James Byler (M’08) knows, perhaps better than most, how we are defined by our roles and classified by our experiences. He knows how we become what we have done, what we have seen, and what we remember.

Byler is many things: A Purdue University graduate and a New York University MBA student. A boyfriend, a son, and a brother. A friend. An Eagle Scout. A retired Marine and a veteran. A Purple Heart recipient. An above-the-knee double amputee. A survivor and an inspiration.

It’s the last of those roles that come through most clearly after talking with Byler — the one that really sums up his character. The act of terrorism in 2010 that stole his legs and much of the next two years of his life does not define him in the way one might imagine it could — because he refuses to let it. When Byler speaks, victim is nowhere in the list of possible descriptors. 

The improvised explosive device that nearly took his life in a dusty alleyway in Afghanistan has made him a shining example of the perseverance of the human spirit and plain old hard work. It may be the role with which he is most uncomfortable — this idea of somehow being a poster child for overcoming the odds, and yet the fact remains that because of what he has conquered, others look up with hope in their eyes and realize that their stories need not end with survivor. They can be reborn as victors.

From Ghostbuster to Boilermaker

For his part, Byler believes he was born to be a Marine. 

“In my kindergarten yearbook, it says I want to be in the army when I grow up,” he recalls. “I just always got excited about it. Then there was 9/11, and it kind of gives you a shot of patriotism, a need to want to do something.” 

His older brother, John (E’05), had attended Purdue, traveling from their home in Huntington, New York, to the famed engineering school, where he participated in ROTC and prepared to join the Army.

Byler tried to convince his parents, Phil and Janet Byler, to allow him to enlist in the Marines straight out of high school. With one son already committed to the military, his parents tried to deter him, but their condition — that he must go to college before making the commitment — had little effect on his future plans.

Janet Byler blames Ghostbusters. A native New Yorker who talks fast and frankly, she laughs a little at the idea of putting the onus for two sons in the armed services on Egon Spengler and Peter Venkman, but not enough to take back the rather fitting analogy.

“They were little heroes from the get-go,” she laughs. “They had their power packs and were going to rescue the world from ghosts. They always wanted to help others. They would suffer for the good of others.” She pauses. “It’s a gift they have, but as a mother, it’s terrifying to think your kid has that trait.”

Byler went off to Purdue with his mind firmly made up to be a Marine before graduation. He spent some time deciding what to study, hoping to build a base for a civilian life if an injury were to force him to end his military career early. A natural planner and leader with a head for numbers, he chose financial counseling and planning.   

“I had a great time at Purdue,” he says. “I made lifelong friends that I still talk to regularly. I got to get away from New York and see something different. The thing about Purdue is that you can always find a fit, and you can always do well. There’s no shortage of intelligent people to ask questions when you have them.”

Purdue’s Platoon Leaders Course, or PLC, allowed Byler to simultaneously pursue his degree while training for his military career. In the summer between his junior and senior years, he completed Officer Candidate School, and graduated as a First Lieutenant. Officer basic school took him away from Indiana, and along with all the other newly commissioned officers from around the country, to Quantico, Virginia. Six months of basic training, with an additional three months training for the infantry division, helped Byler find his place in the United States Marine Corps. He found his love of numbers helped him with the planning necessary to excel in on-ground maneuvers. He started his first assignment at Camp Pendleton, California, with one clear goal: Get his men ready for Afghanistan.

The great equalizer

In October of 2009, when his plane touched down in sunny California, Byler took command of the 46 men in his platoon. Together, they slogged through the Marines’ mountain warfare training, set up just south of Yosemite National Park. Their home base may have been an hour down the coastline from Los Angeles, but they might as well have been a world away. The remoteness was good practice. One day soon, they would be half a world away, and so every day was a race of sorts to make all 46 men function as parts of the greater whole.

“We knew we were going to Afghanistan,” says Byler. “You can only recreate the stress (of an active duty deployment) to an extent short of actually shooting at someone. It’s austere conditions and being there with them as you do it, so they know the fundamentals and it becomes muscle memory. There’s no magic trick to it. There’s just the hard, good work you have to put into anything.” He’s honest about the discomfort involved in practicing war maneuvers. “Nothing quite bonds like shared misery.”

Less than a year later, Byler and his Third Battalion, 5th Marines, deployed to the Sangin Valley of Afghanistan. It was September 2010, and their work centered on helping secure the area by working against the Taliban and aiding the locals, who needed security and assistance to try to establish their own government. 

Both missions went hand in hand, he says, since fighting the Taliban helped win the support of the locals, while winning the support of the locals helped extinguish the insurgency. 

Byler calls IEDs (improvised explosive devices) the “great equalizer on the battlefield today.” A great deal of the time spent on the ground in Afghanistan was devoted to finding and defusing the dangerous weapons, which could be buried almost anywhere. 

