... how their bodies have adapted to their new prostheses,� says Elihu Hirsch, project manager for the Corps� Baltimore District.

Ellerbe Beckett New Focus. Training center was fast-tracked after Walter Reed facility scandal.

Patients have followed the progress of the construction as they learned to walk on the hospital’s veranda. “You see the guys walking out there [and] you can’t help getting emotionally involved,” says Dearl Tate, Turner’s general superintendent. “It has created a sense of mission for all of us.” In July, 490 patients were treated there, more than 100 of whom have multiple amputations. Currently, 40 are inpatients.

The new amputees and their families often see an unlikely member of the official peer-amputee visitor program at Walter Reed, Bob Nilsson, one of the few non-amputee visitors. Nilsson, a former Marine who was injured in the Vietnam War, has been at Walter Reed two or three days a week since the war in Iraq began.

Judy Schriener Project Team. Rozelle (right), Tate, Anglim, Chris Jahrling (Turner), Bacher and Hirsch will finish the center two months early.

Nilsson, retired former president of Turner Construction International, initially went to the hospital just to say thanks. But as he got to know the patients, his enthusiasm drove him to create a scholarship fund and nudge Turner to compete for the training center job.

“Many of these kids have 20 or 30 operations,” Nilsson says. “They just need someone to talk to…and you can help them understand how the system works.” He also tells amputees about the possibilities of a career in construction and real estate development: Nilsson now is a senior advisor to Turner Construction, Skanska USA and Halcrow Group and is a governor in the Urban Land Institute.

Turner Construction

Several young men and women have expressed interest in pursuing construction careers after Nilsson talked to them. One is Sgt. 1st Class David Cook, a 21-year Army veteran whose right leg was severed in Iraq. “He’s great.” says Cook. “I think [construction] is awesome. I’m very interested.”

Nilsson and fellow ULI governor Jim Todd, president of The Peterson Cos., a Fairfax, Va., developer, raised nearly $200,000 for what now is the ULI Second Chance Scholarship. Its first recipient is Army Capt. Jason Scott who was injured in Iraq in October 2005 when two artillery shells exploded. The blast severed his right arm and inflicted other severe injuries as more than a dozen pieces of shrapnel penetrated his body.

Nilsson was one of Scott’s early visitors at Walter Reed. “It honestly hadn’t occurred to me” to work in construction, Scott says. He is starting the real estate MBA program at the University of Florida “with the hopes of getting out and going to work with one of the big construction companies,” he says.

The scholarship covers nearly all living expenses beyond the tuition paid for by the Dept. of Veterans Affairs. “They saw what soldiers got and what soldiers needed and bridged that gap,” says Scott.

Nilsson and Todd want to be able to keep four to seven amputees in school simultaneously. “We’ll need around $200,000 a year to do that,” says Todd.