Foundation Supports Children of Wounded and Fallen Soldiers

Steve Adubato speaks with Adm. Joe Maguire from the Special Operations Warrior Foundation about the organization's mission to support the children of wounded and fallen special operations service members.

10/25/16 #1913

Excerpt:

"Welcome everyone. Steve Adubato here. This is the 25th anniversary of the Charity Golf Invitational, CohnReznick Foundation. CohnReznick Cares. We're at Liberty National Golf Club in Jersey City, New Jersey. Look at this beautiful... Look at this shot guys. Isn't this beautiful. I'll tell you what else is beautiful. The guy we're about to introduce. If you watch the YES network, if you watch the Yankees, you know him. He is Admiral Joseph Maguire. President, CEO of the Special Operations Warrior Foundation. 36 years in the United States Navy and it is our honor to be talking to you. Thanks Steve. Thank you so much. It's an honor to be here. Thank you Admiral. For those who do not know, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation... Tell everybody what it is. Founded in 1980? Well, the Special Operations Warrior Foundation was founded in April of 1980 Steve. After the failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission. The men who went in to try to rescue the hostages from the American Embassy, well that mission was a failure and two of the aircraft collided in the desert. And we lost 8 men, and those men left 17 children behind. So the warriors who came out of the desert, like a lot of folks do when they have a personal tragedy said "what do we do to honor that sacrifice" and they established a scholarship fund back then and quite frankly, the special operation folks didn't have enough money to send those children to college, so generous Americans helped bail them out. And from those 17 children to today where we have 140 children in college. And the foundation provides total college tuition, books, fees, expenses, everything to do with college education. In addition to that, we also provide academic assistance to every child from kindergarten through senior year in college. In the 36 years that we've been established Steve, we've had a 94% college graduation rate. But that's not 100%. So we want to do that, but we want these children, these students, these Gold Star children to be able to go to the every best university that they can and major in something that's going to help them as a family, but also make America stronger. So we provide academic assistance to everybody from kindergarten through senior year in college and the foundation now, thanks to the generous folks and CohnReznick and everybody else, we provide immediate financial assistance to our severely wounded special operators because when the special operators are wounded, I can tell you this first hand, the entire family is wounded. So what we try to do is have the money to have the family be with the wounded warrior in the hospital, but help out with the incidentals that are associated with pain and suffering when somebody is severely wounded..."