At DeeRay’s Auto Body Restoration in Shelley, Idaho, it’s not just cars that come out looking and running good as new. Through a partnership with the local chapter of the Vietnam Veterans Association, DeeRay’s owner Brett Walters also refurbishes motorized wheelchairs for needy veterans — free of charge.
Walters retools old wheelchairs so that they run smoothly, and he also fixes their upholstery and gives them a new coat of paint. “It takes a week, on and off, to work on one and get it ready,” Waters tells WIFI/CNN. “It’s just a really good feeling. It really makes you happy, and you see their faces.”
Shane Ackerschott, a former member of the Army National Guard, became a paraplegic after a work accident. Recently, he received of one Walters’s rehabbed wheelchairs. Ackerschott says, “If this man does this all in the kindness of his heart, he’s truly a saint, I mean to do this, cause there’s a lot of vets out there who can’t afford things like this.”
MORE: Meet A Disabled Veteran Jump Starting Soldiers’ Cars — and Their Lives
Tag: disabled veterans
This Injured Vet’s Motto: Keep Moving
After attending the University of Connecticut’s Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for Veterans with Disabilities, South Kingstown, R.I.-based veteran Steve D’Amico emerged with a bright idea.
D’Amico, a Rhode Island Air National Guard Technical Sgt., wants to help other injured veterans remain active through his new business, Broken Gear. He tells the Associated Press that the company “was founded on the principle of disabled athletes empowering themselves to get back into sports, whether they’re disabled veterans or disabled civilians.”
So far, Broken Gear is selling a variety of t-shirts with messages to inspire disabled athletes and their supporters, such as, “I am broken and I run,” and “I am broken and I ride.” D’Amico’s company also sells camouflaged gear bags made from uniforms of servicemen and women and specially designed to be easy to use by people who have prosthetic hands or suffer from other injuries.
As D’Amico sells these items, he has plans to use the profits to support disabled athletes, “buying equipment and getting vets involved in different activities,” D’Amico says. “For example if a veteran wanted to ride a bike, and didn’t have the funds or the ability, we can sponsor him, get him a bike, get him the Broken Gear jersey and pay for his admission.”
His mission just received a big boost: Work Vessels for Veterans presented D’Amico with a Dodge Durango (which was once used to transport Boy Scouts to camping trips) that he envisions using to take veterans and their sporting gear wherever they need to go.
“I feel so honored. To me, when I see this vehicle, this is what a Broken Gear vehicle would be. It’s rugged. It’s tough. It’s kind of beat up a little bit, but that’s what we’re looking for. You’ve been through the ringer, but that’s OK, you just press on,” D’Amico says.
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After This Soldier Was Shot in the Head, Comedy Became His Therapy
“A lot of people have asked me how I went from being a soldier to being a comedian,” Retired U.S. Army Staff Sergeant Thom Tran says in his Got Your 6 Storytellers talk. “Comedy is my therapy.”
On his fourth day in Iraq, Tran took a gunshot to the back of his skull in a gunfight. As Tran talks, footage of the incident from the field plays behind him. In it, he wipes blood from his neck and says, simply, “f***.”
Tran, who is now based in Los Angeles and works as a standup comedian, writer, producer, voiceover actor, and traffic reporter, has a punch line for everything.
He talks, for example, about how he holds so may jobs because he is constantly on the verge of being fired from at least one of them. He describes how memory loss — a result of his injury — allows him to hide chocolates from himself then find them with that same feeling of surprise you experience when you find money in a pair of pants. And he even manages to make the audience laugh about the way his father reacted to the video of his son being shot in the head.
“We have to be able to laugh at that,” he says, pointing to the video screen behind him as he stands before an audience that is experiencing shock, inspiration and side-splitting laughter all at once.
“Cause if I didn’t, I don’t know where I’d be today,” he continues. “Laughing, this therapeutic thing that comes from your soul, is the only thing I’ve found that can heal that.”
It’s no wonder Tran went on to found the GIs of Comedy, recruiting military veterans to travel and perform for troops and civilian supporters around the world as a way to bring laughter to them and to help them heal.
