Blowing stuff up: A local veteran who once lacked direction now provides it for others

When David Linhart joined the Army at 18, he didn’t hedge about his motivation. He told his recruiter he wanted to blow stuff up. America was at war, after all.

“Everybody was watching CNN and the flashes in the sky over Baghdad and all that kind of stuff. That’s what I was watching when I signed those papers,” the Buckeye resident said.

By the time he shipped out, the fighting had slowed. He never made it overseas. Still, he credits the Army with giving him what he lacked.

“I lost my window because I wasn’t old enough to go over there, I guess,” he said. “But you know, it was a great experience for me. I think infantry was better because of the discipline level in it.

“Whether I knew it or not, I needed that discipline, badly to figure out what to do with my life,” Linhart says. “And when I got out, and I had the discipline, I just didn’t have direction. So, once I put those two together, there was no stopping me.”

Today, the entrepreneur serves as president of the Southwest Veterans Chamber of Commerce board of directors, focused on helping other veterans find that direction sooner than he did.

Poo happens

His first real step into business came through the chamber itself. A pet food home delivery franchise introduced him to ownership and operations. When the company moved out of the country, he decided to build something of his own.

“That’s when I thought about the poop scooping business and kind of started that thing,” Linhart says. “So, I thank the Chamber for giving me the entrepreneurial bug, so to speak, because I’d always worked with business owners and I kind of wanted to be one, but I didn’t know how to get there.”

The chamber connections gave him a runway.

In 2018, he stopped “petering around… So, I saved up, all I could, quit my [day] job, and then I went in full force.”

Big game

Linhart calls himself “a bit of a scrapper” growing up.

“I was the younger brother. My brother was three years older than me, so [I was] always fighting him and his friends,” Linhart said. “So, it’s just always who I was.

“And like I told my drill sergeant or my recruiter, ‘I wanted to blow shit up.’ And I got to play with a lot of big guns. I got to throw grenades. I got to shoot missiles off my shoulder, and you know, I got to do all kinds of really cool stuff; at the time… [I] was just a big kid at heart wanting to play with the big toys.

“It was a big game to play when you were talking about going and serving in the military. And maybe I didn’t even realize it at the time, even though I wanted to go fight in Iraq,” he said.

The discipline stuck. The direction did not.

Now what?

When he left the military in 1997, Linhart remained abroad.

“I stayed in Germany for two years, just enjoying life over in Europe because — when you get the opportunity to live in Europe, right?,” he said.

Eventually he came home and stalled.

“The language barrier just became a little too much,” Linhart said. “So, I decided to come back here, and I spent an entire year not doing anything because I didn’t know what to do.

“And my dad, who’s a Navy veteran, he just said, ‘You need to use your GI Bill,’” he recalled. “He’s like, ‘What are you doing?’”

That push mattered.

“Getting out of the Army as an infantry soldier, you are like, ‘What do I have as far as a marketable skill?,’” Linhart said. “I was trained to kill people. Yeah, legitimately that was my job: to kill people. Right. So, my dad told me to use the GI Bill and I did.”

His college counselor encouraged him, telling him his military service qualified him to be a better learner and saying, “You can take direction,” and “You’ve got credits already from your military time.”

“And I said, ‘I do?’” Linhart recounted. “So, it was kind of an awakening for me.”

He earned an associate’s degree, then completed a bachelor’s degree in global business and management at Arizona State University West Campus.

“But it allowed me again to get something done with my life. So that whole year of sitting there and doing nothing, if my dad wouldn’t have pointed me in the right direction, I might not have done it.

“So that’s the direction I want to help any veteran that needs it,” he concluded.

Get their head straight

The Southwest Veterans Chamber of Commerce’s mission extends beyond entrepreneurship. Its nonprofit foundation focuses on preventing veteran suicide and connecting former service members with support services across Arizona.

Linhart said the chamber works with a wide network of nonprofits, and that its core nonprofit arm is centered on suicide prevention.

He said that is the foundation’s primary driver right now. The chamber maintains relationships with providers offering hyperbaric therapy, equine therapy, counseling and job assistance — resources many veterans may not realize are available to them.

Linhart said a veteran in Graham County struggling with PTSD, for example, might benefit from being connected to the Deep Sea Valkyries, a group that organizes scuba diving experiences to help veterans calm their minds. Making those kinds of connections, he said, is what motivates him.

He noted Arizona has moved from sixth to 10th in the nation for veteran suicide.

“It’s not a marked improvement,” Linhart said. “But that’s a 5% improvement. Whereas other states went in the other direction and took over our spot. So, we are making a difference.”

Not every veteran wants help. Linhart says that during his first term as president, he approached homeless veterans with snacks and water and asked to talk.

Some declined. Others insisted they were fine on their own, saying they liked having no one telling them what to do.

“Those guys, what can we do?” Linhart said.

“We’re a chamber of commerce, right? So, it’s business — but to help veterans.”

Editor’s Note: This story was originally published in the March/April edition of InBuckeye Magazine.