Pal honors retiring Fil-Am US Marine with limo service, renovated home

When Msgt. Jacinto Bernardo, a retiring Filipino-American US Marine, returned to California from Japan last week, he was surprised to be fetched from the airport by a limo and brought to a home that hardly looked like the one he left behind.

It turned out that his fix-upper house was renovated and improved without his knowledge using money that his fellow Marine Jeremy Epperson raised in order to honor him for his heroism as a soldier.

According to an article on The Blaze, Epperson raised roughly $70,000 for the renovation of Bernardo's house through a program he called “Homecoming Heroes.”

Screengrab from ABC7 News

Epperson was quoted in the article as saying that no retiring US Marine should have to return to a home that is a “fix-upper,” a real-estate slang word for a property that requires maintenance work.

The article said Bernardo, an Iraq war veteran, got emotional while talking to a local news station about the surprise his friend gave him.

“We are proud of our service,” said Bernardo, who spent 21 years in the military service. [See video

“Those guys that didn’t make it back and those guys that didn’t make it in one piece, they deserve this, not me,” he added.

Bernardo's LinkedIn page said he graduated high school  in Colegio de San Juan de Letran in the Philippines in 1990 at attended the University of Maryland University College from 2009 to 2014. —KBK, GMA News

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