Watch his story, then share it with six of your friends.
How Putting a Pen to Paper Saved a Disabled Veteran’s Home
Saying that 65-year-old disabled Vietnam veteran Buck was down on his luck is an understatement.
His septic tank failed and would cost $27,000 to repair. His daughter is ill, so he and his wife support their children, leaving them with no money to spare and the belief that they might have to abandon their home in Pontiac, Mich. Desperate, Buck’s wife started writing letters to any organization and individual she could think of, asking for help.
“My wife started applying for everything and I remember it was almost funny the envelopes of rejection coming in,” Buck tells Fox Detroit.
When his wife exhausted all the places she could think of to ask for help, Buck sat down to write a letter of his own to L. Brooks Patterson, a lawyer and politician who is the County Executive of Oakland County, Mich., where Buck lives. “You sir are my last hope,” he wrote, “we gave up for the most part last month but something tells me to contact L. Brooks Patterson.”
Buck’s instinct was right. Patterson immediately directed his staff to search for grants to help Buck. “We picked up a $10,000 grant from the Michigan Veterans Trust Fund and a $16,000 grant from the Michigan Veterans Homeowners Assistance Program,” Patterson says. “Put that together and you can fix the septic and stay in your home for Christmas.”
“It was one of the most amazing feelings I ever felt,” Buck tells Bill Mullan, an Oakland County Media and Communications Officer. “For months we had been thinking we were going to have to leave our home, about the packing we had to do, and how we were going to have to come up with the money to move. I felt safe again.”
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For Soldiers Enduring Seemingly Endless Recoveries, This Organization Provides Free Beach Vacations
With a giant crowd lining the street, fire companies saluting and bagpipes blaring, you’d think it was July 4th or Memorial Day. But the cause for celebration on this balmy July Sunday wasn’t a national holiday. It was to honor the wounded U.S. soldiers and their families who were being treated to an all-expenses-paid vacation to Long Beach, N.Y., courtesy of the Long Beach Waterfront Warriors (LBWW).
Amid all the bad publicity surrounding scheduling discrepancies at VA hospitals nationwide and the plight of our returning troops in general, there’s another issue that’s seldom mentioned: the hardships borne by injured service members who require long-term hospital care.
Soldiers with debilitating injuries — both mental and physical—may never receive the warm hometown welcome depicted in car commercials. Instead, they go to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., to receive treatment and rehabilitation until their doctors classify them as non-medical assist (meaning they no longer need to be at the hospital or require doctors and nurses to be nearby day to day). Depending upon the extent of their injuries, some soldiers are stuck at the hospital for indefinite periods of time.
So in 2009, John McLoughlin, a retired New York City fireman, decided to do something special for those service members by founding the Long Beach Waterfront Warriors. He modeled LBWW on The Graybeards, a civic organization in the Rockaways, N.Y., that runs an adaptive sports festival for the disabled. McLoughlin took this idea a step further, extending it to a weeklong summer vacation and paying for the entire trip and accommodations, as well as providing specialized activities.
This past summer, LBWW flew in 22 injured vets and 46 of their family members to the seashore community.
A few days after the parade, Luke, a Marine from the Midwest who had both legs amputated above the knees after sustaining catastrophic blast wounds in Afghanistan, sits on the beach with his parents and kid sister and talks about the more than 50 surgeries he’s endured in the past two and a half years.
“I was hoping to have my prosthetics for this [week], but…” Luke says with a shrug, referring to the never-ending succession of infections that snag his rehab and timeline for leaving the hospital. Through the Wounded Warrior Project, Luke is one of eight vets in a cyber security training program that upon completion should land him a job with NASA.
Luke’s wife and two kids are also with him in Long Beach (staying at the Allegria Hotel, which has partnered with LBWW for years), where he’s actually able to spend a rare week living with them. That’s because, while his family is able to live in on-base housing, he and the other inpatients on medical-hold stay in barracks on Walter Reed’s campus.
He doesn’t dwell on the subject and instead smiles, recalling the fishing charter he went on that morning. “It was rough out there,” he says. “We were like five miles out, and I got a little nervous for a minute in my wheelchair.” Luke caught the boat’s only keeper of the day, a 24-incher.
