HUNTSVILLE, Alabama -- Kerin Kelly, a helicopter mechanic returned from Baghdad, thought he'd found a home in Huntsville, surrounded by ex-military, spending days in an office in Research Park and using his experience to work on designs for Army helicopters.

It all went wrong weeks before the tornadoes, when office discussions suddenly linked politics and race.

In the space of an afternoon, Kelly had turned in his company badge and walked away from a $56,000 salary. He wandered into a Madison church that afternoon to consider what had happened.

Kelly, 44, said executives at Hawk Enterprises, a defense contractor, singled him out for questioning because he had objected to an email from a co-worker. The email had suggested that President Obama wasn't a natural-born U.S. citizen.

Kelly, an African-American and a Republican, told co-workers the message carried racist implications, suggesting that blacks were not full citizens. Days later, in the corporate vice president's office, Kelly said he felt cornered.

The vice president, according to Kelly, said that it was patriotic to question Obama's citizenship. Kelly, diagnosed with post-traumatic stress, said the room began to spin. He had the overwhelming urge to flee. So he did.

The company disagrees with the implication that Kelly was treated unfairly. Bill Tripp, president of Hawk Enterprises, said Kelly wasn't pushed out, that he put down his ID badge and walked off. Tripp said company officials tried to talk him out of it. But Kelly said they wouldn't take him back later that afternoon when he tried to recant.

"I play it over and over in my head," Kelly said one day at the end of June, sitting in the dining room of his recently purchased home in Madison, still without a clear plan to pay the mortgage. "How could I have defused this? Is it my fault that people felt this way?"

He looked to his wife, Justine. A Polish emigrant from Germany, she said she supports her husband. He's canceled the cable and given up his cell phone. She's working at Walmart while going to school to study linguistics.

"We come back to the same conclusion," said Kelly. "What is the price of dignity? It always comes back to that."

Inaugural invitation

Kelly said his workplace troubles actually started a couple of years ago. In January 2009, he earned an invitation to the presidential inauguration. His picture appeared on the front page of The Huntsville Times under the headline, "McCain backer sees promise in Obama."

Kelly had spent five-and-half-years in the Army. He entered Iraq behind the 1st Armored Division in late 2003 and was injured early on. He's not sure when it happened, but he said he hurt his neck as he was repeatedly dodging mortar fire.

In March 2004 at a hospital in Germany, Kelly was diagnosed with a broken vertebra and scheduled for surgery. But he was needed to work on helicopters as combat intensified. He was sent back to Iraq without surgery.

Unable to bear the weight of a helmet and with limited motion in one arm, he supervised helicopter maintenance for five more months. In September 2004, doctors finally took bones from his hip and fused his vertebra with three metal plates. Discharged in 2005 as a sergeant with a combat action badge and several service medals, Kelly went to work in the private sector.

In 2006 he joined Hawk in Huntsville. "When we come back as civilians they actually pay you, which is amazing," Kelly said.

By 2008 he had grown deeply interested in Obama's candidacy. He felt Obama did not understand military families. "Everyone is watching. He's fighting against the Clinton machine," said Kelly. So he began to write Obama a series of letters, advising him on matters related to veterans.

"We have to fight for our benefits even though the Army knows we were injured," Kelly explained, saying his post-traumatic stress was worse than his physical injuries. "I thought it was normal not to sleep for two or three days."

Kelly said it was difficult, but in 2008 he inked the arrow next to McCain's name. "American hero, I had to vote McCain," Kelly said. Yet when Obama won, the campaign sent a special inaugural invitation. Kelly accepted.

The article in The Times made public his political beliefs. He said he received official word that the company was proud of his involvement. "The rest of the guys at Hawk were not so happy about it," Kelly said.

"The guys in contracting are a very conservative group," he said. "Informally, it seems to me there is an undercurrent of real extreme conservatism."

Jokes about Mexicans and inappropriate talk about women are commonplace, he said. "I have a co-worker who calls me Barack," Kelly said. He was one of just three African-American employees in a company of 48.

But it took an argument over the birthplace of the president for things to come to a head.

