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The Patriot Guard Riders provide motorcycle escorts at military funerals across America. This morning, however, two dozen bikers, mostly Vietnam veterans, assist at a different kind of ritual. A few miles south of Denver, they lead a line of cars up a dirt driveway toward a sprawling ranch house. In the newly landscaped yard, rows of folding chairs are filling with spectators, including many of the 400 volunteers who built the 2,500-square-foot home.
The guests of honor take their places by the front door. Matt Keil, 26, sits in an electric wheelchair; his wife, Tracy, 30, stands with her hand on his shoulder. Matt was an Army staff sergeant in Iraq, married six weeks, when a sniper's bullet left him a quadriplegic. But as he watches the flag-raising ceremony and listens to the speakers—a retired brigadier general, a congressman's aide-his face radiates joy. "Thank you to everyone who's had a hand in this," he says when it's his turn at the microphone. "You'll always be part of our family, no matter what."
Then a compact, bearded man steps forward. In the five years since he founded the nonprofit Homes for Our Troops, John Gonsalves has presided over more than 30 celebrations like this one.
"I want you to have the certificate of occupancy," he says, handing Tracy and Matt a document. The crowd cheers, and the door swings open to the couple's new life.
Matt Keil joined the Army after high school in Toledo, Ohio, primarily for the college money. He loved it so much that he stayed. After deployments to Kosovo and Korea, he volunteered for Iraq in 2004. "I didn't have a wife or kids," he says, "and I wanted to take a slot that might otherwise go to somebody who did."
He spent a year in Ramadi, a stronghold for Sunni insurgents, before being demobilized to Fort Carson, Colorado. One summer day, he met Tracy Wyatt by the pool; she was from Chicago and worked as an accountant for a defense contractor. As they chatted, they realized they had much in common: Both were Midwesterners raised in blue-collar families, ambitious, down-to-earth, and funny. And each thought the other was remarkably cute.
Soon they were sharing an apartment. At a going-away party before Matt's redeployment to Ramadi, he knelt and proposed to Tracy. They married in a small ceremony when he returned on leave in January 2007, then spent five days together before Matt went back to war.
On a predawn February morning, Matt was hanging camouflage netting on the roof of an abandoned house that his platoon had commandeered. From the streets below, he could hear the sounds of battle-the thud of AK-47 fire, the thunder of cannons from Bradley fighting vehicles. The darkness would protect him, he thought. Any insurgents who weren't shooting at tanks would surely be asleep.
But on a nearby rooftop, one enemy gunman was wide-awake.
Tracy answered the phone at 8 a.m. in Colorado. "He's been shot in the shoulder," the officer told her. She was, strangely, not surprised; she'd had a sense of foreboding the previous day, strong enough to keep her in tears and make her leave work early. Tracy and her mother got plane tickets and flew east, thinking a shoulder wound didn't sound so bad.
But when they arrived at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, DC, Matt was in the ICU, fully sedated and breathing with the help of a ventilator. A doctor spoke to Tracy the next day. "As you know," he began, "your husband is paralyzed from the neck down."
Tracy collapsed into her mother's arms. "You mean you didn't know?" the doctor asked. After apologizing, he explained that the bullet had entered through the right side of Matt's neck and exited through his left shoulder blade, damaging his spinal cord along the way.
Soon Matt's parents, siblings, and uncle arrived from Ohio. "Matt has an injury like Christopher Reeve's," the doctor told them. "He may be on a ventilator for the rest of his life. It's possible that he'll regain some limb function, but it's not likely."
Tracy latched onto the image of Reeve, who'd forged a new career as an advocate for people with spinal cord injuries. "I thought, Look what that guy did with his life," she recalls. Strengthening her optimism was the fact that her husband, a major Superman fan, had the Man of Steel's insignia tattooed on his right shoulder.
When Matt began to emerge from sedation, he went into what the doctors called ICU psychosis. Delirious and terrified, he snapped and spat at all who came near.
Once his mind cleared and he realized he was paralyzed, his practical nature kicked in. One of his first questions to Tracy was, "Do we have enough money?" She told him they did, with health insurance and income from her job. Veteran's benefits and Social Security payments would eventually arrive as well. They'd need a new apartment, but that wouldn't be hard—or so Tracy assumed.
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