Wounded Warrior Project COO Honored in Home Town

This is why I support the WWP, one main,now an organization. I know Al along with my Purple Heart Chapter after meeting him at the DAV office in NYC...A dedicated, hard working , loving individual...

This is a very interesting read...an notice Al was, I mean is a Marine

================================================== =
Warwick man's program brings the wounded back to their lives

By Dianna Cahn
Times Herald-Record
dcahn@th-record.com

Annapolis, Md.

Al Giordano never went to war. But he knows about searching for a way home. You land in a hospital bed, wake up with a missing limb. You probably don't even have a toothbrush. And life just doesn't make sense anymore. At this moment, if you're lucky, there's Giordano or one of his small clan, with toothpaste, a razor and some kind of clue about finding a way out of this mess. Giordano knows well that life can take a sharp turn. He's lived it. But that's not why this Warwick father and husband are at a hospital bedside. He's there because someone has to show young men and women damaged by war that you can build a new life out of one that fell to pieces.

"Everyone can get knocked down,"

he says.

"Its how you get back up."

GIORDANO'S CELL PHONE RINGS for about the hundredth time one early July day. The caller is a young father with a severe spinal injury. His veterans' benefits haven't kicked in. He wants to take a job hauling garbage. He needs the money. Giordano shakes his head. You could end up paralyzed, he says.

"I am not going to sugarcoat this, John. It's a s*** sandwich,"

he says.

"You've got to take little bites, swallow, and move on."

Giordano fights for severely wounded Americans coming home from Iraq and Afghanistan. He fights the government for veterans' benefits, spends his days with men and women he meets during the nightmares of their lives and shows them how the guys before them made it back from hell. On this day, Giordano is riding at the back of a group of cyclists. One man pedals with a single leg. He lost his other leg in Iraq. Another pedals with a prosthetic limb. Still another lost both legs in the war. He uses his hands to pump his way across the country. The amputees are 3,500 miles into Soldier Ride, a trek across America to help those still in the hospital beds that they themselves once occupied. They are riding to raise money for the Wounded Warrior Project, the charity Giordano co-founded with partner John Melia two years ago. They are also riding to remind Americans their country is still at war and its servicemen are coming home, changed forever. Giordano points to a picture of the Soldier Ride group in the Washington Post.

"You see this picture?"

he asks.

"What do you think? Pity? You can't do that. "

There but for the grace of God go I.

"This could be me.”This could be my son."

MORE THAN 14,000 U.S. servicemen and women have been wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan. Many are hit by rocket-propelled grenades or roadside bombs and wake up in hospital beds with nothing but the gowns they are wearing – and often, missing body parts

They spend months in hospital beds. And then they spend months living in a dormitory nearby, to train with prosthetics and with occupational and physical therapists, maybe learn to walk again or just to go to the bathroom on their own. And someday, they finally get back out in the world they yearn for – and find they no longer fit the lives they had planned. Giordano and Melia set up the Wounded Warrior Project, a mammoth national effort designed to tend to the cracks in the system. The Army offers phenomenal medical treatment when the men and women it sends to war return unwhole. But it is not equipped to handle their awkward return to their lives as civilians.

"Sometimes,"

says Giordano,

"it's almost like the disabled brother hidden away in the house."

IF LIFE HAD gone as planned, Giordano would be a deli owner today with a successful catering business that counts West Point among its clients. He'd probably be living in Rockland County, not Orange. But this is where he and his wife, Beth, fell in love with Warwick because of its small-town quality. And he never would have graduated from college, much less law school.

But if life went as planned, there would be no wounded warriors.

"

We try to show them how to take the good out of it,"

he says.

"There are a lot of kids who didn't go to college. Now they have an opportunity. They've been through the horrors of war. So now they are going to college. "

I tell them I am living proof. Don't tell me you are too old to go to school," [/quote]he says.

Giordano was born on the Camp Lejeune Marine base in North Carolina, into a long line of servicemen.

In his younger days, he played life hard. He partied, had a 1.2 grade-point average and was, he says, living for the moment when he joined the Marines in 1981. He served until 1985.

Then in 1990, Giordano was in his deli when a telegram arrived: Report to duty in California. You're going to Iraq. At 28, Giordano realized he was no longer a kid.

"The kids were excited, (saying) 'We are going to war,' "

Giordano recalls.

”I said 'Are you crazy? They shoot back.' “

Giordano never got to Iraq. He tore up his leg in training and spent two years in surgery and recovery. By the time he came home, his business was dead, as were his hopes of becoming a New York City cop. Giordano settled down, got married. And, one day, he was filing for benefits, and the officer asked him if he wanted to fight the government on behalf of veterans.

Over the next eight years, Giordano worked for Disabled American Veterans.

He pored through thousands of cases, gaining the kind of expertise few in this country possess and a sense of mission he hadn't known since he'd joined the Marines. Refocused, he went back to school, earned a bachelor's degree in business with a 4.0 grade-point average and, in 2001, started law school. He wanted to represent veterans not only at the Department of Veterans Affairs, but in court, too.

Unable to work part time at Disabled American Veterans, Giordano went to work for United Spinal Association, another charity.

In February, he passed the bar exam. At 43, Giordano found his calling.

THERE'S AN URGENCY TO Giordano, a family man who often spends more weeks on the road with the wounded than at home in Warwick with his wife and 10-year-old son. On a drizzly May evening, Giordano is the one pushing a wheelchair onto the field at Yankee Stadium so that five amputees can be honored by the team before the game. He doesn't stand still, and yet manages quiet, intimate conversations. As a former Marine, Giordano has military sensibilities – always looking for the practical solution, never saying never, maintaining a deep respect for his fellow servicemen. But he will cut through military bureaucracy in a flash.

