A Heart for The American Legion

Jeremy Ehart needed to find clean dirt. He was on fire. Stop. Drop. Roll. He had heard it forever. It wasn’t working. Too much dry grass and brush only made it worse. Ablaze, he staggered down an incline and somehow found a patch that was not overgrown. Ehart leaped and did the drill. 

His wife, Kristy, was house-sitting for friends in Virginia when she got the call. She was told to be at the Marine base staff office in 30 minutes. She was there in five. “They told me they were going to ship me from Virginia to California the next day. They told me he had been burned, that he had been in an accident, but I didn’t know the extent of his injuries until I got there.”

The date was Oct. 28, 2004. “I told the captain, ‘Don’t let anyone else wear those ghillie suits.’” Those are the last words Ehart remembers saying before he lost consciousness on the medevac helicopter. Seven days later, he awakened from a drug-induced coma at a civilian hospital in Fresno, Calif. Kristy was there, having listened over and over to the last voice message from her husband, wondering how he was going to survive.

“The first time I saw him, his hands were hanging from the ceiling because they had him in mesh, trying to keep the circulation,” she says. “His face was all covered in gauze.”

Sixty-four percent of Ehart’s body was burned. He would be hospitalized for the next six months, most of that at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. Thirty-six operations would be needed over the months and years ahead. He would be disfigured for the rest of his life. 

Twenty-six at the time, he had a young son.

The Eharts had been married a little over two years when the accident happened, much of that time spent apart due to Marine Corps deployments that included an eight-month training mission in Japan. Like most military couples, they knew such separations come with the territory. After Oct. 29, 2004, they wouldn’t have to worry about time and distance away from each other anymore. “We really haven’t been apart in the last 13 years,” Kristy says.

Ehart and his Marine Corps antiterrorism unit had been sent to northern California that autumn to help train Department of Energy (DoE) security personnel. His role was to get into a camouflage ghillie suit made mostly of flammable burlap and pretend to be a bad guy. He had a DoE MILES (multiple integrated laser engagement system) weapon that fired blank cartridges and recorded hits on targets equipped with sensors.

Something went wrong with the weapon, though, which was plugged just in case a live round might unintentionally be loaded into it. Gas backed up inside the barrel and ignited, unleashing flames back at Ehart.

“They neglected to have a place for the gases to escape, so after several rounds went through, the gases built up and had no place to go but back at me,” he says. “That ghillie suit wasn’t fire-retardant as well as everyone thought it was. I actually saw the flame. It started on my arm. I didn’t have a radio. I got up to the nearest Marine to me. We had panic words if we had to stop the exercise. So I got his attention. He had a radio. He called it in that we needed to stop the exercise. I started thrashing around on the ground. The more I rolled, the worse it got. I rolled for a few seconds and tried to keep my head up. I could feel it getting hotter and worse. It felt like an hour. It was probably 30 seconds.”

After Ehart made it to the clear area, another Marine and one of the DoE trainees swooped in and extinguished the flames, which by that time had engulfed most of his body.

“I lost consciousness for a few minutes,” he says. “I don’t know how long it was. When I came back to, the DoE medical staff was right there. They had me stripped and had an IV in me already. They had the morphine pumping. And they told me the helicopter was on its way.”

Jeremy and Kristy had gone to high school together in Hutchinson, Kan., but did not date as teens. They hung out in different circles until rediscovering one another at a party a couple of years after graduation. They fell in love and traveled to Texas to see her brother graduate from Air Force basic training. 

At 22, Ehart had never before considered military service, but the Air Force ceremony inspired him to leave his job as a pepperoni maker at a local food-processing plant. “Within a week, I went to the recruiter’s office and signed the papers.”

Until then, Ehart says, he didn’t have much ambition. He didn’t participate in sports or other extracurricular activities in high school. He skipped as many classes as he could and still graduate, after which he went to work at the plant. Military service eventually seemed a good opportunity to chart a new course. “The Marine Corps was definitely a good thing for me. It changed me.”

