stocks dwindled, so did the island's population, from 5,000 to 2,500. The Cobbs left grudgingly for the mainland in the 1970s. Zita Cobb's father died shortly thereafter, but she heeded his advice. She got a business degree, worked in fiber optics, landed in Silicon Valley, and before long was the third highest paid female executive in America. In her early 40s, she cashed out tens of millions in stock options,

dropped out of the winner-take-all economy, and took her business savvy home, determined to revitalize Fogo Island. Instead of writing a check, she posed a question. What do we have and what do we know and how can we put that forward in a way that's dignified for Fogo Islanders and creates economy and connects us to the world? Spend one night at what the locals call a shed party, and the answer emerges. When you think about the people of this place, if there's one thing we're really good at, it's hospitality.

What does hospitality mean here? Hospitality in its purest form is the love of a stranger. We didn't get a lot of strangers. And when they arrived, as my mother used to say, it's always better to see a light coming into the harbor than a light going out. So in 2013, Cobb built the biggest beacon in the harbor. She made the Fogo Island Inn the centerpiece of a charitable trust called Shorefast, with profits reinvested in the island. At $2,000 a night, the inn does turn a profit. But there were other considerations.

We're going to put a 29-room inn on an island that's never had an inn. What are the consequences of that? Well, more people will come. Well, how many more people? As one woman said, well, you know, we're only 2,500 people. We can only love so many people at a time. Shorefast and the inn employ more than 300 islanders. But the real payoff is the ripple effect. For starters, all the furniture at the inn is locally made. Same for the pillows and quilts. It so happens the women of Fogo Island have been making them for their own homes for 400 years. We're getting there. We got half done.

Word is out now, this quilt is destined for a customer in Baltimore. We joined the quilting bee, but didn't last long. It was all very nice except for this one square. This is our lettuce room. Shorefast puts up seed money for new businesses, too. A quarter of a million dollars so far. And then you put your plant in. A $7,500 microloan went to Dwight Budden and his father Hayward,

a former fisher who left Fogo Island when the industry collapsed. He's back now as a hydroponic farmer, growing greens for the inn. There's our kale. Does Hayward eat kale? Not too much. Beyond the kale, new culture is taking root. Futuristic-looking studios now speckle the landscape, part of Shorefast's ambition to bring artists in residence to Fogo.

And back at the inn, a chef turns cod into haute cuisine. If your dad saw cod with magnolia oil and sea foam... And porcini. And porcini, What would he say? Yes, first thing he says, can you really eat that? You can do more than eat cod. You can fish for it again. Now that a decades-long ban has been eased,

Fogo Island's fishers are backhauling cod. We ventured out of Fogo Harbor with brothers Glenn and Jerry Best. You know about our fish tonight? The fifth generation of their family to harvest these waters. You go east, your next stop is Ireland. Ireland. We're not going there today. Man, over and, like that, right?

The Best brothers showed us the traditional Newfoundland way of fishing with a hand line. 150 feet down, no rods, reels, or nets. Now we're talking. That's the beauty. Up comes cod, without much of a talking. That's a beauty. Up comes cod without much of a fight. Yeah, that's a nice cod.

That's probably a 20-pound fish. Cod is making a comeback in the North Atlantic. Canada still imposes catch limits. But when the best get down to business, they use an automated system to drop thousands of hooks in the water at a time. We watch them offload 20,000 pounds of cod from a single trip. What's more, shellfish has done the unthinkable and dethroned cod as king.

Crab and shrimp now make up 80% of Glenn Best's business, and he's never had a better year. You told me you caught 400,000 pounds of snow crab. At 760, a pound is 3 million bucks. That's pretty good. Yeah, it was a good year. But a thriving fishery isn't always enough to keep the kids around. Beth's three children have moved away from Fogo

to pursue other careers. Your family's been doing this for generations. You named this boat after your dad. So the sad part about it is that Jerry and myself, we probably could be the last generation that will fish within our family. When the day comes that that happens, that will probably be a sad day. Still, Fogo Island's population has stabilized. There's hope the next census will show an uptick.

