Army Sgt. Ryan J. Hopkins, 21, Livermore; dies of injuries in motor pool accident

The accidental motor pool explosion in Iraq didn’t kill Army Sgt. Ryan Hopkins. But the fireball scorched him from the waist up. It stripped Hopkins of his ears, nose, lips and eyelids. It damaged his lungs and burned his fingers down to their tendons.

Yet the 21-year-old native of Livermore, near Oakland, embraced life. Hopkins and his wife, Kathryn, a fellow soldier he had met in the Army, bought a house in Texas near the San Antonio military hospital where he was being treated. They talked about going to college and having children.

“He was always very confident, even before he got hurt,” she said.

“The accident is one of the worst things that has happened to me, but also the best thing,” Ryan Hopkins wrote on his MySpace page. “It has brought me so much closer to my wife, and my family. I appreciate things so much more and the little things don’t bother me anymore. “

The big things, he absorbed. Once, a little girl turned to her mother and said, “Mommy, look — there’s a monster.” In public, people always stared.

“I asked him, ‘Ryan, how can you take it?’” said his mother, Janet Hopkins. “And he said, ‘Mom, they’re staring at me because I’m so damned good looking.’ … He just went on with life the best he could.”

It was a daily struggle, said his wife, who buried her own grief for her husband’s sake.

“I kept a poker face for the longest time,” she said. “If he had seen me crying or having trouble dealing with things.... I had to be strong for him.”

Hopkins died at Brooke Army Medical Center from complications of his burns Jan. 8 — a day after his 30th reconstructive surgery and 15 months after the Oct. 4, 2008, fuel explosion at an Army base in Baghdad.

The Defense Department announced Hopkins’ death Sept. 16. At the time of his injury, he was a driver assigned to the 64th Brigade Support Battalion, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 4th Infantry Division at Ft. Carson, Colo. He was later reassigned to the Warrior Transition Unit at Ft. Sam Houston in San Antonio.

In addition to his wife and mother, he is survived by his father, David; two brothers, Aaron, 34, and Chad, 24; and a sister, Leda, 22.

Growing up, Hopkins was a fan of action sports who loved to push the edge, whether he was skateboarding, snowboarding or wakeboarding.

“I had a frequent flier pass to the ER. He was always getting banged up,” his mother said. “He was missing the gene for fear. He had no fear.”

Hopkins also was a math whiz and graduated from Livermore High School in 3 1/2 years.

“He took math classes at a local college because he had taken all the high school math classes,” his mother said. “He never even had to study.”

But graduating early left Ryan at loose ends; his friends were still in high school and college didn’t interest him at the time.

“He was bored. He wanted to sit around the house and do nothing,” his mother said. “We told him, ‘You’ve either got to get a job or go to college.’ He said, ‘I’m going to join the Army and go to Iraq.’ I think he did it just to make me mad.”

Janet Hopkins describes herself as a pacifist and a flower child of the 1960s. She already had one son in the Navy, and the thought of having two children potentially in harm’s way upset her. Still, she and her husband gave their permission for Ryan, 17 at the time, to enlist.

“As parents, we support our children’s’ decisions whether we disagree with them or not,” she said. When he made sergeant, his parents were proud. “He was very good at what he did,” she said.

And when he was flown to the burn unit at the Texas hospital, Janet and David Hopkins all but moved to San Antonio for the next year to be near their son.

Ryan Hopkins was buried Jan. 16 at Roselawn Cemetery in Livermore.

A week later, his brother Chad, who followed him into the Army, deployed to Iraq.

mike.anton@latimes.com