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One morning in late March, 72-year-old Donald Surratt stood outside his family’s old homeplace in the Lincoln County community of Iron Station and watched a bulldozer reduce the place to

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One morning in late March, 72-year-old Donald Surratt stood outside his family’s old homeplace in the Lincoln County community of Iron Station and watched a bulldozer reduce the place to

One morning in late March, 72-year-old Donald Surratt stood outside his family’s old homeplace in the Lincoln County community of Iron Station and watched a bulldozer reduce the place to rubble.

How could he not shed a few tears? He was standing on sacred ground. This modest, wood-frame house, purchased when Surratt was about 5 years old, had provided countless indelible memories.

It was the home where Surratt had experienced family. Where his dad taught him the things that fathers teach their sons.

It was where his mother pampered her son as only moms can do. And then, decades later, it was where the son returned the favor, pampering his elderly mother as she neared her death.

It was where Surratt cared for his own son, Darrell, who battled muscular dystrophy his entire adult life. And it was where that son, bedridden at 51, died.

So many memories, good and bad, on this hallowed family land. So yes, Surratt wept as the old house came down.

• • •

Two months later, John Gallina stands on that same land, right alongside Surratt, admiring the new house being built where the old one once stood. They can’t help but smile at the progress being made — the foundation, the frame, the flooring, the roof.

“I’m just rejoicing in the goodness of God,” Surratt says. He’s a slender man with a large smile and an even larger faith. “This is just amazing.”

Gallina nods in agreement. He’s the cofounder of Purple Heart Homes, a national nonprofit based in Statesville that provides housing repairs, at no cost, to veterans of the U.S. military — vets like Donald Surratt.

Purple Heart Homes originally agreed to put a new roof on Surratt’s existing house, but when a contractor determined that removing the unstable roof would likely cause the whole thing to collapse, agency officials instead decided to demolish the unsafe structure and build Surratt a new house from the ground up.

“When you meet this veteran, Mr. Surratt, how can you not want to help him?” Gallina says. “You hear his story and what he’s experienced in his life, taking care of his son, who had a disability and passed away in the very home that we tore down. You want to love on somebody like that, and let them know that they matter — that’s what this is really about.”

John Gallina of Purple Heart Homes with Donald Surratt

Surviving in combat depends on loyalty among soldiers. At home, former National Guardsman John Gallina (left) continues serving fellow veterans like Surratt through Purple Heart Homes. photograph by Chris Edwards

Like Surratt, Gallina is a veteran, too. Although they’re a generation apart — Gallina is 45 — both served proudly. Surratt was an Army MP during the Vietnam era; Gallina was a member of the NC National Guard during Operation Iraqi Freedom II. Surratt served stateside as the war was nearing its end in Vietnam; Gallina was deployed to Iraq, where he fought and was wounded in combat. It was Gallina’s inspiring personal journey, coupled with that of his National Guard buddy and Purple Heart Homes cofounder Dale Beatty, that led to the creation of the organization more than 15 years ago.

The two Statesville natives met through their National Guard recruiter when they joined in 1996, a couple of gung-ho 17-year-olds who wanted to serve their country. In time, they would become the best of friends, on and off the battlefield, doing practically everything together.

Including getting injured.

Purple heart medal

photograph by Blakeley/Alamy Stock Photo

Their unit, the 30th Brigade Combat Team, deployed into northern Iraq in February 2004. On November 15 of that same year — two decades ago this month — the two young men were injured during a security route-clearing mission when their armored Humvee struck an anti-tank land mine. The device, buried just beneath the road surface, exploded on contact, flipping the two-and-a-half-ton vehicle end over end as if it were a child’s Matchbox car.

Gallina, knocked unconscious in the blast, suffered severe back pain and a traumatic brain injury — he battles post-traumatic stress disorder to this day — but Beatty got the worst of it. One foot was severed in the explosion, as was the heel of his other foot. Eventually, both legs had to be amputated below the knees, requiring him to wear prosthetic legs. Both men earned Purple Hearts for being wounded in the line of duty.