Babies are the island's biggest celebrities. But as ever, with growth come growing pains. It's already become one of those islands where you have to pray to get a spot on the ferry. Jennifer Sexton spent summers on Fogo Island visiting her grandparents. She recently moved here from Western Canada to open this coffee joint, where locals mix with those who come from away. Everybody asks about the inn. What do you tell them?

Well, it's a blessing and a curse. Her regulars grumble that not long ago, they could get a home for $25,000, Canadian. Now, homes cost 10 times as much. For somebody from away, that wouldn't be a lot. But for somebody from here, that is a lot of money. Zita Cobb, the woman who turned this tide, says she doesn't want unchecked growth either. As the economy grows, we will be smaller as a percentage of the whole economy. A rare business leader that wants less market share. We want less market share, exactly.

You said it with a smile on your face, but there's a lot of responsibility here. Yeah. I mean, the consequences are huge because, as my brother says, yes, our parents will get out of the graveyard and wring our necks if we mess this up. What's your response to the capitalist who would say, why are you limiting your growth? That is the techno-economic question. But I start with a different question. What are we optimizing for? We are optimizing for place.

We're optimizing for community. The pillars of this community have been won over. If Cobb's experiment helps diversify the economy, Glenn Best says he's all in. It's not like we're overrun by tourism. That's not the way it works here. We're not the Venice of Newfoundland. We're not out of patience with people yet.

On our last night at the Shed Party, we got the full sweep of Fogo Island, its hospitality and its contrasts laid out on the table. Cod and crab, young and old, warmth, wit, and this. A traditional song delivered with a handshake, a kind of hope that comes tempered by history. The undoing of this traditional way of making a life was very painful. I think I still carry those broken hearts.

I think that kind of pain doesn't go away. To what extent has that been repaired by the work you've done since you've come back? Yeah, I think it actually does help. You can heal a broken heart. Be satisfied with what you've got. Live well enough alone. Well done! The new BMO VI Porter MasterCard is your ticket to more. More perks.

More points. More perks. More points. More flights. More of all the things you want in a travel rewards card. And then some. Get your ticket to more with the new BMO VI Porter MasterCard and get up to $2,400 in value in your first 13 months. Terms and conditions apply. Visit bmo.com slash viporter to learn more. In the world of skiing, there are two kinds of skiers. Those who like to stay on groomed runs and be guided gently around obstacles, and those who like to ski the whole mountain and ski towards the obstacles. That is called free riding. Man-made jumps, rails, and half pipes are rejected in favor of the drops, jagged cliffs, and deep chutes created by Mother Nature.

The sport of freeriding took off in the 1990s and is now one of the fastest-growing disciplines in skiing. Given the risks inherent with the terrain, it attracts some of the bravest and most adventurous skiers in the world. But as we first reported last March, even among that group, 15-year-old Jacob Smith stands out. We thought you should see what he does, because he cannot. This is Big Sky, Montana, home to some of the steepest and most challenging ski slopes in the country. And that is Jacob Smith, who is blind. Three years ago, he was just 12 years old as he made his way to the top of the 11,000 foot high Lone Peak to ski down it. Watch this. Dropping in three, two, one. Jacob drops into the big couloir, a narrow, rock-walled, 1,400-foot chute.

That dot is him, making his way turn by turn. A wrong move can be catastrophic. The run has a 50-degree slope, which means if you slip down the couloir, there's little chance you can stop yourself. When you're standing at the top, you feel like if you move, you're going to die. And that's the moment most people would say, you know what, maybe not a good idea. Yeah, but I'm kind of just like, well, I'm already up here, so I've got to make it down somehow. He did, and became the only legally blind athlete to ski the legendary run.

You did it! That was awesome. History just has been made. Forever. How did you feel when you made it to the bottom? Excited that I did it. I didn't crash. I thought it was awesome.

