Wounded Indiana Marine will receive donated custom home

ATTICA, Ind. — The streets of Attica echoed with sirens as a fleet of first responder vehicles escorted Marine Lance Cpl. Bryan Chambers to West Mill Social Hall.

Outside the community center, dozens stood holding flags anticipating their guests of honor to arrive.

Chambers, a wounded veteran of the Iraq War, was the main guest of honor, celebrated with a community-wide event topped off with new home from Homes for Our Troops. The nonprofit organization builds and donates specially adapted, custom homes for severely injured post-9/11 veterans.

As Chambers pulled up to the community center, the crowd erupted in cheer, waving their flags in the air for the veteran.

Bill Ivey, the executive director of Homes for Our Troops, welcomed Chambers with a big hug and walked him inside the building, where several distinguished guests waited. Those gathered to celebrate Chambers included Indiana State Rep. Sharon Negele, Fountain County Sheriff Terry Holt, Indiana Attorney General Todd Rokita.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Chambers decided he would, when the time came, join the military, he said. He was in his high school classroom with the rest of his class that morning, watching news coverage of the Twin Towers falling.

Horrified by what he had seen, Chambers made a commitment to himself that he would serve his country and protect his fellow countrymen, he said.

Chambers graduated high school in June 2006, and by July he was on his way to boot camp.

By August 2006, he was aboard a plane flying to Iraq for his first six-month deployment.

During the last mission of his deployment in Iraq, he narrowly avoided death. But the mission cost Chambers his leg.

“We were on our last patrol, and I guess our commanding officer was looking for that attaboy moment. So, we were on our patrol, and we were going outside of our normal area of operations,” Chambers said.

“But I was the lead vehicle of our platoon, and I ran over an improvised explosive device. I was in an LAV (Light Armored Vehicle); it’s a 14ton vehicle, so when I hit the IED, it flipped the LAV up in the air and spun it around.

“Our nose was directly opposite of the direction we were going. It ripped the 3-ton engine out of the vehicle. The engine is right next to the hole where I was because I was driving,” Chambers said.

“I was pinned in the vehicle. Orders were given out over the radio to back away from the vehicle. It was just kind of presumed that I was gone because, well, if the engine was gone, the driver’s hole is right next to the engine.

“So, they didn’t think I was alive, but my brothers — they neglected to hear that information. When they got the driver’s hole opened, they saw I was pinned in it. My corpsman and my lieutenant had to jump on my leg and break my femur to get me out, because I was pinned in the driver’s hole. From there, I was basically on a flight for my life. I was flown to Karbala, then to Germany, and then finally I was flown back to the United States.”

Chambers doesn’t remember most of the details before or after the explosion. He was only able to figure out what had happened through the accounts of his brothers in arms, who desperately tried to save his life that day.

“I remember the safety brief from the day before, and then I woke up in Tampa, Fla., almost three months later. I had a TBI (traumatic brain injury), I had lost my spleen and I lost my leg.”

Once Chambers woke up from his coma, he was sent to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md., where he received his prosthetics and physical therapy treatments.

On Feb. 28, 2008, Chambers was finally able to leave the hospital and return to his parents’ home in Denver, Colo.

It had been exactly one year since the explosion, which occurred on Feb. 28, 2007.

For the next several years, Chambers went back to living the civilian lifestyle — with his parents for a few years, later moving into an apartment with his sister, and then eventually buying a house.

Life changed again for Chambers again in 2012, when he met his future wife, Rhyann, at a party.

From the first moment Bryan saw Rhyann, he knew she was the one for him.

Rhyann, on the other hand, wanted nothing to do with him. It wasn’t because she didn’t like him. If anything, it was because she knew that she did like him and that was going to cause a ton of trouble for her.

“I met him at a party, and I enjoyed visiting with this man. His past was unknown to me. There was a little bit of a hitch to it all because I was in a relationship with somebody else, and when we left that party, I told my friend, ‘I can’t see him again!’ And she’s like, ‘Why?’

“I said, ‘Welp, I’m not a cheater, and I’m not about to be.’ From the very beginning, I knew that I had an attraction to him, but like I said, to avoid drama, I avoided him,” said Rhyann Chambers.

This didn’t stop Bryan from trying to win her over. For the next five months, Rhyann would occasionally hear that Bryan was asking for her number in hopes of scheduling a date. Rhyann eventually became single again and decided to give Bryan a shot.

“We messaged each other, and he was like, ‘Let’s hang out before I leave for the weekend.’ So, we hung out for seven hours that night. I left work to visit with Bryan, and then I left Bryan to go back to work.

