\u201cI\u2019ve never been to a military hospital and one day I went to have lunch with my wife at Walter Reed and as soon as you walk in, you see some pretty heavy stuff and I really wasn\u2019t prepared for that and it hit me hard. I knew right at that moment that I had to get involved but I really didn\u2019t know what attributes I had to offer these guys,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Thompson, who served in the Army National Guard from 1985 to 1992, said he \u201cneeded some direction and discipline.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSo I moved to Colorado and enlisted in the Army National Guard. The military gave me what I needed as a young man,\u201d said Thompson, who lost his father at the age of 13.<\/p>\n
Thompson was never deployed \u2014 and seeing the young men and women at Walter Reed was a real \u201cgut check\u201d for him.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was lucky and they weren\u2019t so lucky,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
After his visit to the medical center, he went to the American Red Cross office at the hospital and asked to be a volunteer. He was placed in the aquatics department and started helping wounded soldiers.<\/p>\n
It was there that Thompson realized he could help even more these soldiers with their rehabilitation.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
You should click over and read the rest of the story. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
ABC News sends us their latest in their Standing Up for Heroes series. This one is about Army National Guard veteran John W. Thompson and his program to help wounded warriors and their rehabilitation; \u201cI\u2019ve never been to a military hospital and one day I went to have lunch with my wife at Walter Reed […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42971,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42970","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-support-the-troops"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/HT_rehab_diving_3_mar_140409_16x9_608.jpg?fit=608%2C342&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4ozh1-bb4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42970","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=42970"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42970\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/42971"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=42970"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=42970"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=42970"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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