“If you talk about war based on training and technology, we’re going to win every time, but what the Taliban is really good at is the use of IEDs,” he says.

The devices, often made from fertilizer like the explosives used in the Oklahoma City bombing, are detonated with a simple pressure plate. They are inexpensive, deadly, and abundant. From busy city streets to civilian backyards, soldiers cannot walk with any certainty that the ground upon which they tread is safe. 

In Byler’s case, one minute it might be, and in the next, the very same patch of dirt can ignite a living nightmare.

Just after 7:30 on the morning of October 17, Byler and about a dozen of his Marines were doing routine daily security patrol. They had located two IEDs at an abandoned compound, called the explosive ordinance disposal team, and were setting up a security perimeter around the facility. 

Gunfire rang out. A couple of the Marines instinctively ran toward the contact. Byler, conditioned to making sure his men remained safe, ran up an alleyway, chasing after the pair. The gunfire ceased and the enemy appeared to have moved on. As the trio headed back toward the compound to deal with the original IEDs, Byler traversed the exact same alleyway the three of them had already run down. He fiddled with his radio, thinking he should update his higher command on the situation. Somewhere in that dusty corridor, his foot set off a pressure plate.

“I never got the full details,” he recalls. His voice, as he describes what he has explained to many other friends and family members, takes on the quality of a radio announcer reading a weather forecast. It’s not hollow so much as matter-of-fact. “I just found myself laying on my side, with smoke everywhere, and my pinkies blown off. I remember looking down and feeling, I don’t know? Blown out at the knees on both sides. It wasn’t too much thought process, really. Just wow, this sucks. Just pure terror and shock.”

The men with him went to work fast, saving his life by applying tourniquets and getting him to help in a wheelbarrow. 

“The guys did a phenomenal job of getting me out of there alive,” Byler says. “You can bleed out so fast. They did exactly what they were trained to do. They were young kids. Twenty-one and 20 years old, so the age of your average undergraduate Purdue student. I’m alive because of what they did.” 

A British Medevac helicopter already in the air was diverted to his location, and in about 20 minutes, he was receiving the critical care he needed to have a chance at survival. Byler still talks with one of the Marines who tended to him and rushed him to help in that wheelbarrow. The other was killed less than two weeks afterward, before Byler was able to thank him for helping save his own life.  

Byler was flown to a hospital in Germany, waiting to be stabilized enough to weather a transfer back to a US hospital. It was the beginning of many surgeries, and more than a year and a half of hospitalization, but he was alive.

Byler’s mother and father got the news about what had happened to their son the next day. Janet Byler cannot discuss it without tearing up, and she apologizes, and breathes shakily, and apologizes again. When she manages to get it out, her words come in a rush, as though she is ripping a Band-Aid off a painful memory that will never quite heal. 

“They came to the door,” she recalls. “Two uniformed Marines on a Sunday morning. You know what I thought. It was dark, and Phil went down for the door and started screaming. I thought … maybe somebody had run over the cat and come up to the door to tell us. I don’t remember a whole lot of what I did. I did meet the two young men a year later at a fundraiser. They said I came down the stairs and sat down … I don’t remember that at all. Their first words were, ‘Mr. and Mrs. Byler, your son is alive.’” 

For grievous injuries like Byler’s, the Marine Corps sends a team in person to explain the extent of the injuries, the trail of treatment, and plans for future care. Janet Byler preferred this scenario to hearing such a thing over the phone, despite her initial moments of near heart failure upon seeing the two men at her door. 

“When they read the injuries to you, you need a human being there to remind you that he’s alive,” she says. “It’s brutal. You just can’t believe that what they’re describing is a description of your beautiful son. They are polite and beautifully uniformed, and you just keep saying, ‘He’s alive? He’s alive?’ You just keep asking.”

Byler’s injuries went beyond the amputation of both legs and his pinkies. He also lost part of his ring finger on one hand. His eardrums were blown out, so there were ear surgeries to come to try to restore his hearing. He spent six days in Germany before being flown back to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. The next three months were a blur of surgeries, of phone calls and shuffling, as Janet Byler left her job teaching school to camp out at her son’s side and his father did his best to split time between his work as an attorney and visiting with his son and wife. 

Byler, for his part, took a while to come to terms with what had happened. 

“I kind of thought I’ll either live and come back in one piece, or die,” he says. “It almost seems like the most horrific scenario. It wasn’t something I’d considered too much, but you know, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it.”

Building homes for heroes

At Christmas, his doctors felt he was stable enough for a quick trip home to Long Island. Being able to spend the holiday with his family would be good for his morale and help him work harder through the coming pain of rehabilitation. 

