Massachusetts Combat Wounded National Guards Sgt. gets hero's welcome home

Eagan: Wounded soldier gets surprise escort home after 3-year recovery
August 18, 2013

After three years and multiple surgeries, National Guard Sgt. Breinne Travers Sullivan finally came home for good yesterday from Walter Reed Army Medical Center. But she never expected to see on the highway, in front and behind her husband Joe’s Nissan, a police and military escort that began shortly after the couple left the hospital and grew into a caravan of more than a hundred as the Sullivans crossed the Massachusetts border. The escort grew even bigger as the Sullivans neared their pretty Cape house in Marshfield: police cars, sheriff’s cars, military vehicles and Humvees, and waving flags and a sea of motorcycles from the Massachusetts Fallen Heroes Memorial Riders.

Also welcoming her yesterday: soldiers from the National Guard 379th Engineering Company with whom she served in Afghanistan, including soldiers beside her that horrific night in Logar Province when enemy fighters ambushed and sent a rocket-propelled grenade into the 18-ton vehicle she was driving. Shrapnel tore into her face, eye, shoulder and jaw.

“She’s probably going to cry, no doubt about that. And I’ll be honest, I’ll probably be crying too,” Joe Sullivan said, when asked before the ride how he expected his wife to react once she realized that this massive outpouring, a surprise, was for her. “God Bless America,” said Joe, also a National Guardsman who served in Afghanistan. “Only in America could you do something like this, send out an email saying she’s coming home and next thing you know, within a week, your friends come out and do something like this.”
read more here