Prater Family On Road To Recovery
Greggory Prater, an E-5 in the United States Army, has served his country proudly. After having success in the business field, conditions changed and he found himself looking for a new line of work. He had many family members and relatives who served, and he felt it was the right time for him and his family.
Greggory has been on two tours of duty in Iraq, among other assignments, and was injured participating in Operation Iraqi Freedom – diagnosed as a traumatic brain injury (TBI) in 2008 from blast exposure. Greggory found himself and his family in a peculiar situation when he suddenly stopped receiving his pay, from what he found was a clerical mistake that mixed his name with another soldier who had went AWOL.
With the situation started affecting his usual scheduled pay from the Army, the Prater family started to struggle financially, and the bills started to pile up fast. At the time his car was being repossessed, they had little food, and they couldn’t afford to keep the power on. Greggory and his family were living a poor quality of life, and it took an emotional toll, “I was sad, my family was sad.”
Greggory tried a variety of services but found them to be of little help, until his squad leader told him about Operation Homefront and the Army Homefront Fund. He said when “everyone told me no, Operation Homefront told me yes.” He had a tough time explaining the situation to others since he worried they would not believe him, but after calling Operation Homefront things would be different.
Operation Homefront kept his family from getting evicted from their house, paid their electricity bill, and helped to put food on the table. “Once we were approved to get assistance from Operation Homefront, everything else started to fall into place.” Now over the initial hump, Greggory has a positive vision for his family’s future as he works to get the clerical mistake fixed.
“I can’t put it in to words, the gratitude, if it wasn’t for Operation Homefront I don’t know where I would be.”