Antonio Pierce "He got his legs blown off...All we had to do was play a football game"

Just a heart warming story.



Wounded Veteran Brings Out Giants' Best

By DOM AMORE | Courant Staff Writer
January 31, 2008

CHANDLER, Ariz. — The playoffs hadn't begun yet, and already the Giants could see a major victory. They began filing into their hotel in Tampa on Jan. 4 and they saw Lt. Col. Greg Gadson standing to greet them.

Standing, just as Lt. Col. Gadson, who had lost both legs to a roadside bomb in Iraq, had told them he would several weeks before.

"It was shocking," said Giants linebacker Antonio Pierce. "We knew the ordeal this man was going through. He got his legs blown off, he's fighting for his life. All we had to do was play a football game. That's easy."

Gadson, a linebacker at West Point in the late 1980s, was introduced to the Giants by receivers coach Mike Sullivan, who had been his teammate at the academy. They stayed in touch on and off through the years, then Sullivan got an e-mail last April with the awful news. Gadson, who had served in the Gulf War and in Bosnia, was seriously injured by an improvised explosive device. The soldiers of the 2nd Battalion, 32nd Field Artillery, whom he had helped train, had performed courageously to save his life, but back at Walter Reed Hospital in Maryland, the infections forced doctors to amputate his legs.
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