Gallina completed his tour before returning home in early 2005 and resuming his civilian career as a general contractor. Beatty came home after a yearlong stay at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington. When he arrived, a new challenge awaited him: His house wasn’t wheelchair-accessible.

One war had finally ended for the young soldiers, but another battle, it seemed, had just begun.

• • •

As Beatty pondered his housing options, word spread throughout Iredell County that the young veteran needed an adaptive home for himself and his family. With patriotic fervor, the community rallied around the Beattys. Gallina, the local home builders association, area churches, veterans’ organizations, and other groups united to build the family a new house.

“It really helped in my healing process to know how much the community has been behind me,” Beatty said at the time. “Some guys go back and are not that lucky. I’ve been lucky.”

Dale Beatty, the co-founder of Purple Heart Homes

Gallina and the late Dale Beatty (pictured) founded Purple Heart Homes after fellow veterans helped Beatty build a wheelchair-accessible home for him and his family. photograph by Piper Warlick, Courtesy of Purple Heart Homes

The experience opened Gallina and Beatty’s eyes to the plight of an earlier generation of veterans who were not so lucky. “Throughout the process of building Dale’s home, we started observing that a lot of the volunteers were wearing Vietnam hats and Vietnam vests,” Gallina says. “Some of them had tattoos [reading], ‘I served in Vietnam.’”

It reminded Gallina of an earlier experience. “When I was coming home and landed in Bangor, Maine, there were seven Vietnam vets waiting there, saluting us as we got off the plane,” he recalls. “There’s no parade, no flag — just these seven Vietnam vets — and I realized that this was something different. They were making sure that we were welcomed home properly, because of the way they were not welcomed home.”

The realization inspired Gallina and Beatty to honor their military brethren who’d fought in that earlier conflict. They decided to build a wheelchair ramp for a Vietnam veteran in Conover. “It was just the two of us, me and Dale, going to his house and saying, ‘We want to help you — we want to welcome you home,’” Gallina recalls. “And when we told him that, he just welled up with tears. He said, ‘I’ve been home for over 40 years, and nobody’s ever told me, ‘Welcome home.’ We started thinking, ‘OK, we can do a lot more of this.’ It really gave us a sense of purpose, and that’s how we got started.”

It was then, in 2008, that Gallina and Beatty embarked on their most impactful mission yet — the establishment of Purple Heart Homes, a nonprofit organization dedicated to assisting any honorably discharged veteran with a housing need, be it a wheelchair ramp, an accessible bathroom, a new roof, or any number of other home-related issues. Two years later, the agency finished its first project.

Since then, Purple Heart Homes has completed more than 1,300 such projects benefitting more than 3,100 veterans nationwide. In addition to repairs, they’ve built a few “tiny homes” — compact houses typically less than 400 square feet — many of them for Vietnam vets who were transitioning out of homelessness.

Regardless of a project’s scope, it takes a village to complete one successfully. Purple Heart Homes, Gallina points out, is just the facilitator. “It’s about connecting with the community and the home builders association,” he says, “working with credit unions and local volunteer groups and American Legions and VFWs, and saying, ‘Hey, here’s somebody we need to rally around.’”

A new home built by Purple Heart Homes

Thanks to Purple Heart Homes, a brand-new house in Lincoln County sits on ground where Surratt’s childhood memories are sown into the soil. Photography courtesy of Purple Heart Homes

Surratt’s new home is a perfect example of that kind of collaboration. “For this job, we have about 35 community partners,” says Joel Dalton, a regional development officer for Purple Heart Homes whose job is to recruit partners. “Just about everything you’re looking at here has been donated or discounted.”

That includes the concrete foundation. The roof. The drywall. The flooring. The fixtures. It includes heating and air. Plumbing. Electrical work. Cabinets. Landscaping. A new septic tank. Most of the labor was done for free. Lincoln County even donated the building permits.