He pushes through benefits claims for young and old veterans alike, fighting as hard for a guy in his 80s as he fights for one still lying in a hospital bed. He describes navigating the Department of Veterans Affairs as trying to turn the Queen Mary around and has been known to tell officers there,

"I will make a deal with you. If you don't screw it up, I won't make a stink about it."

Giordano is relentless, taking his energy from the very men and women who lean on him.

"He doesn't understand why anything can't be done,"

says his wife, Beth Giordano.

"He doesn't take no for an answer. It's just not an option."

WOUNDED WARRIOR PROJECT began in Melia's basement after he paid a visit to Walter Reed Army Medical Center in August 2003. With his wife and two young daughters, Melia, who worked for a veterans' charity, stuffed 50 backpacks with basics: in each, a toothbrush, razor, sweat suit, T-shirts, CD player and a tape of the HBO series

"The Sopranos."

He delivered the packs to Walter Reed. Three days later, he got a call asking for more. Melia called his advocate buddy Giordano at United Spinal Association, and Wounded Warrior Project was born under the United Spinal umbrella.

They began planning events based on the shared philosophy that the sooner the amputees know that life can go on, the better it will. They joined forces with Disabled Sports USA, taking new amputees snowboarding in winter and waterskiing in summer. The Wounded Warrior Project has grown so big that it is currently moving out from under the United Spinal umbrella to become independent.

The project also brought in seasoned veterans to counsel the wounded.

"Who better to talk to a 22-year-old who lost both legs – and his wife – than this fellow vet without legs?"

says Giordano.

IN EARLY JULY, on a hot summer morning, the former deli owner who once flunked out of college got an invitation to the White House. But that's not how Giordano tells it. He'll tell you about Ryan Kelly, Heath Calhoun and the other members of Soldier Ride who were asked to the White House lawn.

"The president of the United States wanted to see these guys,"

he says.

"He wouldn't tell you this,"

Beth Giordano says later.

"But when they were standing on the lawn with the president, Al looked over at John (Melia) teary-eyed and said 'Buddy, I remember two, three years ago, we said we have something here, but how do we get the word out?'"

The day after meeting the president, Giordano is back at Walter Reed, talking with the amputees. Some of them are so young, he says. He would love nothing more than to be able to shut down the whole operation, but the number of wounded keeps growing.

"You know what a bad day is?"

he says.

"When there's another 30 on the way."

Some of the warriors

Heath Calhoun, a father of two with a third on the way, lost both legs when a rocket-propelled grenade struck his convoy in Iraq. Calhoun was going to go back to school in January but decided to join Soldier Ride 2005 instead because, he said,

"I've been in that hospital bed."

Somewhere on the highway in Arizona, partway through Soldier Ride, one of the wheels on Calhoun's three-wheeler tears apart, sending Calhoun flying off the bike. He gets pretty badly scraped up but is back riding the next day.

"I didn't sign up to quit,"

he says.

Ryan Kelly's leg was blown off south of Baghdad in one of the early roadside bombings. He's now in college and has been a Wounded Warrior Project emissary almost from the day he learned to walk again. He's learning to fly helicopters, and he, too, rode across the country with Soldier Ride. "Instead of staying in your bed and feeling sorry for yourself, go to the guys still in the hospital and teach them," Kelly said on an evening during Soldier Ride. He was nursing a sore on his stump from the prosthetic after weeks of cycling.

"It's hard for me to whine about my leg being sore when Heath has no legs."

Jamal Daniels jokes as he pumps his body up and down on the parallel bars with his arms. His left leg is missing, his right ankle and foot suspended in front of him, fastened into a cage of thick steel pins. He's not sure he will ever have movement in his remaining ankle again.

"You always have to say it could've been worse,"

Daniels, a Bronx-born Marine, says. Two months ago, Al Giordano pushed Daniels in his wheelchair onto the field at Yankee Stadium. This day, his ankle freshly fused, Daniels greets Giordano in the physical therapy room at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. They talk of benefits, and Giordano tells him to consider moving out of New York City. Working nearby with his new prosthetic, Christopher Gordon looks over at Daniels.

"He has a fused ankle and he's the most upbeat guy here,"

Gordon says.

"It's the kind of thing that keeps you upbeat."

Jeremy Feldbusch took shrapnel to his brain in Mosul and lost his sight. Now he visits the wounded in hospitals, gives speeches and takes part in Wounded Warrior Project events. An avid hunter from Pittsburgh, Feldbusch got a permit to hunt with an assistant, and out he went, bagging a deer.

"Here's a guy, you'd never know he's blinded,"

Giordano said.

"I don't think anybody's told him yet."

Alex Pressman joined the Marines after emigrating from Russia to the U.S. He's in the Marine Corps Reserves, and his time was up when his unit got called to serve in Iraq. But he went with the guys anyway, and lost a foot.

"Here's a kid who wasn't born here, doesn't have to go but wants to go,"

Giordano said.

"He's in college now."

Joey Bozik lost both legs and an arm in Iraq. He's 27. On July 3, he strapped himself onto a water ski harness and glided across Jamaica Bay and onto the pages of the New York Daily News.

"I don't care who you spent your weekend with: You didn't have better company than I had on Saturday,"

wrote columnist Denis Hamill. Bozik was one of 23 amputees at this Wounded Warrior Project event.

"As much as I would love to say I had my husband home all summer,"

Giordano's wife, Beth, said,

"when I saw the Daily News article – the look on that boy's face – how can I say that?"

Wounded Warrior Project
711 Fifth street NE
Suite A
Roanoke VA 24016
(540)342-0032//0336
http://www.woundedwarriorproject.org/

Semper Fi