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HUNTINGTON -- When poor eyesight kept Edward Seiler from following in family footsteps to serve in Vietnam, he did the next best thing: He became director of the Huntington VA Medical Center, charged with caring for the health of thousands of West Virginia's veterans.

The Huntington native was recently honored in Washington, D.C., with the Presidential Rank Award, an honor given to top civil servants in the federal government.

"It was a tremendous personal honor to receive this, the highest award a civil servant can receive. I like to think of it not as a capstone of my career personally, but representative of what has been accomplished by the team to provide excellent care to our veterans," said Seiler, from his office atop the hill that the VA is situated on, on Spring Valley Drive. "It's a special mission we have in taking care of America's heroes."

Seiler graduated from Marshall University and began his professional career in 1968 at the VA he would return to years later. He said when his working years first started, it was expected he would move from one VA Medical Center to another as needs arose. Seven months later, Seiler found himself in Baltimore, and moved nearly every two years -- from Maryland to Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio, Washington, New Hampshire, New York, Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Florida.

"I looked at it as an opportunity to advance my career and live in different parts of the country. It was an adventure," he said.

He married a young woman he met as a college student and together they had a son. Just before his move to West Palm Beach, Fla., they separated; and, as if moving and beginning at a new facility wasn't difficult enough, Seiler's eyesight was going from bad to worse.

"I wasn't planning to leave Rhode Island, but I threw my hat in the ring for the Florida job. It was a new hospital, 19 stories high, just a magnificent facility and close to the coast," Seiler said.

The year after he took the position, he had to give up driving and began walking to work. Several years later, he had lost all vision in both eyes.

"I was very nearsighted at birth and my entire life. My eye doctor in Huntington told my parents he felt like I wouldn't be able to do college work because of the extensive amount of reading," said Seiler, who holds two post-graduates degrees from the University of Southern California and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "I had some retinal detachments as a teenager and more retinal problems, glaucoma and macular degeneration in my 40s and 50s. The combination robbed me of all my vision."

Seiler said he has been told he is the only blind CEO in the VA administration. He relies on rides to work from his condo in the St. James Building downtown and depends on his trusty sidekick, Terk, a 2 1/2-year-old full-bloodied Doberman who sits quietly at his feet inside his office, to be his eyes. In a little less than three years, Seiler said, Terk has been in 26 states between personal and professional travel.

"I don't let the fact I live alone or that I'm blind stop me from traveling," he said. "I also want to be able to demonstrate to both people who are severely visually impaired and those who aren't that you don't have to let a disability keep you from working in a responsible, highly productive position."

Four years ago in September, Seiler said he decided he would see what it was like to go home again. He had been away from Huntington for nearly four decades.

"I will finish up my career in Huntington. Retirement is not too far in the future," said Seiler, who is in his 43rd year of service with the VA. "I'm still debating where I'm going to base myself. I will probably split time between somewhere else and Huntington. This is my home."

Seiler said he plans to continue traveling -- he loves to be near the ocean and enjoys visiting his son in Colorado. He's debating some teaching opportunities at Marshall University, seeking to donate his time as volunteer faculty to work on case studies with graduate students.

And, he has already made some impact on Marshall students, meeting with the Herd football team a few years back when they visited the VA to do some community service.

"I told them, 'You're going to see some World War II veterans who fought in Normandy and the Battle of the Bulge. You're going to see some Vietnam vets who walked through jungles and rice paddies. You're going to see some young veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

'You guys are the elite of your football team. You're sports stars. These are heroes. They put their lives on the line, and I hope you have an appreciation for that,' " Seiler recalled. He said he couldn't read the facial expressions of the young men, but the room fell quiet. "Hopefully, that had an impact, and they got a sense of who they were visiting. There's a different between a star and a hero."

During the days, Seiler divides his time between office work and walking the halls to talk with the heroes he serves.

"They are wonderful people with stories to tell. We have veterans in their 80s and 90s who volunteer here and a very high population of veterans in West Virginia to care for. West Virginians responded to the call to serve," he said. "It's part of the reason I came back home. You don't find the kind of people elsewhere you find here in West Virginia."

Lori Wolfe/The Herald-Dispatch

VA Medical Center director/CEO Edward Seiler was recently one of only five VA medical center directors to be honored by President Obama as a top civil servant in the federal government.

Purchase this photo

Lori Wolfe/The Herald-Dispatch

VA Medical Center director/CEO Edward Seiler was recently one of only five VA medical center directors to be honored by President Obama as a top civil servant in the federal government.

Purchase this photo

Lori Wolfe/The Herald-Dispatch

VA Medical Center director/CEO Edward Seiler was recently one of only five VA medical center directors to be honored by President Obama as a top civil servant in the federal government.

Purchase this photo