Justin Bond was on hole 8 when he picked up his phone. He was willing to talk, but we figured we’d let him play out the round. The 33-year-old Iraq War veteran (right) deserved at least that small courtesy.
Early in his ten-year Army career, Bond was pronounced dead — after being crushed between two vehicles while engaged in civilian work in his native California. He’s got a metal pelvis and tailbone to show for it, as well as an official time of death. Years later, he found himself in the middle of several fire fights during the Iraq War. In the worst, the first battle of Fallujah, a mortar blast sent a thousand pieces of shrapnel into his midsection. Minutes later, his Humvee was riddled with 21 AK-47 rounds, one of which slashed through his knee, bounced off the engine block and cut through the other.
Army doctors told Bond the left leg would have to go. He begged to keep it, as you or I would, and though doctors argued against it, the wounded soldier got his way. There was a catch: “It’s not gonna work,” doctors told him. Bond didn’t care. A useless leg was better than no leg, he thought, no matter how useless it was.
The doctors’ prognosis proved true. Bond’s left leg gave him constant pain, impaired his mobility and generally made his life miserable. Five years and 33 surgeries after incurring the injury in a savage battle lost by US forces, Bond agreed to have the leg amputated.
After his heroic service to his country, and despite all of his strength, Bond’s future might have been spent in a wheelchair — if it weren’t for the inspiration and influence of a perfect stranger. A man by the name of Jerry Kerr.
“I was one of those pricks who didn’t think much about people with disabilities,” Kerr, a former St. Louis real estate developer, tells Tonic. When engineers told him he’d have to pave over a portion of a playground at one of his properties to make room for handicap parking, Kerr objected. A few weeks later, in July 1998, Kerr (left) jumped off a dock while playing with his kids, hitting his head on the lake bottom and shattering his C-4 vertebrae into 17 pieces. As he floated motionless, buoyed by his loved ones and waiting for the paramedics to arrive, he couldn’t have imagined how many people with disabilities he’d help over the next decade.
When you’re disabled, you keep an eye open for ways to improve your life. For Kerr, a spastic quadriplegic, that meant paying close attention to trends in technology, particularly universally designed technology — devices that improve quality of life whether you’re 10 or 100 years old, wheelchair-bound or a professional athlete. Sidewalk ramps and closed captioning are good examples.
The same can be said of the Segway.
“It’s life changing,” Bond says when asked why he now volunteers for Segs4Vets, an initiative undertaken by Disability Rights Advocates for Technology (DRAFT), a 501(c)3 based in St. Louis. Bond found out first-hand. While lying in a hospital bed after losing his leg, a nurse suggested he check out the nonprofit, which gives away Segways — high-tech electric vehicles that reach speeds of 12.6 miles per hour and turn sharp corners at the slight shift of a rider’s weight. Justin filled out an application, as any wounded vet can do online, and a week later he had his own Segway. Now, he rides it all the time. “Everywhere I go, from morning until night,” he says, “I’m on it.”
Today, five years after Jerry Kerr founded the nonprofit, Segs4Vets has given away 475 Segways. Bond’s Segway was number 340. If the funding is available (you can donate here), the organization will give away hundreds more. On June 23, Segs4Vets will give a Segway to First Sergent Peter Lara, whose jaw and scapula were shattered in a close quarter fire fight in Mosul in 2005. He’s lucky for many reasons, perhaps least of which is the $7,000 gift he’ll receive. At the moment, Kerr says, there’s a backlog of 600 applications sitting on his desk. That stack gets higher every day.
“Unfortunately, these wars continue to go on, and you know, with Afghanistan continuing to heat up and the casualty numbers growing, well, we thought we’d be out of business by now. Our goal is to be out of business,” Kerr says. “We’re not building an endowment. We’re just trying to serve our mission and our purpose and when we’re done, then the Segs4Vets program will be done.”
If Segs4Vets is a business at all, it’s safe to say it’s a family business. The organization is made up of family, friends and friends of friends, and everyone involved is a volunteer.
The first eyeballs that fall on an application are those of Kerr’s former fraternity brother, a retired JAG colonel. Kerr befriended DRAFT’s treasurer, a CPA and Segway enthusiast, at the first ever Segway Fest in 2003. General Ralph “Ed” Eberhart, a retired four-star general and a friend of a friend, is the volunteer most responsible for winning Segs4Vets a waiver from the US military to allow the organization to give a $7,000 gift to active duty members of the military. Prior to the decision, ethics regulations prohibited active duty military personnel from accepting gifts valued over $50.
DRAFT works because it is a tight-knit patchwork of passionate volunteers, 20 to 25 of whom donate an average of 30 days per year to a nonprofit certified as one of the most efficient in America.
“All you have to do is bring someone to a Segway training assessment program one time,” Kerr says. “When you see a big, strapping, good-looking guy with no legs crying, you’re done.”
The vehicles might elicit such an emotional response from wounded vets because Segways — developed by superstar inventor Dean Kamen — are everything a wheelchair is not. They’re fast, they’re stylish, they’re for everyone, and maybe most importantly, Segways allow veterans to stand tall.
“In a wheelchair, you’re always looking up at everybody, and everybody is always looking down at you,” says Bond, who “is toast” after walking two to three blocks with the assistance of only his prosthesis. “People look at you as if you’re disabled, which makes you feel disabled, and pretty soon you act disabled. But on a Segway, you’re standing up and looking down and people don’t notice the injuries because they’re looking down at the Segway or they’re looking up at your face. They don’t recognize your disability.”
It doesn’t hurt that Segways are allowed on the golf course, where Bond cruises through sand traps and deep rough. Like a true gentleman, he doesn’t take his Segway on the green. But he does bring it fishing at a local lake, where he churns through thick mud that two-legged fishermen don’t dare tread. He also propels it up and down steep hills, where sensitive gyroscopes keep the machine balanced and the rider safe.
Segways don’t do stairs, though Hesco Bastion, the British company that now owns Segway, is working on it. And it appears riders need at least one arm — Segs4Vets has never given a Segway to a double-arm amputee — though Kerr won’t say so himself.
“I won’t say no absolutely,” he says. “It doesn’t make any difference who you are. If you come to our training assessment program and we don’t think you’re safe, you’re not going to get one.”
Maybe the most fitting arena for a Segway is college, where wounded soldier-students speed across sprawling campuses to make sure they get to class on time. For wounded vets, timeliness at increasingly over-crowded classrooms is often about more than just being a good student. It can be the difference between getting a good seat, and getting a front row seat — a nightmare scenario for soldiers suffering from PTSD.
There are few places a Segway can’t go. That’s not just because the vehicle is an incredible machine packed with cutting-edge technology, but because the US is the most wheelchair accessible country in the world. It is veterans who made it that way. When our brothers and sisters returned home forever changed from World War II, Korea and Vietnam, America changed for them, enacting the most wide-reaching civil rights protections for the disabled found on earth. It is soldiers like Justin Bond — zooming around on his Segway at right — who remind us to keep our country that way, and soldiers like him who give us the freedom to worry about it in the first place.
“I know who I have to thank for my ability to get around and do things,” Kerr says. “And that’s disabled veterans.”
Photos courtesy of DRAFT and Justin Bond.