National Guard Sgt. Breinne Travers Sullivan is a true hero - Soldier gets a heroes welcome home after more than three years recovering in the hospital

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.”

“What she did over there was amazing. But she had to come home and fight a whole new fight,” said Dan Magoon of the Mass. Fallen Heroes. Patrick Hayden of that group, who was best man at the Sullivan wedding — in the Rose Garden of Walter Reed — sent the letter that started the momentum going. Said Magoon, “We wanted this soldier to know: We haven’t forgotten about her.”

A nurse, 34-year-old Breinne Travers Sullivan was awarded a Purple Heart after losing her left eye and having many teeth and facial bones shattered. She still endures a traumatic brain injury but has a military service dog, Seamus. The Labrador-retriever mix, which wears a camouflage-colored service shirt and presses elevator buttons with his paw, has helped her so much Breinne has considered one day working for a military dog service provider.

But the future for the couple is uncharted, really, said Joe Sullivan, because Breinne’s recovery and therapy are “really something she’s going to have to deal with for the rest of her life.”

Yet Breinne Travers Sullivan has never been a “why me?” soldier. In interviews at Walter Reed just six months after the brutal ambush, her scarred face and eye still requiring multiple surgeries, she told the Herald’s Peter Gelzinis she was much more fortunate than many around her. She has no memory of what happened to her, she said. Other soldiers can’t forget. She can sleep. They can’t. They are haunted, and can’t stop seeing what they saw.

“If you’ve spent any time at Walter Reed,” she said, “you know you’ve got no right to sit there, hang your head … I didn’t expect to come home with a brain injury. I’ve adjusted to it. I’ve accepted it.” Her husband at her side, Breinne Travers Sullivan said, “ I am just still so unbelievably lucky.”