Luke and another double-amputee, Jose, are able to participate in perhaps LBWW’s most unlikely activity: surfing lessons. A team of instructors shows up in the early afternoon with boards specially designed to accommodate surfers with disabilities. Both are catching waves in no time.
Jose was enjoying the LBWW vacation with his wife and brother. He also lives at Walter Reed, and his family is burdened by the same circumstances as Luke’s. Fortunately, however, Homes for Our Troops, a nonprofit that builds specially designed housing for disabled vets, recently broke ground on a new house for Jose and his wife on Long Island, not far from his family in Queens.
Historically, LBWW tries to help the most severely injured and those that have recently returned from deployment overseas. In fact, sometimes the families are being reunited for the first time. But as the role of the U.S. in Iraq and Afghanistan has wound down, the organization has also reached out to vets who’ve been in the hospital for an extended period of time — years or even decades.
Also lounging on the beach that day are 42 Vietnam veterans from the local Northport VA Medical Center. Most are afflicted with some combination of mental and physical illnesses. Ned, a potbellied volunteer with long gray hair and beard, nods to Ralph, a barrel-chested vet with no toes, and explains how much this day means to Ralph. “When he got up this morning, there was a big ‘0’ on the wall in his room. Tomorrow it’ll say ‘365.’ He counts down the days until we come out again next year.”
Just then, four teenage volunteer boys and Jerry, a retired fireman and boisterous volunteer with LBWW since its inception, lift Ralph into a specially designed beach wheelchair and roll him on the sand and into the surf, 10 hands securely on the handles as he bobs and smiles through the waves during his second dip of the afternoon.
The severity of Northport Vets’ disabilities made day trips a huge challenge for the VA’s staff. But with the enthusiasm and organization that LBWW has built over the years, it’s now safe and practical for the group to bring the Vietnam vets out as well. LBWW keeps a team of volunteer nurses from Long Island’s North Shore University Hospital on hand at all times during the week’s activities, led by Nurse Patty, a mainstay with the group.
Jerry explains that LBWW’s success is reliant on its relatively small size, and that repeating their model is best done at the local level. He says that large programs like the “Wounded Warriors Project have great resources” that can help LBWW get off the ground, “but they also have a huge infrastructure, which creates a lot of overhead.” With LBWW’s web of tight, local functionaries, every dollar raised goes directly to their cause. Aside from the considerable cost of plane tickets and accommodations, LBWW has also raised funds for a private tour of Ground Zero and Rockefeller Center, the weekend parade and BBQ, a 5K race, a Mets game and the fishing trip, not to mention three beach days packed with food, drinks, surfing and even a massage tent.
LBWW’s success has already inspired another group, the West Palm Beach Waterfront Warriors, who’ve been bringing wounded vets and their families to the Florida coast since 2011.
Which shorefront community will be next?
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The names and identifying information of the veterans in this story have been changed to protect their privacy.
Being Severely Burned Didn’t Stop This Veteran From Hitting the Links
Before enlisting in the Army, Rick Yarosh of Windsor, N.Y., had taken up golf and was getting good at it. He planned to continue his pursuit of the sport when he returned from deployment.
But in 2006, while Yarosh served as a sergeant in Iraq, an I.E.D. exploded, burning 60 percent of his body and causing him to lose his nose, ears, a leg and several fingers. Since then, Yarosh has been continuing his physical therapy while also working at Sitrin Health Care Center, helping with its military rehabilitation program.
Yarosh was eager to try golf again, but he couldn’t find an adaptive club that worked with his disabilities. Luckily, two students from SUNY-Polytechnic Institute (near Utica, N.Y.) stepped in to help.
Nicholas Arbour and Adam Peters had a class assignment to solve a real-world problem and started meeting with Yarosh in January to design a golf club that would accommodate his needs. Arbour and Peters studied professional golfers’ swings and created three prototypes on a 3-D printer to develop their final design, which includes a wrist guard and a handle that Yarosh can hold while he swings the club.
