U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Anthony Tillman missed his daughter Kayla's entire four years of high school due to his military service, so he was determined not to miss her high school graduation. Tillman, an 18-year military veteran, spent nine months in Korea on a deployment and then returned to his station
U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Anthony Tillman missed his daughter Kayla's entire four years of high school due to his military service, so he was determined not to miss her high school graduation.
Behind the scenes, Tillman was doing all he could to get there, including making the nearly 600-mile drive from Fort Benning to Fort Lauderdale. He arrived at Kayla's graduation on Sunday just around one hour before the ceremony was to begin."We kind of looked at each other and said, 'How do we do this?' But there was never a doubt that we were going to do it," said Margie Scott, the high school's assistant principal.
Kayla recalled the complete shock of seeing her dad. Aside from being stationed outside of Florida for his entire military career, he had been away on various deployments for most of her childhood, including in Iraq. "When they started playing the graduation music, tears just started coming down my eyes because right then and there I realized how much of her life I’d missed," he said."I didn’t realize the stuff my kids were going through by me not being there physically."
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