The project also included a jump-start from Love Our Veterans (L.O.V.), an organization based in Denver, North Carolina, that assists local vets with financial needs. Before Purple Heart Homes could build Surratt a new house, he had to finish paying for the old one. So L.O.V. stepped in and paid off the mortgage. The nonprofit also bought him kerosene for heating the old house.

“I want all veterans to know that you can’t be too proud to ask [for help].”

It wasn’t easy for the proud veteran. In fact, Surratt says, “it was hard. But I want all veterans to know that you can’t be too proud to ask. I’m the type of person who never wanted to ask for anything. God blessed me to be in my right mind and still have my health, strength, and energy. But I needed help.”

After his military service, Surratt worked his entire adult life before taking early retirement about a decade ago to care for his elderly mother and disabled son. His mother died in 2016; Darrell died in 2022. “I was trying to get the house repaired while my son and my mom were here, but it was hard,” he says. “I was too busy taking care of them. I’m just thankful that they were comfortable before they passed.”

Once Purple Heart Homes got involved, the workers soon realized that the house was just too far gone. “They said, ‘Donald, we’re just gonna build you a new home,’” Surratt recalls. “Man, that floored me. I said, ‘You’re gonna do what?!’ I couldn’t believe it.”

Surratt moved into the new home in October, on the same sacred ground that his family has occupied for so many decades.

• • •

For Gallina, some days are tougher than others. Every day marking a “mission complete” — the description that Purple Heart Homes uses to celebrate the finish of another veteran’s project — is a good day. But he still struggles with PTSD, a constant reminder of the war that he fought — and, in some ways, the one he’s still fighting. It can be triggered by something as simple as seeing a piece of trash in the road and fearing that it’s a bomb. Or driving by a playground and seeing no children on it. Those are tough days.

The worst one came on February 12, 2018. That was the day that Beatty died unexpectedly of a double pulmonary embolism, a complication stemming from his war injuries. He was only 39 years old.

“That was really tough,” Gallina says softly, his eyes wet with tears. “We were as close as any two brothers could be and not be twins. We were different from each other — Dale used to say we were ‘The Odd Couple’ — but our passion for service really bonded us together.”

“We made a pledge to each other: no soldier left behind.”

Gallina soldiers on, though. Realizing that Purple Heart Homes is bigger than any one man — or any two men, for that matter — he knows that he’s doing what Beatty would want him to do, which is to continue doing good for his fellow veterans. “We made a pledge to each other: no soldier left behind,” Gallina says. “Whether that soldier’s in a different generation of service than I am is irrelevant — that pledge is still the same.”

During the war, Gallina saw the worst that humanity had to offer. When he came home, he found it difficult to shake those memories. “Nobody gets through combat unscathed,” he says. “When you witness innocent people being killed and maimed, and when you witness all the tragedy that happens on the battlefield, you can’t not be impacted.”

He readily admits that he brought those memories home with him and dwelled on them for a long time. They dimmed his view of people — not just overseas, but also in his own backyard. Some veterans, he knows, never move past that tainted mindset. But he did.

“Through the hundreds of communities we’ve worked in across the country, I’ve come to realize that [negativity] is not a realistic perspective,” Gallina says. “I see now that we’re surrounded by good, and we’re surrounded by good people. For me, I get to see what’s right in America every day, and it’s very much been a healing thing to be able to do some good and impact people in a positive way.”

No soldier left behind — that includes Gallina himself.

When he stands alongside Donald Surratt in front of Surratt’s new home — when he sees the smile on Surratt’s face and hears the gratitude and humility in his voice — that’s where Gallina finds healing and peace.

That’s sacred ground, indeed.

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This story was published on Oct 24, 2024

Jimmy Tomlin

Jimmy Tomlin is a Statesville native now living in High Point, he has written for Our State since 1998. He has been a feature writer and columnist for The High Point Enterprise since 1990. Tomlin has won numerous state, regional, and national writing awards.