A Dalmatia man was among a group of veterans and police officers who made a 600-plus mile relay run from New Jersey to North Carolina to pay tribute to the country's wounded warriors.
Timothy Wynn, a Marine Corps veteran, was joined by 20 others, including former Marines, Army soldiers and New Jersey police officers, who ran from Jersey City to Camp Lejune.
The run was completed as a relay, with runners switching off but maintaining the trip for 24 hours a day for six days, according to The Jersey Journal.
It began at a Purple Heart memorial and ended at a memorial for the victims of a terrorist bombing of a Marine Corps barracks in Beirut, Lebanon, in 1983, killing 241 Marines, sailors and soldiers.
The run also retraced in reverse the trek of an original run made by Marines from the 3rd Battalion, 8th Marine Regiment, 2nd Marine Division who ran in 1985 from a base of the Camp Lejune complex to Jersey City, raising money for the restoration of the Statue of Liberty along the way.
Wynn was among the original 18 runners, dubbed the Liberty Run Marines. At 23 years of age, he was home on leave from the Beirut area. The run, he said, was a spur of the moment idea.
"When we finished the run, we dropped off the money off to them and turned around and drove back to North Carolina because we were deploying in the next day or two," said Wynn, who finished his four-year commitment to the Corps as a corporal.
According to The Camp Lejune Globe, that race was also a relay. Three six-man teams ran a stretch of 25 to 30 miles, with each runner jogging four to six miles before they could rest.
The format remained mostly the same this year for what was named the Honor-Courage-Commitment Run. However, now at 48 years of age, Wynn ran about nine miles total. He helped more with driving and logistics, and with keeping up morale.
"We had some younger guys," he said. "They ran the majority of it."
The original group of runners held a reunion in Jersey City last July. Police officers and Marine Corps veterans spoke at the event. From there, the second run was born.
"We thought it'd be a neat thing to do a run in the opposite direction from Jersey City to North Carolina but this time for a different cause," he said.
The finish was emotional, he said.
The entire group got in formation for the final leg and ran the last few miles together. They ended at the memorial, where a commemoration ceremony was held memorializing the 29th anniversary of the terrorist attack in Beirut.
An estimated $6,000 was raised for the Wounded Warrior Project and the Wounded Warrior Regiment, according to published reports.
Wynn was humble in recounting both runs.
"I didn't do it for the publicity. It was to raise awareness for our wounded warriors, all these young guys who are injured coming back from Afghanistan and Iraq," he said.