Sailor's promotion is small step in a long road

Sailor's promotion is small step in a long road
By Thomas Kaplan, Times Staff Writer
Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Anthony “Doc” Thompson is caressed by his wife, Ivonne, and 10-month-old son, A.J., during the promotion ceremony Monday. Thompson, who received a severe traumatic brain injury in Iraq in April 2007, has been at the Haley veterans hospital for 13 months.
[KEN HELLE Times]

TAMPA — Ivonne Thompson leaned over an ironing board Sunday night and unfurled her husband's fatigues, ready to press them neatly for his promotion ceremony the next day.

Then she began to cry.

The last time Mrs. Thompson saw her husband in uniform was when he went off to Iraq on Jan. 29, 2007. Navy hospital Corpsman 2nd class Anthony "Doc" Thompson came back three months later with head injuries so severe his doctors said he would have died in any previous war.

But the 26-year-old sailor survived, and has spent the past 13 months recuperating here at the James A. Haley Veterans' Hospital. On Monday, at a ceremony tinged with sadness over the fact he won't remember it, he was promoted a rank to the grade of petty officer second class.

Standing next to her husband and their 10-month-old son, Anthony Jr., Mrs. Thompson was crying again. "It's emotional," she said. "I'm just so proud."

Thompson, a Humble, Texas, native on his second combat tour, was stationed with seven Marines on a highway overpass-turned-observation post outside Fallujah last year when a suicide bomber detonated a truck filled with 3,000 pounds of explosives underneath their feet.

Also on hand was hospital Corpsman 2nd class Andrew Dye, who tended to Thompson when he was pulled from the rubble and is credited for saving his life.

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