A cause close to our hearts... Important!

This is a story about the Hunk's best friend who he's known since 2nd grade. He's suffered so much to serve this country and has asked for nothing in return. Please, if you find it in your heart to help him and others like him, support Operation War Hero. This family deserves our help and support for what they sacrificed to serve their country.

One soldier's never-ending battle

Reservist Eric Richardson came back from Kuwait with nerve damage caused by too-small boots and lives each day in excruciating pain. His young family was struggling until a determined woman stepped into their lives and altered the path of fate.
~JESSIE MILLIGAN STAR-TELEGRAM STAFF WRITER

Although it was not a Jesus image seen in a window's sheen nor a bolt-of-lightning intervention, it was as if the heavens allowed a small miracle one day this past spring when Jeff Gowins pulled his City Roofing truck into Racetrac Petroleum on Texas 183 in Fort Worth.

"Are you a roofer?" asked a woman at the gas pump next to him, looking at the sign on his truck. "Sir, I need your help right now. I'm trying to help a veteran. He's terribly injured, and his roof is leaking, and the ceiling is falling in at his house ...."

Gowins was stunned at the story that gushed from the woman.

A bad beginning
It started with a pair of too-small combat boots. The pair issued to reservist Eric Richardson of Saginaw was one full size too small for him. Richardson spent three months in the desert with his feet painfully crammed inside them. Nerve damage set in, and then a rare condition spread through his body and into his brain, he says.

Now, three years after coming back from Kuwait, his memory fails. His vision and hearing are fading. He can barely swallow, and he cannot walk. All because he wore a pair of combat boots one size too small. Back home, there is little relief from his constant pain. One day, the ceiling in his 4-year-old child's bedroom collapsed after rain leaked in. As their 40-year-old home falls into disrepair around them, his wife, Shelia, 31, struggles good-naturedly with his care.

By the time Gowins left the gas station that day, he was fired up to help the Richardsons. City Roofing already had helped re-roof several veterans' homes.

And the woman, Vicky Field, a particularly passionate employee of the U.S. Department of Defense newly charged with aiding injured veterans, had found someone with the skills to support her work. It was a chance meeting at a gas station, but together Gowins and Field would do what neither could do alone. They would start a new foundation to aid severely injured veterans, and they would set out not only to fix Richardson's home, but to build him a new one as well.

Hurting and hope
Small miracles are long overdue in the Richardson family's life. Go back some years, to 1996, and you'll see that life was sweet when Eric and Shelia Richardson married. The couple moved into a home on a street of few-frills ranch houses not far from the industrial main street of Saginaw, bordering north Fort Worth.

Shelia Richardson's parents live just up the street. It felt like home to Shelia, an eighth-grade science teacher at Tison Middle School in Weatherford, and to Eric, a Keller policeman.
He'd moved around Tarrant County so much as a kid that he'd never really been able to make close friends. Finally, he was settled, and he wanted to bring in extra income for his new family.
In August 2001, he joined the 610th Security Forces, an Air Force Reserve unit based in Fort Worth. A month later, the military's mission changed dramatically. By May 2002, he was in Kuwait.

He complained, of course, when the size 9 combat boots were issued. He wears a size 10.
"He kept telling them he needed new boots," Shelia Richardson says. "They told him no, so he wore 'em anyway." New equipment, from body armor to boots, was slow in coming in the early months of the war.

One day in August 2002, while carrying about 70 pounds of equipment on his 200-pound frame, he jumped out of a Humvee and heard a sharp snap in his foot. He thought he had broken his toes.

"Nerve damage," a military doctor told him and ordered him to wear athletic shoes.
The Richardsons say his superiors nixed the tennis shoes and ordered him back into his boots.
Roberta Smith, the public affairs officer for the 610th Security Forces, citing privacy issues, said recently that the Air Force Reserves are supportive of Richardson but cannot confirm the cause of the injury nor can it confirm any disciplinary action against the officers who Richardson says ordered him back into the boots.

Two weeks later, the pain was so unbearable that he was sent home on crutches, expecting that the damage would heal in about six months to a year. Eric Richardson and Shelia had a baby boy on the way, a little brother for their tiny red-headed daughter, Rebecca. Eric bought a shiny black pickup truck. Things would be OK, he thought.