The entire town of Huntington rallied to welcome home their returning friend. From the moment word of the accident had reached his parents, Byler’s church family and town had been stepping up to help. Volunteers had been doing their yard work, bringing food over, and planning benefits to help defray the Bylers’ expenses. A local contractor and friend of the family donated the labor to build a wheelchair ramp for the Bylers’ home. Huntington’s Boy Scout Troop 78 sponsored a Turkey Trot run at Thanksgiving to help pay for the supplies for the ramp and other accessibility modifications. 

By the time Christmas came, Byler was welcomed home with a parade and ushered into his parents’ house on a newly built ramp. He notes that it was a watershed moment for him.

“I did not expect it at all,” he says. “I was thinking kind of about Vietnam, where the guys were spit on when they got back. People may not always agree with this war, but they don’t take it out on the military or the soldiers now, which is a good thing. It kind of restored my faith in humanity.” 

Around the time that Byler returned to Walter Reed after the holidays, Andy Pujols, president, founder, and chairman of the board of Building Homes for Heroes, introduced himself to Byler’s mother. Pujols, who runs an international transportation company, was among the first wave of volunteers who helped personnel with search and rescue efforts after 9/11. 

After watching veteran J. R. Martinez on a season of Dancing with the Stars, Pujols hit upon the idea of modifying the current homes of injured veterans or building them new, handicap-accessible ones as a way to give back to the sons and daughters who were giving so much in the wake of 9/11.

While the ramp had made it possible for James Byler to get in the house, it was nearly impossible for him to move from room to room in his wheelchair. Pujols’ team of architects, designers, and builders were asking to completely renovate and retrofit the Byler home, free of charge, to make it easier for him to move about freely when the time came.

“James, although he walks on his prosthetics now with great strength, often times he’s tired, so he has to use his chair,” Pujols says. “We make sure the homes are completely accessible. We’ll lower thermostats and electrical outlets. We created cabinetry that will raise and lower electronically. We want to make sure they have as much freedom as we all have.” 

Renovations to the Bylers’ Huntington home were finished last year, and James Byler, who goes home nearly every weekend during the school year, has turned his attention to helping others in the same way. He kept in touch with his platoon as much as possible after his injury, often having calls patched through to Afghanistan to encourage men who had suffered similar injuries and were waiting for transport. The Marine Corps recognized his commitment by promoting him to the rank of Captain before he was medically discharged.

On September 11 of this year, he met with Pujols and the head of several large financial firms on Wall Street to discuss donations to Building Homes for Heroes. He hopes to help secure funding for other veterans in need of the services. 

“Even though he had school, James has said, ‘Andy, I want to help,’” says Pujols. “He is strong and competent, and charismatic. He goes and sees the newly injured. He’s a leader with his fellow soldiers. He is very focused, and just by nodding and smiling, and walking in to see them the way he does, he lifts their spirits. He’s one of their own.” 

Saving himself

Recovery has come one painstaking step at a time. At first told that his amputations might be too high to work with prosthetics, Byler was determined to try to walk. The work came in stages, starting off with very short legs, and over time and with mastery, moving up to higher and higher limbs, walking on inclines and declines, and with less support. 

“There was never a moment where I said, ‘okay, now I am walking,’” Byler says. “I’m still trying to improve.”

These days he tries to discipline himself to only use his wheelchair at home. Many days, he can walk around the NYU campus, where he is studying for his MBA to become a financial trader, with only one cane for assistance. More and more, he can walk without people necessarily noticing that he is wearing prosthetic legs, a milestone unimaginable only a year ago. 

Forcing himself to walk again helped save him from the well of despair and drug dependency that can sometimes overcome injured veterans. “It’s very easy to sit alone in your room, maybe playing a video game, and just get incredibly depressed,” he says. “Another big thing was kicking the pain killers. For a while they are necessary, but they keep you in a sort of mental haze where you feel powerless and not in control.”

During his visits to Walter Reed, he urges other injured veterans to push themselves as hard as they can, and above all, to stay as positive as possible. He sees soldiers with injuries worse than his traveling the world and leading active lives, while some with injuries much less severe never seem to pull themselves out of misery. A good attitude and an unwillingness to accept defeat, two of the things that made him such a good Marine to begin with, have made his recovery possible.

While he sometimes wishes that he could get through the grocery store or an interview at school without having to explain what happened to him, he realizes that people are naturally curious. More than that, after hearing about what he has faced, they are almost always supportive and more thankful for their own lives. 

He shrugs off the work while acknowledging the process. “The more time that goes by, the more I forget what life was like before I lost my legs, so that, in a way, helps,” Byler says. “I’ve just gotten adjusted to this way of life as the new normal. You can always do anything if you really want to, you just might have to get creative in how you do it.”