Nathan Aldaco suffers from a rare congenital heart defect, but his health condition hasn’t prevented him from fulfilling his wish to become a U.S. Marine.
(FOX)- The Marines of the 7th Engineer Support Battalion at Camp Pendleton, Calif., recently gave the 12-year-old his own combat uniform for the trip, which Make-a-Wish Foundation made possible. They also gave him and his family a tour of an explosive ordinance disposal compound to show the boy the explosives they disarmed, Sgt. Laura Guana wrote on Facebook.
Next, he traveled through a demolition range in a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle, and the team showed him their EOD robots, detonated TNT, C4, dynamite and blasting caps.
“The bombs were cool,” Aldaco said in an interview with the Marines’ official website. “I like working with robots. It was fun controlling them and picking stuff up with them.”
As a child, Aldaco was diagnosed with hypoplastic left heart syndrome, in which the left heart is severely underdeveloped. He’s undergone various surgeries and is thriving, according to a report by the Marines.