Fight or flight

On April 5, Kelly received an email from a co-worker. He said the email pictured George W. Bush welcoming home troops. The email said this is how "natural-born" presidents behave.

The person who sent the email sat nearby. And so it began. Kelly objected. The co-worker said something like: "It's true, isn't it?," recalled Kelly. Three or four other employees got involved.

Kelly said he argued that the defense contractors around him shouldn't question the citizenship of President Obama, that the line of argument was packed with racial resentment and that African-Americans had to work for generations to win full citizenship.

"This is not a challenge about Barack Obama," said Kelly. "You are implicitly challenging African-American citizenship and legitimacy."

"Are you saying we're all racists?" Kelly recalled one co-worker asking.

Kelly pointed out that McCain had been born at a military base outside the country. His co-workers, including one manager, weren't happy "with getting a lecture." At least one complained to upper management.

"He took it to mean white folks are ignorant of history," Kelly said.

Kelly was called into human resources. He was asked to write up his version of the exchange. "I didn't think I did anything wrong," he said.

On April 8 he was asked to meet with the company vice president, a retired naval officer named Norm Bush.

Kelly said he was told his exchange had cost the company time and money. Kelly felt singled-out. "I was very upset; the room was spinning," he said, explaining that anxiety triggers post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms that in turn trigger the fight-or-flight response.

"I just got up and said, 'I resign,' " said Kelly. He said he went to a church to think and calm down. He said he called that afternoon to recant his resignation. He was told it was too late.

Claims denied

Kelly applied for unemployment. He was denied the $265 a week.

On May 4, the state Department of Industrial Relations ruled he left voluntarily: "because you were dissatisfied with working conditions consisting of doing a counseling session. You became defensive, removed your badge said, 'I do not want to work here any longer.' Your leaving work for this reason was without good cause connected with work."

"What is their idea of good cause?" asked Kelly. "Does somebody have to burn a cross at your desk?"

He went to Birmingham and filed a complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. He didn't hear anything for months. In June, the EEOC found no support for Kelly's claims.

Contacted earlier by The Times, Bush, the company vice president, said he couldn't comment because of the EEOC inquiry. Company president Bill Tripp spoke after the inquiry concluded.

"The EEOC found in our favor," said Tripp. "He quit. He put his ID card on the desk and left and said, 'I quit.' "

Tripp said the company doesn't expect employees to discuss politics at work and that the company is ethnically diverse. "We have people from Taiwan, we have people from Puerto Rico, we have several blacks, we have just about any race you're looking for. We're a company of 48 people. We have a very diverse culture."

Tripp said the entire episode was disappointing.

"We did everything we could to help Mr. Kelly," said Tripp, saying the company at one point created a spot just for Kelly. "Kerin was not asked to leave. He was not fired. He was not let go. He quit. In fact, we tried to talk him out of it."

Kelly likes to say that Hawk is a great company. He speaks highly of Tripp, the president. But he said conversations change when senior managers walk out of a room. He said the problem among certain defense contracting companies isn't the official culture, but the informal culture when no supervisors are around.

Kelly, who grew up in New York, said his grandfather was in the Navy and his father served in the Army. "This stuff is not tolerated in the military, and they know this."

In April the debate over whether Obama had been born outside of the country and smuggled into Hawaii hit its height on the heels of support from Donald Trump. A New York Times poll that month found that almost half of Republicans believed it.

But at the end of April, a few weeks after Kelly left the office and on the same day tornadoes struck Alabama, Obama released his birth certificate. The arguments began to fizzle. Prominent Republicans today, such as Mitt Romney, reject the claims.

Today, Kelly hopes to start over. He intends to stay in Huntsville. And he said he has some leads on jobs working on military helicopters. "I have skills, and I will continue to use them to help the warfighter and take pride in doing that."

Kelly said he's still waiting for an apology.

"This gets back to who I am and my identity. I should not be expected to accept that behavior," he said. "The fact is, that they are so culturally and ethnically insulated, that they don't see this as rational, being upset over birtherism."