{"id":72507,"date":"2017-06-02T10:35:01","date_gmt":"2017-06-02T14:35:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/valorguardians.com\/blog\/?p=72507"},"modified":"2017-06-02T10:35:01","modified_gmt":"2017-06-02T14:35:01","slug":"keeping-a-fathers-promise","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/?p=72507","title":{"rendered":"Keeping a father’s promise"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/center><\/p>\n

Stars & Stripes<\/a> tells the story of how the mates of Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar kept his promise to his step-daughter, Octavia Osborne, to attend her graduation after he was killed in Afghanistan<\/a> earlier this year.<\/p>\n

Octavia had heard that some of her dad’s brothers-in-arms planned to attend her graduation ceremony May 25, but the reality of what that meant didn’t really sink in at first.<\/p>\n

“It dawned on me here and there that they were going to be there, but it didn’t really hit me until I got to the graduation and saw all those men sitting there in the stands,” she said.<\/p>\n

The contingent from the 7th Group included not only the Green Berets in their dress uniforms, but many of their spouses and children as well. When [De Alencar’s widow] Natasha and her mother, Yolanda Thornton, arrived at the stadium, Octavia’s special cheering section was already in place.<\/p>\n

“They were saving seats for us!” Natasha said, her voice still filled with amazement at the memory. “I was overwhelmed. Everyone who was there had taken time out of their busy lives because they knew we had that void we were missing. They just wanted to let us know that they had our back.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Thanks to Frankie for the tip.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stars & Stripes tells the story of how the mates of Staff Sgt. Mark De Alencar … Keeping a father’s promise<\/span>Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":71408,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[217],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-72507","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-we-remember"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72507","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=72507"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72507\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/71408"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=72507"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=72507"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.azuse.cloud\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=72507"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}