Burned soldier portrait to show at Smithsonian

SAN ANTONIO Retired Army Sgt. Richard Yarosh has gotten used to the stares. His face is blanketed in knotty scar tissue. His nose tip is missing. His ears are gone, as is part of his right leg. His fingers are permanently bent and rigid.

All is the result of an explosion in Iraq that doused him in fuel and fire three years ago.

"I know people are curious," he said. "They'll stop in their tracks and look. I guess I can understand. I probably would have stared, too."

Now, a lot more people will be staring at Yarosh's face but in a very different way: A life-sized oil painting of him went on display at the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington on Friday and will be on display through August as part of the Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.

The Yarosh painting is part of a series of portraits by Matthew Mitchell begun four years ago, when he set out to paint 100 military personnel or others who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. With 30 completed so far, each of the portraits is 26 inches by 30 inches with roughly the same head-and-shoulders framing. Yarosh's portrait is No. 23.

"There's a huge amount of people who have been deeply touched by these wars in America, and these wars are obviously some of the most formative events in the world," Mitchell said. "Yet, most people in America don't need to pay attention to these wars whatsoever. They don't feel compelled."

The 38-year-old Mitchell, of Amherst, Mass., asks each of his subjects to write a brief description of his or her experience to go with the portraits. Yarosh's includes the line: "That day started the same as every other day, but that day has never ended."

The day was Sept. 1, 2006, and Yarosh was manning the turret of a Bradley assault vehicle, patrolling a road that he'd been on "a million times." Only this time, the vehicle hit an explosive device. The fuel tank blew, and Yarosh was instantly covered in flames.

He took a blind jump from the top of the vehicle, breaking his leg and severing an artery that would eventually force an amputation. He rolled around in the dirt, but with so much fuel, he couldn't get the fire out. He lay there, next to the burning vehicle, and gave up.

"I wasn't in pain. I could accept the fact that I was going to go. This was how the Lord would take me," he said.

But for reasons he still can't explain, Yarosh rolled to his right one more time and fell into a canal, where the flames were extinguished. Fellow soldiers pulled him from the water even as his body armor disintegrated into ash, and he survived. One of the other soldiers in the vehicle did not; Sgt. Luis Montes died about a week after the blast.

Yarosh, now 27, spent more than two years in full-time treatment and rehabilitation at Brooke Army Medical Center, home of the Army's only burn unit.

Yarosh, who moved back to Windsor, N.Y., after his retirement in January, says he was a little uneasy when he sat for the portrait because he worried about how an artist, likely to be more liberal, might depict him.

Yarosh was astonished when he saw the completed portrait.

"It was perfect. I couldn't believe that he captured me," he said. "It captures my pride. I'm proud of the way I look. I'm proud of the reason for the way I look."