HEATH CALHOUN

On sight, it is clear that Staff Sergeant Heath Calhoun
is a very decent guy, and a very good soldier. It is in
his face, in the way he carries himself…everything. It
could be argued that he was born to it, like his father
(Vietnam) and grandfather (WWII) before him.
And probably like his son Mason, four, who already
spends a lot of the time in the soldier suit he got for
Halloween. A surprising number of America’s best
fighting men have always been Scotch Irish, like
Calhoun, and an awful lot of them have come from
southern hill towns like Bristol, Tennessee where he
grew up. Anyhow, it’s clear that, if you were in a jam,
you would be plenty lucky to have Heath Calhoun at
your side, or at your back.

He still conveys that sense, powerfully, even though
both his legs were blown off, above the knee, in Iraq
in 2003 by a rocket-propelled grenade. These days,
he is fighting—calmly, quietly and with ferocious
resolve—to create a life for himself and for his wife
and three kids, two born since his return. A couple of
mile-posts: he learned to mono-ski, hard and fast, just
five months after he was injured. And he rode 4,200
miles across the country, on a special bike that you
pedal with your arms, to raise awareness and money
for injured veterans. He is also a national spokesman
for the Wounded Warrior Project, a group that lobbies
for wounded soldiers, and he regularly counsels
the newly injured.

But his great passion these days is to walk. He tells me
that people who lose both legs above the knee do not
walk, and, when we met, he said that he had resigned
himself to being in a chair from here on out. But there
is a prosthetic leg maker who is experimenting with a
computerized prosthesis that may change that. They
chose Heath as one of two men to be “on point” for
the effort. Good choice.

Heath’s sense of urgency about the prosthesis and
walking is interesting, in the context of this project.
He says what all the people I have painted here say:
that being in a chair is profoundly different and that
people see you differently…discount you in some way.
If it is humanly possible, he wants to meet the world
at eye-level. If not, he will do what he must and, it
seems clear, he will do it brilliantly. Like everyone else
in this project, it would be quite a mistake to discount
Heath Calhoun. At any level.