Heartbreaking Video Shows Army Widow's Reunion With Husband

Tara Thomas met her husband's coffin on the tarmac
By Evann Gastaldo,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 20, 2017 1:20 PM CST

In a moving scene, an Army wife met her husband on the airport tarmac last week—but he was in a coffin. The heartbreaking reunion between Tara and Shawn Thomas was caught on video by Lisa West Williams, who was traveling in the plane that transported Shawn Thomas' body home to North Carolina. The video she took out her window shows members of the military removing Thomas' flag-draped coffin from the plane before Tara, dressed all in black, approaches and rests her head against the coffin. "There was not a dry eye around me," wrote Williams on Facebook. The video has been viewed nearly 10 million times since she posted it Tuesday.

Shawn, 35, was a Green Beret who was killed in a vehicle accident in Niger Feb. 2, during his eighth deployment, according to the Army Times and his obituary, which says that he died "defending our freedom while doing a job that he loved." His unit had been deployed to Africa to train locals to counter the spread of terrorist groups; he had previously deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Williams says that she spoke to his wife, a mother of four, after taking the video: "She did thank me for the video and she wanted it to be shared," Williams tells WNCT. "She wanted people to realize that this goes on every day. There are many men and women that come home in a casket and they’ve made the ultimate sacrifice for us." (More viral video stories.)

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