Wounded Warrior Project History

As told by John Melia:

I was a Marine in the early ’90s, and I was injured in a Marine Corps helicopter crash that killed four of my friends and injured 14 of us. So my experience coming home as a wounded vet kind of showed me some of the gaps in service delivery to [wounded] military members.

In 2002, I was watching a news story on TV and saw a young Marine being loaded onto a helicopter, and it just brought back a flood of memories for me and I thought, “Boy, I bet that guy’s getting ready to go on the same type of journey that I did for a number of years, struggling to figure out what I was going to do after I was retired from the military.”