Thank you for giving to Help for Heroes, where your money will support servicemen and women  who  have returned from Iraq and Afghanistan with severe physical injuries.  I will be running The North Pole Marathon on 26^th March 2008 to raise money for this charity.

Help for Heroes was set up in October 2007 and is backed by the Army Benevolent Fund, the Army’s own charity.  It is currently run by volunteers, and supported by a strong group of trustees including General Sir Richard Dannatt – Chief of the General Staff, and patrons including Johnson Beharry VC, who was awarded the Victoria Cross for his bravery in Iraq in 2004.

The charity has been created from a situation where there are insufficient medical facilities to go around an increasing number of wounded servicemen requiring certain treatments.  The charity’s first project is to build an orthopaedic swimming pool including a gym at Headley Court in Surrey, the Services main rehabilitation centre in the UK.  No swim training facilities currently exist, which for many patients is the most effective training towards recovery.  Servicemen are currently being taken by minibus to a public swimming pool which lacks privacy or specialized equipment to deal with their individual needs.

The launch speech by the charity’s founder and appeal chairman, Bryn Parry clearly represents the ethos of Help for Heroes–

“What is Help for Heroes all about? The answer is really very simple;… it’s about the blokes.

Soldiers serve their country; they are servicemen.  They get sent to wars and they fight, that’s their job and they do their job brilliantly. Sometimes they are killed while serving their country and when that happens it is a tragedy and we remember them with pride.  Sometimes they are wounded and when that happens we must care for them. These days our front line treatment and our medics are so good that our soldiers are surviving wounds that they would have died from 10 years ago. Some of those injuries are horrific, many are amputees and many are complex trauma cases. Nowadays they don’t die,… they survive and we must ensure that they go on to live good fulfilling lives.”

Thank you for your support!

Marie