On October 28, Arbour and Peters presented Yarosh with his new golf club at a ceremony at Sitrin Health Care Center. “I’m so happy,” Yarosh tells Syracuse.com. “I tried the club and I could hit the ball with it quite a distance. Now I can go out with my friends again and play golf. It’s an incredible feeling…I used to wrestle and play football, and I like to be competitive. It was another piece of my life that I lost, and these two helped me get that back.”
Arbour and Peters earned top grades from their professor for their project. “I would have written to their professor and protested if they didn’t get an A,” Yarosh says. “They worked really hard at this, and it means a lot to me.”
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The Double Amputee Veteran That’s Now an Eye-Catching Cover Model
Noah Galloway of Birmingham, Ala., never dreamed of entering the military — then history intervened.
“There’s a lot of military history in my family, and I didn’t want anything to do with any of it,” Galloway says in a video for Men’s Health. “September 11th happened, and I was twenty years old, I was physically fit, and I just saw it as something I needed to do.” In October 2001, he enlisted.
Then during December 2005, Sergeant Galloway was serving in the Infantry in Iraq in when his unit received orders that required driving a Humvee into an area known as “the Triangle of Death” in Yusufiah. Driving with the headlights off and night vision goggles on, they didn’t see a trip wire, which detonated a roadside bomb as they drove over it. The explosion blasted Galloway into a canal and led to the amputation of both his left arm and leg.
Personal turmoil soon followed. “I thought more than a few times that it would have been better if I’d have just died,” he says. “I’d have been looked at like a hero. But instead, here I am, I’ve had two of my limbs taken from me. I would drink every day, but then I would go out in public and I was fine. There was this other side of me that I was just really hiding. I finally decided this has got to stop.”
Galloway joined a gym, began working out extensively and changed his diet. “Everything in my life started to improve,” he says.
The father of three now works as a personal trainer specializing in helping disabled vets, and he doesn’t let his clients get away with their excuses for not excelling. “Whatever it is that you tell me that you can’t do, we can find something to get it done,” he says. “I’ve had nothing but people try to help me. The least I can do is try to help anyone that’s in need around me.”
Most recently, Men’s Health named Galloway its “Ultimate Men’s Health Guy,” picking him from among the 1,246 contenders who entered the magazine’s first-ever contest and placing him on the November cover. Galloway won the reader’s choice poll of three finalists — finishing with more than 60,000 votes.
We bet that his inspiring story will motivate some couch potatoes to lace up their sneakers.
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MORE: A No-Brainer Job for Ex Drill Sergeants: Motivating the Rest of Us
Nationwide, Veterans Struggle with Housing. It’s This Company’s Mission to Help Out
When you hear about struggling veterans across the country receiving much-needed home renovations, it’s one company that’s often providing the assistance: The Home Depot.
For years, the home improvement store has made a commitment to helping veterans any way it can — including donating supplies and having its employees offer volunteer labor. And for the past four years, the merchant has used its Celebration of Service to rally its employees between September 11 and Veterans Day to partner with nonprofits nationwide to refurbish 1,000 homes for people who’ve served our country.
Through the program, The Home Depot employees volunteer their time for renovation projects during their days off. There’s no compensation, and despite the fact that they’re not required to participate, hundreds of workers do so each year.
Recently, five Home Depot employees joined 19 volunteers from Oregon Paralyzed Veterans of America to renovate the home of Army veteran Daniel Service in West Salem, Ore. Service left the military in 1991 after he was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and since 2008, has been in a wheelchair. Volunteers repaired and painted a deck, built a portable greenhouse, replaced security lights and more for the disabled veteran.
“It’s wonderful for me to see them honor my husband, and it’s such a great thing for others to see what Home Depot is doing,” Service’s wife, Beverly, tells Capi Lynn of the Statesmen Journal. “They are volunteering their time and giving their hearts.”
Meanwhile on the opposite corner of the country, Gulf War Navy veteran Carol Semplis of South Florida was struggling to navigate the old flooring in her house after a foot infection she contracted during her service resulted in the amputation of her big toes. “I don’t have any big toes and my feet have been giving me a lot of trouble. That floor was making it worse,” she tells Oralia Ortega of CBS Miami.