Ehart learned the distinctive brand of esprit de corps shared among those who choose to be Marines. “In boot camp, you do everything together. You eat together. You shower together. You PT together. You do everything together. There comes a point when you can only PT so long, and you need those fellow Marines to help pull you through. I found I needed my fellow Marines more than I thought I did.”

Sharply cut in his dress blues on their wedding day in 2002, Ehart proudly held his young son Addison as relatives snapped photographs, capturing the beginning of a journey no one could have foreseen a year earlier for the couple.

Three and a half months after he was injured – mid-February 2005 – Ehart saw the effects of the training accident. “I actually remember the very first day I looked in the mirror in the hospital. It was something else looking back at me. It wasn’t me.”

Kristy remembers the emotional toll it took on him. “He said one time in the hospital, ‘You know, you don’t have to stay.’”

Her response: “I didn’t marry you for what you looked like. I married you for your heart.”

In San Antonio, the Eharts met other couples facing similar challenges during recovery. Kristy still keeps up with many of them on Facebook. Some marriages survived. Others did not. “There are a few who have split because they can’t handle it,” she says. “You don’t handle it. You just do it.”

“She never left,” Ehart explains of his wife’s resolve. “You learn a lot about yourself and your spouse when you’ve been put through something you didn’t expect, something you never thought you’d have to expect. Having her down there was a blessing. She definitely kept me going. She is one of the reasons I am here right now.”

Kristy adds, “I told him, ‘You’re not going to sit in this room. We’re not going to do this.’ The very first day he got out of the hospital, I took him to the PX on post and carted him around in a wheelchair. I told him, ‘You’re not going to be a hermit.’ It would drive me nuts.”

Ehart was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), received medication and struggled against the impulse to withdraw. “If it was up to me, I would probably have stayed a hermit,” he says.

Following another year of outpatient care at Brooke, Ehart was medically discharged. “They said, ‘Here’s your papers,’” he says. “There was no preparation. No anything. I got out in 2006. That was before PTSD became a big thing.” They moved back to Hutchinson to start over. 

Medicated and self-conscious about his appearance, Ehart wanted to isolate himself while Kristy and others tried to get him out. He bought a motorcycle, never having ridden before, to get some air. After about a year home, a friend whose grandfather was a member of Post 68 in Hutchinson suggested the couple drop in on an American Legion Riders chapter meeting. Unsure, Ehart agreed to check it out.

“I walked in not knowing what to expect, and at this time I was still uneasy with a lot of people,” he says. “You walk into a meeting full of people you don’t know, and you don’t know what’s going on, or don’t understand what they’re talking about. Instead of the looks and ‘What happened to you?’ they stuck their hands out and introduced themselves. I thought, ‘Hmm, good start.’”

Someone in the chapter made a motion during the meeting to pay the Eharts’ dues for one year. “By the end of the meeting, we were American Legion, American Legion Auxiliary and American Legion Riders members,” he recalls. “We weren’t planning on joining. We literally came down to see what was going on, to see how I felt, to see if it was something I could handle, something I could do without freaking out.”

A month later, they bought a Suzuki Boulevard C50. “That was big enough for us for a while – until that Harley bug bit,” Ehart says. Soon they were both deeply involved in the Riders, and his-and-hers Harleys replaced the Suzuki. They began riding in American Legion welcome-home events for troops returning from overseas service. They escorted and helped provide security at funerals for military personnel who lost their lives on active duty.

“That was big for me,” Ehart says. “You go to a welcome-home, thinking that it’s going be the person coming home and maybe a few family members, and you pull up and there’s 40 people there you don’t know. That got me to a point where instead of always hiding in the back, I was hiding in the middle of a group. And then I moved from hiding in the middle of the group to maybe being on the end of the group and then from being on the end to being in the front of the group. Little steps. It’s helped.”

The majority of Post 68’s members are older than Ehart, but that has not diminished his commitment to the kind of camaraderie Marines in particular are known for. “Coming into a place that you’re not exactly sure of, you don’t exactly know what it is, you’re not sure how people are going to respond, and then everything is OK – it’s definitely been a breakthrough for me. I had some delicate times. Some emotional barriers. I know that The American Legion has helped me get past those.

