COMMUNITY
Meet David Linhart, director of the Southwest Veterans Chamber of Commerce. He entered the Army right out of high school, top right and facing page, and was eventually assigned to serve on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle team, bottom right.
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.
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BLOWING STUFF UP A local veteran who once lacked direction now provides it for others BY DAVID KENNARD W HEN 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, he serves as president of the Southwest Veterans Chamber of Commerce, 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
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InBuckeye.com | March/April 2026
March/April 2026 | InBuckeye.com
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