This week, volunteers from the Home Depot installed new wood flooring and tile, revamped the landscaping, added a garden and painted her home.
“These veterans bravely served our country and basically this is the least we can do by giving back,” Nadene Rose, manager of the Oakland Park Home Depot, says.
Thanks to an army of busy volunteers, hundreds of veterans will receive refreshed, snug homes before winter.
MORE: When This Vet’s House Started to Crumble, Home Depot Stepped in with a $20,000 Renovation
When a Bomb Left This Veteran Without Legs, He Decided to Help Others with Disabilities
In 2003, Robert “B.J.” Jackson was deployed to Iraq while serving with the Iowa National Guard. While there, a roadside bomb exploded, destroying his Humvee and causing a traumatic brain injury (which left him with PTSD) and the loss of both of his legs.
Back home in Clive, Iowa after grueling rehab, B.J.’s wife Abby thought he could use a night out. The two went to a nightclub for New Year’s Eve, but the bouncer turned them away, saying that the custom tennis shoes Jackson wore on his prosthetics didn’t meet the establishment’s dress code.
Abby protested, but B.J. wanted to slink away. When the club’s owner found out what had happened, he apologized and paid to fly B.J. to a veteran’s event. More importantly, though, the incident sparked an idea in B.J., who had been demoralized by his injuries.
“That night gave me a new outlook,” he tells Daniel Finney of the Des Moines Register. “I was ready to just let it go, like there was something wrong with me. But my wife and my friends said, ‘Hey, no, that isn’t OK.’ I realized there’s a stigma on people with disabilities. And I was going to do something about it.”
B.J. and his wife, who now live in Florida with their six children, founded The Right to Bear Stumps, an organization that raises awareness about the challenges faced by people with disabilities and raises money to help them. B.J., who struggled to learn to talk again after his brain injuries, is now a motivational speaker — delivering his message at places like churches and the Harley Davidson rally in Sturgis, S.D.
Through the Right To Bear Stumps, B.J. also helps build modifications to houses to accommodate disabilities and organizes golf outings for people with prosthetic limbs. Although he still struggles with issues stemming from his injuries, he jokes with Finney, “The biggest challenge I face right now is getting all the kids in the van.”
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Despite Their Disabilities, These Veterans Commemorated 9/11 in a Courageous Way
When 24-year-old Cody Elliott was a teenager in Pismo Beach, Calif., he worked at a surf shop where he helped disabled people learn how to ride the waves. “Seeing them smile on the waves while they were surfing — that showed me that no matter what, life continues on afterwards,” Elliott tells Carmen George of the Fresno Bee.
Inspired by his best friend’s loss of a family member in the 9/11 attacks, Elliott enlisted in the Marines. The lesson of life continuing on became crucial for Elliott when he lost his left leg above the knee while serving in Afghanistan in 2011.
Despite the injury, Elliott is thankful for what he still has. He climbs mountains with the names of six of his comrades who died in Afghanistan tattooed on his right arm next to a picture of the World Trade Center. And last week, Elliott joined a group of injured veterans scaling three peaks — El Capitan, Royal Arches and Ranger Rock — in Yosemite National Park to commemorate September 11th.
“Getting out climbing is my peace of mind these days,” Elliott tells George. “The only thing you hear is your breath and the people motivating you at the bottom. It’s just you and the rock.”
Elliott enjoys climbing so much, he hopes to make a career in the climbing industry. “My whole thing is to motivate people through life,” he says. “That no matter what, you can get up and be physically active.”
The climbing expedition was arranged by Army veteran D.J. Skelton, who started Paradox Sports — a Boulder, Colorado-based nonprofit that organizes adaptive sports expeditions for disabled people after he was injured in Iraq. “I lost my left eye, my upper jaw and palate, a lot extensive facial damage,” he tells Sara Sandrik of KFSN. “So we decided to have this on September 11th as celebration, a celebration of the life that we have, the life, the limbs, the things that we have sacrificed that have brought us together as a community,” says Skelton.
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