I guess we made it four more times, so I just wanted to do it again. You were testing your luck that day. We got Jacob Smith on course. Jacob is still testing his luck and good sense. We met him in January at a junior regional free ride tournament in Big Sky. Jacob Smith on course. Jacob is still testing his luck and good sense. We met him in January at a junior regional free ride tournament in Big Sky. That's him, now 15 years old, competing against 40 other teenage daredevils, all of whom can see perfectly well. Coming right off the top of that.

Finding pretty good landing. This time, the background for all the competitors' spectacular experiment with gravity was another triple diamond shoot, appropriately named DTM. DTM stands for? Don't tell mama. It is an insane run, like a 45 degree slope. Yeah. Do the judges give you any slack for being blind? No, zero. Do you think they should? No, I don't. I want to be treated normal so I compete with other sighted skiers. It's not an insignificant difference. We worked with his doctors and our graphic artists to show roughly what Jacob can see on a run. He has extreme tunnel vision and no depth perception on top of that. It's blurry.

His visual acuity is rated 2,800, four times the level of legal blindness. Think of the big E on the eye chart. He would need it to be blown up four times in order to see it from 20 feet away. Fantastic ski technique. You wouldn't be able to tell he's visually impaired. So how does Jacob ski like this? His family keeps him on course. Go up with your right feet really far. On competition days, his little brother Preston patiently helps him hike to the top of the venue. It's so high, the lifts won't take you there.

First down, down, perfect, perfect, keep going. Then his father Nathan helps him get down. Nice turns, nice turns. Jacob has a two-way radio turned up high in his pocket. His dad is on the other end at the base, somehow, calmly, guiding him down. Okay, right, right, right. It's on me to make sure I don't let him down, that I get him in trouble. You know, that I have to guide him through narrower chutes or not go off a cliff. You have to be his eyes. Yeah.

And there can't be a delay. He can't say, are you sure, Dad? Nope. Have you ever missed it? Have you ever said, oh gosh, I forgot to tell him about that or I didn't see that? Oh, yeah, all the time. But his adaptation is pretty amazing. How much do you trust him? I mean, enough to turn right when he tells me. Jacob's just putting his all into my dad's voice.

It's crazy. Skiing, just listening to someone turn there, turn there. Could you ski like that? It's like closing your eyes, basically. It would be so hard. Jacob's siblings are all competitive skiers. That's Andrew, who's 17, doing a 360. Preston is 14, and Julia is 12.

Do the other competitors know that he's blind? Some do, but they always, like, announce it over the intercom that like blind skier Jacob coming down the hill. He is the only ever, I have to say blind skier. That's when everyone turns and looks. Oh, it's a miracle. Look at him. Would you know if you didn't know? He's such a good skier for legally blind. They just get mad at him if he's in the way. If we tell anybody that he's legally blind, then nobody believes us. They just give us a bad look. Jacob was born with vision. Soon after he learned to walk, he was on skis. Family vacations were spent bombing down the trails in Big Sky with his family. But it was back home at their ranch in North Dakota that an unexpected obstacle changed Jacob's life.

He started getting headaches and began bumping into things. He was eight years old. I, like, ran into a wall or something that my mom saw, and then it was, like, two days after I went to the eye doctor. And he took one look at my eyes, looked at my mom, and then just asked, like, which hospital he wanted, because my octave nerve was swelling and bleeding. Did you have any sense that things were going wrong up until that point? No. That day, Jacob was flown here to the Masonic Children's Hospital in Minneapolis,

where he underwent an emergency 12-hour surgery after an MRI revealed a cancerous brain tumor the size of a softball that was crushing his optic nerve. It's the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life. It looked like half his brain was a tumor. So at that point, you're not thinking, I'm worried he's going to lose his vision. You're thinking, I'm worried he's not. I'm losing my child. You're going to lose your child. I'm going to bury a kid. In that first surgery, doctors removed enough of the tumor to relieve the pressure on Jacob's optic nerve