Instead, the pain escalated.

Name the pain
Mysteriously, maddeningly, Richardson's nerve damage spread. His limbs were swollen. His joints ached. Muscles and bones weakened. Pain was constant. The disorder is one originally identified during the Civil War, when soldiers complained of constant pain originating from long-healed wounds. Doctors now identify the disorder as chronic regional pain syndrome, so called because in most cases the pain stays close to the original injury. More infrequently, the body's sympathetic nervous system kicks into overdrive, and the damage spreads along this network of nerves that control automatic body functions, from the dilation of the eyes in low light to the heightening of the heartbeat when in danger.

Usually, if the nerve damage spreads, it travels to one other limb, sometimes all of the limbs.
In even fewer cases, as in Richardson's, it also wreaks havoc with the central nervous system, the pathway to the brain, and spreads throughout the entire body, damaging cells along the way.
Theories exist on what causes the advancing nerve damage, but the exact cause of its spread is not agreed upon. Surgery to sever the affected nerves sometimes stops the spread, although the technique was not successful for Richardson.

There is no cure.

Mysteriously, miraculously, the condition can go into remission.

For the better part of a year, Eric Richardson was treated at the highly regarded Wilford Hall Medical Center at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. He was released from the hospital in 2004 under a program to manage his pain. A drip of pain killers, often morphine, is released from a surgically implanted pump that sends the medication directly into his spine. A hospital bed has been wedged into the couple's bedroom. There, he spends most of his time, even on warm days, with nine blankets, one of them electric, piled on his legs to ward of the feeling of cold that is typical of the syndrome.

Furniture has been pushed against the walls and piled high in other rooms to make way for Richardson's wheelchair. Most doors in the couple's home are too narrow to allow for wheelchair passage. He can't get into the bathrooms because of the narrow doors. One bathroom sits just as he left it three years ago, torn apart for a remodeling project he was to finish on his return home. He can't get to the back yard. He can barely navigate the kitchen.

Doctors tell him to stay in bed most of the time, but Richardson is the kind of guy who used to like going shark fishing in the Gulf of Mexico or helping his brother build a house. Once in a while, he likes to get out of bed.

Pulling together
"The doctors say this condition will kill him," Shelia Richardson says. Maybe soon, maybe years from now.

"One of his biggest fears is that I will leave him," she says. "I took the vows. I meant it when I said I'd be there in sickness and in health." Shelia is a patient, calm person, the kind of mom who can gather up two tiny children fighting over a stuffed toy and comfort them in her lap while the dog barks and the phone rings. She knows which is the most important. Ronnie, almost 3, is a happy redhead who just got his head shaved for summer.

"This is all he's ever known," Shelia says. "He was born after his dad got home." Rebecca, 4, gets scared when her dad is having particularly hard times. Mostly, she is a helpful child with serious eyes. She straightens the blankets on her father's legs or helps her mom get him out of bed and into the wheelchair.

"She says she wants to be a doctor so that she can help people who hurt like her father does," Shelia Richardson says. "Either that or a cheerleader."

Humor helps when emotions are drained at the Richardson home. So does logic. "We are all going to die," Shelia says. "None of us knows when. We just have to live each day. "In my mind, I still see us old together," she says, brushing her long, dark hair back. Her eyes look very, very tired.

No blame assigned
The family holds no bitterness toward the Air Force, even as their lives continued to fall apart, even when the roof on their home started leaking every time it rained. But in Shelia's mind, all this — the injury, the financial woes — was the result of falling through the cracks of a system lumbering under the weight of war.

"The way Eric looks at it, bad things can happen in any business or corporation. This was war. It was just one or two individuals, not the whole system," Shelia Richardson says. They have looked beyond the military for help. The Richardsons applied for TV's Extreme Makeover: Home Edition in April. They were not selected. Shelia says she was told by show representatives that their situation didn't make the Air Force look good, although the Air Force had been involved in the nomination.

Charitable organizations turned the Richardsons down for aid because Shelia's teacher's income disqualified them. Just a few weeks back, Shelia brought Eric to the dentist. Nerves to his teeth had begun to die. The dentist took one look at the resulting infections that had spread through his teeth and called an ambulance.

Eric Richardson refused to be admitted to the hospital.

He wanted to be at home.