“This place is an outlet. You don’t have to hold everything in. It’s not all inside. I think a big part of it is being able to talk to like-minded, non-judgmental people. I think that’s the biggest thing.”

Ehart no longer takes medicine for PTSD. For one thing, he’s too busy with the Legion these days.

A year after joining Post 68, he was elected adjutant, an office he has held for seven of the past nine years. He is a member of Kansas’ District 7 Executive Committee. Kristy has served as the Auxiliary unit’s sergeant-at-arms and is now the Legion Riders chapter treasurer. In August, they attended the Legion’s 98th National Convention in Cincinnati. That was a big step. 

“He would never have done that in past years,” Kristy explains. “That would have been too many people.”

Prior to the Legion Riders meeting in 2009, neither Jeremy nor Kristy knew much about the post.

Chartered nearly a century ago, Lysle Rishel Post 68 was named for a young Marine from Hutchinson who was killed at Belleau Wood on June 23, 1918.Post 68 has long been woven into the Legion’s identity in Kansas. It has been the state’s home for multiple American Legion Family gatherings over the century and recently was named the venue, indefinitely, of the summer department convention.

The post once owned and occupied Hutchinson’s historic Bisonte Hotel, built in 1908 for $250,000. It housed such visitors as presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, as well as famed Marine Corps composer/conductor John Philip Sousa, the march king who wrote “Stars and Stripes Forever” and “Semper Fidelis.” After the railroads faded, the hotel was available in the mid-1940s for a sliver of its construction cost, and Post 68 bought it. Some photos, drawings, room keys and a brick from the hotel, which was abandoned and razed in the early 1960s, are all that remain in Legion possession from that period in the post’s history. After a couple of temporary locations, Post 68 bought a former catering facility on West 4th Street that is known affectionately as the “big barn” due to its red barn-like design.

Inside, the post is home to bingo nights and burger Thursdays, chili feeds and other traditional activities, with a well-furnished club room that has on one wall a collage of members’ military photos. One photo is of a sharply dressed young Marine who looks very different today but has the kind of heart that made his wife fall deeply in love with him – a heart that has found a place among his fellow Legionnaires.

“When I say The American Legion has saved my life, it may not be literal,” says the 37-year-old adjutant. “I would have never committed suicide or anything, but I would have been a hermit. And, in doing so, there is a very good possibility my wife would not have liked me being a hermit. So, it’s hard telling how things might have gone. I could have lost my wife. I could have lost my son. I could have lost my friends.”

Instead, he is now serving as the post’s Boys State Committee chairman and plans to volunteer at the department Boys State program next summer as his son gets ready for his junior year of high school, where he is a standout athlete in three sports. 

“I’ve come a long, long way,” Ehart says, adding that he hopes other post-9/11 veterans like himself will discover what the Legion – and being around veterans who understand, regardless of war era or duty station – can do for them.

Just like in the Marine Corps, the mission is what has mattered most in Ehart’s progress since 2004. “It’s never all about me. But when you’re conscious about the way you look or when you’re self-conscious about the way you are, then you always feel like it’s all about you. So when we’re doing something out in the public, or for instance with Boys State, I know that the focus isn’t on me.

“I’ve never laid blame to anybody or anything. I’m proud of what I have done. I’m a Marine. I am very proud of being a Legionnaire, and a lot of it is they have pulled me out of a funk. They helped me to become, right now, who I am.”

Kristy adds, “I am very, very proud of him. He could have given up any day. But he never did.”

With Addison set to graduate from high school in a couple of years, the Eharts have been through enough to know better than to predict the future. They both realize the past has made them stronger in ways they never imagined 15 years ago.

“I don’t have a clue what we’re going to do,” Kristy says. “It will probably come down to Legion stuff. I love being a part of something.”  

Jeff Stoffer is editor of The American Legion Magazine.