{"id":28771,"date":"2012-02-16T20:18:52","date_gmt":"2012-02-17T00:18:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=28771"},"modified":"2012-02-16T20:18:52","modified_gmt":"2012-02-17T00:18:52","slug":"51-year-old-mom-graduates-from-basic-training","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=28771","title":{"rendered":"51-year-old Mom graduates from Basic Training"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>She&#8217;s a few years younger than me, and I don&#8217;t think I could do it again, but this Marine Mom, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.army.mil\/article\/73875\/\">Sgt. Sandra Coast<\/a>, decided she wanted to join the Army while her son was at the Marine Recruiter.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For as long as she can remember she has had a special place in her heart for troops and a hunger to serve.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I have a friend in the Navy that was emailing me from Afghanistan. It&#8217;s his third combat tour in seven years. I don&#8217;t know, I can&#8217;t explain it, I just had this overwhelming desire to give back to the military somehow. I was doing the same job day after day after day; I can&#8217;t live my life that way,&#8221; Coast said. &#8220;There is more to life than this, so I ended up in basic training.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>Now, 1st Sgt. John Byars has a new perception of his elders.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I was impressed because she can do everything the younger Soldiers do,&#8221; Byars said. &#8220;She never expected us to feel sorry for her. She even got one of the highest Army Physical Fitness Test scores in the company. She is a prime example that age is just a number. She ran faster than Soldiers young enough to be her kids.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I guess you have to follow your heart. Congratulations, Sergeant. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>She&#8217;s a few years younger than me, and I don&#8217;t think I could do it again, but this Marine Mom, Sgt. Sandra Coast, decided she wanted to join the Army while her son was at the Marine Recruiter. For as long as she can remember she has had a special place in her heart for [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-soldiers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ozh1-7u3","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28771\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}