A lucky break
Luck hadn't turned the Richardsons way in three years. Then, in April this year, they met Vicky Field. Just this spring the Granbury woman took a U.S. Department of Defense job with the newly formed Military Severely Injured Joint Operations Center. Her job is to make sure veterans are hooked into the military benefit stream and to rally community support to do what the government cannot.

Her first project: Help the Richardsons.

She approaches her job with zeal. Her passion has a source of ignition. Her own son, Chad Snowden, is a veteran of Iraq who is gradually recovering from a gunshot wound to the head.
Field is determined enough that she thinks nothing of stopping a guy in a roofing truck at a gas station and asking for help. She's just enthusiastic enough that people tend to respond.

Jeff Gowins inspected the Richardsons' home not long after that chance meeting at the gas station. Along with him came another construction pro that Field found after visiting the office of U.S. Rep. Kay Granger. A representative of a housing developer, who wishes to remain anonymous, pored over the darkened rooms, where the lights are kept low to avoid hurting Eric Richardson's eyes. They poked around at the ceiling, they measured doorways.

The Saginaw home cannot be remodeled to accommodate a wheelchair, Gowins and the developer decided.

They'd build the Richardsons a new home instead.

A fresh start
Field and Gowins have worked quickly. Groundbreaking on the developer-donated lot at the Marine Creek Ranch subdivision is to take place later this month, and Gowins says the 2,100-square-foot home with donated materials and labor should be ready within three months. The Richardsons will have no mortgage payment. Even the landscaping is being donated.

Field and Gowins quickly mustered a six-person board of directors to manage donations to the Richardsons and, afterward, to other veterans. Paperwork is under way to register the foundation as a charity that can accept tax-deductible donations. The new nonprofit is to be called Operation War Heroes, and a Web site, www.operationwarhero.org, was recently constructed.

"That should go a long way toward relieving the burden on this family," Gowins says. "This has really been a God thing. The right people are being put on the right path to meet at the right place and the right time."

Meanwhile, Field has been out rallying more support. She's spoken at the Saginaw Chamber of Commerce requesting donations for the new home. She's visited area businesses and politicians. She's fielded hundreds of e-mails from people expressing interest in helping out — from the Quilting Grannies of Pecan Valley to the employees of Lockheed Martin Aeronautics' joint strike fighter program — after the story about her and her son, Chad, was featured in the Star-Telegram on Mother's Day.

Shelia Richardson, out of school for the summer and busy taking her husband to doctors' appointments several times a week, was at first too wary and too tired to let the goodness of the offer sink in.

"We'd been through so many letdowns. We didn't want to get our hopes up," she says. "Really, all I was expecting is maybe having a door widened." She says she and Eric are somewhat uncomfortable about receiving charity. They counter this by knowing that, when they are able, they'll do what they can to raise money for Operation War Heroes.

"Eric says he'd like to rally some support for them," Shelia says. "Maybe on the Internet."

She's beginning to let a little joy in.

When the developer's architect meets with the Richardsons to ensure they'll be happy with the home, Shelia Richardson tells them not to do anything "fancy." "I just want Eric to be able to get around," she says.

The new home emerges in her dreams.

Sometimes they are bad dreams where everything goes wrong. Usually, however, they are dreams where she sees Eric in the wheelchair, moving comfortably about the house.

Daughter Rebecca's only request: a pink bedroom.

Eric Richardson's only request: room to maneuver in a wheelchair.

"I'd really like to be able to move around," he said one recent afternoon before drifting off to sleep. These days he isn't always able to muster the energy for a conversation. He has told Shelia that he wants a flagpole in the front yard of his new home.

"He wants his buddies to know he still supports them," Shelia Richardson says.

The Richardsons can finally think about the future. Shelia already has started packing.

With help from Vicky Field and others, ground will be broken this month on the Richardsons' new home.

How you can help
For more information, e-mail info@operationwarhero.org
Operation War Heroes' new Web site is at www.operationwarhero.org
Jessie Milligan, (817) 390-7738 jlmilligan@star-telegram.com

SPECIAL TO THE STAR-TELEGRAM/JESSICA KOURKOUNIS


Please, I hope you find it in your heart to support this charity and our friends Eric and Shiela. If you believe in the power of prayer, please send up one for them.