Outspoken war vet seeks to improve prosthetic arms

DURHAM -- Jonathan Kuniholm wears his hair military-crop short, so when people look quizzically at his prosthetic arm with the shiny metal hook, a whole conversation can transpire in a word.

"People just say, 'Iraq?' " the retired Marine Corps captain explains.

A simple nod can speak volumes.

The words flow for Kuniholm when he talks about disabled veterans and an engineering project he's involved with that could help other amputees. He converses warmly about family and his daily walks to school with his 8-year-old son. He waxes philosophic about the politics of the Iraq war.

On Aug. 28, Kuniholm, 37, plunged into a national conversation. At Invesco Field in Denver, he told Democrats gathered for the party convention that the best way to thank him for his service and sacrifice was to vote for Barack Obama.

"I don't really consider myself political. Military folks are apolitical most of the time," says Kuniholm, now back at home. "I'm still registered as independent."

But Kuniholm, the son of a Marine and grandson of a West Point graduate, found himself drawn into the political arena this year, in part, because he gets irked by how some portray opponents of the war as not supporting the troops.

"It's not been that way for me," Kuniholm says. "Everywhere I go, the first thing people do is thank me for my service. There's certainly the conventional wisdom that this was not possible after Vietnam."

But Kuniholm's father, Bruce Kuniholm, director of the Terry Sanford Institute of Public Policy at Duke University, has given his son a different impression of that era. Bruce Kuniholm, a platoon commander in Vietnam, was toasted at stop after stop on his cross-country return from the war.

"He could not buy himself a drink," his son recalls. "I would be curious to know how many other people had similar experiences."

That eagerness to challenge conventional thinking is a dynamic that drives Jon Kuniholm in his work and life.

He is a problem-solver who is both idealistic and pragmatic. He is simple but complex.

His family and friends describe him as an "ordinary man who has done extraordinary things."

He is one of 300 engineers worldwide working to modernize prosthetic arms for a U.S. Defense Department program. And he has started a nonprofit group to encourage the sharing of prosthetic hardware designs and research so new products can be developed at lower cost.

He is training to climb Alaska's Mount McKinley, the highest peak in North America, in June with other disabled veterans. In addition to raising money for the Veterans Coalition, he hopes to inspire others with disabilities. Next month, he will join throngs of runners in the Marine Corps Marathon in Arlington, Va.

"He's got a lot of irons in the fire," says his mother, Liz Kuniholm, a Raleigh lawyer who lives two blocks from her son in Durham.

A precocious child

Jon Kuniholm has been brimming with ideas and energy for as long as his mom can remember.

As a boy, she says, he once made a clay figure of a mountain climber with his grandmother's help. Not only did he shape the figure, his mother boasts, he sewed the clothes and stitched the climbing ropes slung over its shoulder.

Jon, born in Durham the week his father started graduate school at Duke, excelled in the classroom, too. He attended the N.C. School of Science and Mathematics for academically gifted teens, then got an English degree at Dartmouth College.

Engineering was a second career of sorts. After college, he went overseas to work for the U.S. Treasury Department, but he quickly realized he wanted to go back to school and do something that would have a lasting effect on the world.