to stop his vision from continuing to deteriorate. Here he is leaving a message for his siblings a few days later. I miss you all a lot. I really, really do. It's getting, my situation's getting better. I'm coming home and I'm really excited. But Jacob would need three more major brain surgeries over the next three years,

all before he was 12 years old. My head feels okay. Each time with an extensive rehabilitation. Did you ever get down about it? Like I did, but at the same time, I just prayed a lot. When you were praying about it, were you praying this will be over? Were you praying I want to get my vision back? Or were you praying I'll stay alive? That I'll stay alive and that'll get through it. And that's what happened. Finally, in 2017, a course of radiation eradicated the

cancer and Jacob got a clean scan. But his doctor said the radiation increased his lifetime risk of another brain tumor by up to 30 percent. Right now, the tumor that we originally targeted is gone. You know, so far, so good. It doesn't sound like you've exhaled. I don't think you ever exhale. Because? Because there's always the what if. You know, when you get put into that situation that you never felt you ever should have been or expected, I don't think you're ever going to exhale and go, we're done. Whose idea was it to return to skiing? Well, my dad's.

Turn and go straight through. So we came out here and we kind of just tried it out. Everywhere I went skiing for probably the first year or two was with either my dad or a coach. You've taught your kids to ski, but you've never taught a blind child to ski. No. So you did not know what you were doing? No.

So tell me about those early days. Well, at first everyone said get a rope and a sign and he's going to be a blind skier and you're going to guide him. I'm like, nope, that's not an option. We're not going to do it that way. Because why? Because I'm not going to let that define him. Father and son admit they're trying to carve their own path,

sort of figuring it out as they go. Jacob says he's learned to listen for danger. Other skiers, the churning of a lift, or icy conditions underfoot. Andy says he remembers many of the runs from when he could see. Can you feel your way down a run you didn't go on before you lost your vision? I mean, yeah, I can, and I've done it. And how does it work out? It's pretty scary, and sometimes takes me a little minute. That's got to be terrifying.

Well, you get used to it. How many crashes were there in those early days? I don't even think I can count that high. When Jacob was 10, he shattered his femur in 60 places when he skied into a tree. Are you not nervous that there's going to be a catastrophic accident, that he could die doing this? It's not the way I vision life. I don't look for the reasons not to do things. I'm not going to put him in something that I'm not going through first, that the consequences of falling are not going to be life-threatening.

What are you fearful of? The only big fear I have is not succeeding. You're more afraid of not succeeding than you are of getting hurt? Yes. Why is that? Because I've already lost my vision, so a couple broken bones and a couple more mishaps, I guess, isn't a big deal to me at all.

Clearly he's fearless. As a parent, are you not fearful? He's not reckless. He knows his limitations. I think he has the ability to ski anything on the mountain, but he's not going to go try to do it by himself. Like, he wants to be with somebody he wants to trust. He won't ski with people he doesn't trust.

Nathan said Jacob is cautious about skiing and competing on low visibility days, when he can see even less than usual. Still, he finds a way of keeping up with his siblings. They are an enviable pack on the mountain. Do you see him being, like, super plugged into everything else, right, to the sounds? He was saying, he, like, here's the lift, the snow. Yeah. What do you see? His hearing is very,

like, he chooses what he wants to hear. So... What do you mean? There's times at home where he'll be, like, you could say his name a thousand times, and he'll pretend, like, he didn't hear one word. But then skiing, it's, like, you could, like, flick, and he'll pretend like he didn't hear one word. But then skiing, it's like you could like flick and he'll like just turn, you know. On competition day,

Jacob suits up and sends it. Dad drop in three, two, one. Finishing 19th out of 41 competitors. For Jacob, success isn't about the trophy. It's about freedom, showing others how to negotiate obstacles, even when you can't see them coming. Coming to the finish line. Honestly, no matter what gets thrown in front of you, what kind of comes out of nowhere and strikes you, takes you off guard a little bit, there is always a way to conquer it, to adapt, to make it happen,

and still do what you want to do. I'm Leslie Stahl. We'll be back next week with another edition of 60 Minutes.