After it happened, J.R. Martinez could not bear to look in a mirror.

He remembered seeing flames on his flesh in the Humvee after it hit an anti-tank mine near the Iraqi city of Karbala in the early days of the war. He spent agonizing months at Brooke Army Medical Center, the Army's top burn treatment facility in San Antonio.

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J.R. Martinez, 25, a wounded Iraq veteran from Dalton, has leaned on his mother, Maria Zavala, 52, as he recovered from extensive burns. He is now the face of the Coalition to Salute America's Heroes.

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Martinez's good looks before his injuries made his scars hard to accept.

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J.R. Martinez was on the football team at Dalton High School before he joined the Army.

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The rugged good looks were gone. The steely Dalton High School football player and Army private had melted into a web of charred skin. The mirror told the truth.

The young soldier turned away, unable to stomach the man he had become, hideous scars on his face, neck, arms and hands. He understood then why everyone had wanted to protect him from his own reflection.

"What is that?" he said. "That's not me. Take it away."

Forty percent of his body burned, Martinez recoiled — from society, from himself. His emotions went from anger to depression back to anger. He kept asking what anyone in his situation would: "Why me?"

Five years passed. Martinez endured a surgeon's scalpel 32 times. He leaned on his mother, Maria Zavala, who fled bloodshed in her native El Salvador in 1982 and worked hard in America to give her son a better life.

She insisted he hear what was trite but true: It's the person inside that matters. Not an easy notion for an infantryman caught up in pretty-boy looks and girlfriends. But as his own treatment and therapy continued, Martinez found himself hanging around patient wards, sharing his experience with other wounded soldiers.

When he finally came to terms with his harrowing near-death experience, he began using his disfigurement, still jarring to strangers, to help others.

One day in San Antonio, he stepped into a pitch-black hospital room. The soldier in the bed did not want to see the sun, fiery in the Texas sky, that would flood his room with light, reveal his war injuries.

Martinez told the soldier he should stop feeling sorry for himself, that others were much worse off.

"Who?" asked the soldier.

Martinez opened the curtain halfway to show his own blemished body. It was then that he realized he could help light up the dark world of the wounded.

He hooked up with the Coalition to Salute America's Heroes, a charity started four years ago by California entrepreneur Roger Chapin to raise money for wounded veterans and their families.

The face he wanted to hide from the world became a public face for the charity.

"We live in a visual world," Martinez said. "People don't understand things until they see it."

As in: how war can damage you for life.

Look at me, Martinez tells people these days. Try to understand what I went through. What my mother went through.

"If I step up, it's a completely different game," he said of his success in securing donations. "It's a visceral reaction. I'm completely comfortable with that."

The money raised by the coalition goes toward helping veterans with a 30 percent or more disability rating, said Pat Norberto, director of development for Coalition to Salute America's Heroes. It can mean something as simple as paying medical bills or getting back a repossessed car to a project as large as building a new home for a soldier returned from Iraq or Afghanistan.

Martinez travels the country these days as a national spokesman for the organization. He is unfazed by bad publicity that dogged the charity earlier this year.

The charity watchdog group American Institute of Philanthropy gave the Coalition to Salute America's Heroes an "F" rating for spending less than 35 percent of its cash budget on bona-fide charitable programs.

According to congressional investigators, the coalition and Help Hospitalized Veterans, another veterans' nonprofit launched by Chapin, collected $160 million in contributions from 2004 to 2006. Seventy-four cents of every donated dollar was eaten up by fund-raising, salaries and expenses such as a membership in a country club instead of helping veterans.

The coalition, now under formal investigation by the Charities Bureau of the New York State Attorney General's Office, contests the accuracy and fairness of the figures cited in Congress. Norberto said it was unfair to lump the two Chapin charities together. He said that in 2006, 96 percent of the coalition's dollars were spent on programs for the wounded.

Martinez, who is one of 20 paid staffers at the coalition, also defends the organization. "This is what I can vouch for — the 6,500 families we have helped. I see the difference we are making."

People still stare at Martinez, trying to figure out what grisly act could leave a man so disfigured. But the retired soldier is proud of his scars now.

Only one part of his left arm was unscathed by the blast. He was wearing a Timex watch that protected a band of skin on his wrist. But that skin, too, is no longer virgin.

Martinez had a watch tattooed. In black ink, the face says 2:30; the band says April 5, 2003, the date and time of the Humvee blast — and of a soldier's rebirth.