Bethany welcomes veterans with beach week

BETHANY BEACH – Lots of towns and community groups make kind gestures to veterans, like discounting pool passes or holding yellow-ribbon parades.

Through the crisply-planned work of a homegrown nonprofit group, though, Bethany Beach takes veteran appreciation a lot farther, throwing dozens of wounded vets and their families a weeklong party.

Back for a second year, Operation SEAS the Day has a simple premise: Put vets recovering from wartime injury, along with their families, up in beach houses and condos and shower them with free or deeply-discounted recreation.

This year, 35 groups arrived Tuesdayfor Warrior Beach Week, said event organizer Annette Reeping, including five families who took part in last year’s event, the first of its kind in Bethany.

Those five SEAS the Day “alumni,” Reeping said, will help the other 30 families find their way around Bethany and understand what opportunities the week has in store.

“The feedback we had is, it took some of them awhile to exhale and relax,” Reeping said of last year’s 25 participants. “Some of them have never been on vacation.”

Vets apply for spots in the program through the Wounded Warrior Project, a nationwide veterans service organization that selects the families who will take part. Some of the veterans come to Bethany straight from military hospitals in the Washington, D.C. area, Reeping said.

The list of businesses offering discounts or free services to the vets is practically a who’s who of Bethany commerce. Organizers had more offers of homes to use than they could take advantage of, Reeping said, and also had a surfeit of locals who volunteered to be “host families,” acting kind of as tour guides or travel agents and making sure the veterans don’t feel lost.

“The community has been overwhelmingly coming out to support this effort,” Reeping said.

Steve Moulton, a vet who came for the 2013 event and is returning as an alumnus to help this year’s families, said the experience gave him a hard-to-find sense of comfort, “like a house that already had furniture in it.”

“I could watch my kids from dusk until dawn,” he said. “Smiles constantly.”

Delmarva Media Group reporter Leigh Giangreco contributed to this story.

Contact James Fisher at (302) 983-6772, on Twitter @JamesFisherTNJ or jfisher@delawareonline.com.