Six months ago, Johnny Morris, founder and CEO of Bass Pro Shops sent out a challenge to Americans to build 100 adaptive homes across the nation for military veterans whose service and sacrifice left them wounded and disabled. To do so, it would take patriots across the country stepping up and pooling their resources to make it a reality.
In October last year, Huntsville’s Louis Breland and his wife Patti, founder of Breland Homes, heard about the challenge and decided to take the lead in making that challenge a reality in Alabama. They offered to build not one but two handicap homes for North Alabama veterans.
“You know what they say – to whom much has been given, much is expected,” said Breland. “We’ve been very blessed and lucky to be in the homebuilding business and to be at the right place at the right time. It is our honor to be able to do this and I hope to do it again.”
Yesterday, with just such a patriotic team behind them consisting of Breland; Grammy award-winning musician Lee Greenwood, a lifelong advocate for the American military and the national ambassador for the Helping A Hero organization; Madison County Commission chairman Dale Strong; local American Idol winner Alex Miller who sang the national anthem; and flanked by members of the Madison Chapter of the Veterans Motorcycle Association and the Army Recruiters, they broke ground on the second of those houses in Breland’s Crossings at River’s Landing community off Wall Triana Highway.
“The community itself is in Triana but it is part of the Madison City Schools system and served by Huntsville Fire & Rescue, so you have the best of all three communities that have in common their support for the warfighter and recognition of our veterans,” said Joey Ceci, president of Breland Companies.
Chairman Strong confirmed that commitment.
“You may have heard a couple of explosions just before this ceremony began, but we don’t apologize for it because behind that wire fence is 38,000 acres of Redstone Arsenal where those explosions are proof of the Army Materiel Command’s support for the Army warfighter,” said Strong to a round of cheers.
The Helping A Hero homebuilding process began with Greenwood announcing he would hold his 40th Anniversary All-Star Music Tribute at Huntsville’s Von Braun Center last fall. There he announced U.S. Army SSG Michael Brown and his wife Kimberly and daughter Alyssa join Sgt. 1st Class Scott Barkalow and his family in Athens, as recipients of a fully customized OSHA compliant adaptive home that fits their needs as disabled American veterans.
How the team came together to make it a reality consists of many “cogs in the wheel” according to Breland. Once Breland accepted the challenge, those cogs quickly fell in place when Strong contacted a cousin in Monrovia who had been Greenwood’s manager for 32 years.
Strong introduced Breland to Greenwood, Greenwood introduced Breland to Meredith Iler, founder of the Helping A Hero Home program, and Helping A Hero took a referral from a local veteran amputee named U.S. Army Sgt Ross Cox and convinced SSG Brown to apply for the deeply vetted program.
“I had to twist his arm to get him to sign the application,” said Cox during the groundbreaking ceremony. “But Michael, we did not lose our legs. We gave them in a fight for freedom and to preserve this nation. You fit all the criteria for this program.”
SSG Michael Brown currently lives and works in Madison, but he lived in Murfreesboro, Tenn. when he enlisted in the Army as a military police officer in 2005. During the height of the surge in the war on terrorism, he was deployed to Mosul, Iraq to train the Iraqi police force.
Thirty-three days into his deployment, his vehicle was struck by a Soviet-style RKG-3 on October 16, 2007, and the impact shot through his armored tank, immediately severing his left foot at the ankle.
One month after the attack, SSG Brown was transported to Walter Reed Hospital to begin what would be years of physical therapy.
He was awarded the Bronze Star and Purple Heart and is grateful to be around today.
“By 2005, I knew what was going to happen. I knew I would be deployed, and I knew I would fight the war on terror. That did not scare me. It was a decision I made consciously. The U.S. Army was the best direction for myself and my future family,” SSG Brown explained at the groundbreaking ceremony. “As the medic was transporting me out of that Iraqi dirt, I grabbed his cellphone and called my wife. It was a nine-second call. I said Kim, I’ve been in an accident and I’m losing my left foot. I love you.”
It would be nine hours later before she received official word of his condition.
“The jewel of the experience of struggling through those physical therapy sessions learning how to put on a prosthetic device, was that my daughter Alyssa was just learning to take her first steps as I was re-learning my second set of first steps.”
SSG Brown said he quickly learned the power of positive thinking and understood the reality of there being no sense dwelling on things he couldn’t change or think about how wrong things had gone.
“My dad always said it is the adversity and the struggle that makes the man,” he advised. “I believe it is all about leaning into those challenges and progressing and moving forward. Everybody has struggles in their life. Everybody has ups and downs. The struggle itself isn’t the important part. It is how you deal with that struggle and how you overcome it that will define you and your life.
“Yes, I’m an amputee. But more importantly I’m a husband to a wonderful wife, I’m a father to an amazing girl, and I am a soldier for life.”
Breland said the Brown family should be in the new home in four to six months.
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