{"id":28771,"date":"2012-02-16T20:18:52","date_gmt":"2012-02-17T00:18:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=28771"},"modified":"2012-02-16T20:18:52","modified_gmt":"2012-02-17T00:18:52","slug":"51-year-old-mom-graduates-from-basic-training","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=28771","title":{"rendered":"51-year-old Mom graduates from Basic Training"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>She&#8217;s a few years younger than me, and I don&#8217;t think I could do it again, but this Marine Mom, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.army.mil\/article\/73875\/\">Sgt. Sandra Coast<\/a>, decided she wanted to join the Army while her son was at the Marine Recruiter.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>For as long as she can remember she has had a special place in her heart for troops and a hunger to serve.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I have a friend in the Navy that was emailing me from Afghanistan. It&#8217;s his third combat tour in seven years. I don&#8217;t know, I can&#8217;t explain it, I just had this overwhelming desire to give back to the military somehow. I was doing the same job day after day after day; I can&#8217;t live my life that way,&#8221; Coast said. &#8220;There is more to life than this, so I ended up in basic training.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<blockquote><p>Now, 1st Sgt. John Byars has a new perception of his elders.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;I was impressed because she can do everything the younger Soldiers do,&#8221; Byars said. &#8220;She never expected us to feel sorry for her. She even got one of the highest Army Physical Fitness Test scores in the company. She is a prime example that age is just a number. She ran faster than Soldiers young enough to be her kids.&#8221;<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I guess you have to follow your heart. Congratulations, Sergeant. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>She&#8217;s a few years younger than me, and I don&#8217;t think I could do it again, &hellip; <a title=\"51-year-old Mom graduates from Basic Training\" class=\"hm-read-more\" href=\"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=28771\"><span class=\"screen-reader-text\">51-year-old Mom graduates from Basic Training<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28771","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-real-soldiers"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28771\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}