No moment can melt a heart faster than a military homecoming, and this reunion on the Ellen DeGeneres Show is sure to make you fill buckets of tears.
It started with a letter from Navy Supply Officer Noah Copeland to host Ellen DeGeneres. He wrote to say how much his girlfriend, Maura Gonsalves — who’s in the audience in this clip and cries as the host reads the letter — loves her and her show. Naturally, she’s asked to come to the stage, where she tells the audience and viewers at home how Copeland, the love of her life, was deployed five months after they moved to San Diego. He was sent to the remote island of Diego Garcia, and they’ve been apart for more than a year.
Hoping to make her feel better, DeGeneres prompts someone offstage to bring out surprise tickets to the Ellen birthday show … instead, out comes Copeland, bringing the tickets and flowers, which he moves aside so his girlfriend can leap into his arms, both crying as they embrace.
“I just wanted to do something special for her. My friends, when they come back off deployment, they’re on the pier and their girlfriends are there and we weren’t able to get that, and so I just wrote in and it happened and it was awesome,” Copeland explains.
As if that wasn’t beautiful enough, Gonsalves reveals that while watching an episode of the show that featured when Ricky Martin visited Puerto Rico following the devastating Hurricane Maria, she and Copeland felt so compelled to help that they donated the money they were going to use on a trip to Puerto Rico to the Ricky Martin Foundation to aid those impacted by the natural disaster.
“I told him ‘we have to do something,'” she says with tears in her eyes. “We just wanted to do whatever we could and I knew that our trip wasn’t going to work out there. And just seeing those people and the animals and everything … It’s so sad, I couldn’t believe it.”
The couple’s benevolent act of kindness inspired DeGeneres to gift them a six-night stay at the Koa Kea resort in Hawaii, making the happily reunited couple even more thankful.
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This Article Was Originally Posted at www.TasteofCountry.com