“It made for a long day, but obviously, it was worth it. I remember calling my mom the next day and I said, ‘Mom I’m in trouble. I think I’m in love,’ and she was like, ‘With the guy you just broke up with?’ And I’m like, ‘No! That would make things a lot less complicated.’

“But we started dating that May, and by Feb. 28, we were engaged,” said Rhyann.

For Bryan, Feb. 28, six years after losing his leg, had become another important day for him. He dubbed it his alive day.

That year, Bryan knew he wanted to share this important day with Rhyann. They took a trip to Florida and it was on Miami Beach where Bryan asked Rhyann to marry him. She said yes.

In September 2013, they got married on top of Silverthorne Mountain.

Now that Bryan was a family man, he began to question if he should sell his home in Colorado. At the time, he couldn’t afford to live there without having a roommate to subsidize the cost. Bryan knew he eventually wanted to have kids, so he sold the house and decided to move somewhere within his budget, Indiana.

Bryan was born in Indianapolis and lived in Hillsboro until he was about 12 years old, when his parent decided to move to Colorado.

He bought a small house, a place to start a family.

But after moving in and living there for a few years, Bryan began to question whether this could become his forever home. It wasn’t accommodating his war wounds.

There were a lot of stairs Bryan had to endure on a daily basis, and the doorways were too narrow for a wheelchair to fit through. Although Bryan was able to walk, this may not always be the case in the long run.

That’s when Bryan had heard about Homes for Our Troops from his brother-inlaw’s brother. He was a contractor at one of the houses the organization built in Montrose, Colo.

The family member had asked if Bryan had heard about the organization, since he believed Bryan met the requirements to qualify for a home. The couple didn’t know if their application would be accepted, but they applied anyway.

Homes for Our Troops is a publicly funded 501(c) (3) nonprofit organization based out of Massachusetts started back in 2004.

Homes for Our Troops builds mortgage-free specially adapted custom homes for injured post-9/11 veterans, as a way to enable them to rebuild their lives. Homes for Our Troops strives to build new homes anywhere in the nation for veterans.

“What we do is not charity work,” said Ivey, “and I want to be clear about that. We see our jobs as a solemn obligation to help pay the American people. We pay a debt that we owe these men and women that have been so severely injured defending our freedom and independence in Iraq and Afghanistan. We think by building them a specially adapted custom home, that’s completely accessible to someone in a wheelchair and where that veteran wants to live, is a good down payment on helping repay that debt that we owe them.

“We think by building these homes where the veteran wants to live and getting them in it, we could help them get a step forward on rebuilding their lives. And that’s one of the things that make us different from a lot of other nonprofits, because for us it’s not about the home. Certainly, they’re important, but it’s what our veterans and their families can do once they’re in that home is what’s important to us.

“That’s why our tagline is, ‘Building Homes, Rebuilding Lives.’ The important part is rebuilding lives.”

Homes for Our Troops representatives stay in contact with the veterans for the rest of their lives, Ivey said.

“It’s not, here are the keys and have a good time, hope it works. It’s, here are the keys, welcome to the Homes for our Troops family and we’re going to be there for you going forward,” Ivey added.

Since 2004, Homes for Our Troops has built over 320 for veterans, and nearly 90 cents out of every dollar spent has gone directly to program services, the organization reports.

In 2019, a few months after Rhyann gave birth to twins, their application was approved and they received a call from Homes for Our Troops asking where they would like their new home to be built.

The couple said, “Indiana.” “On May 20, 2019, we added two beautiful children to our lives and another miracle, that I had no idea what was in store for us. I don’t think Bryan and I fully understand or fully grasp just how much of a blessing this house is going to be,” his wife said.

“When you talk about a house, yeah, the house itself is supposed to have a sense of security, but when we’re talking about a house that I don’t have to worry about stairs or worry about slipping in bathtubs, I don’t have to worry about him catching his foot in the transition from one floor to another. Just simple things like that, that you don’t have to think about until you do. On top of being mortgage-free, that in our 20s and 30s we’re going to be able to make dreams and ideas that have gone through our heads into actual reality. Adventures that we thought about can become adventures for our family.”

Last week, the Chamberses and Ivey broke soil on the plot of land which will soon become the Chambers’ new home. The project is expected to be finished by late 2022.

“Not only did they give us the security that we needed in a house,” said Rhyann, “but also the ability to have the dreams that we were wanting to do as a family. I knew that this organization was not giving us a house but giving us a home.”

“Not only did they give us the security that we needed in a house, but also the ability to have the dreams that we were wanting to do as a family.” — Rhyann Chambers, wife of wounded Marine, Lance Cpl. Bryan Chambers