Winter Garden veteran receives adapted home

Homes for Our Troops, a national nonprofit organization that works to build mortgage-free, specially adapted homes for injured veterans, turned over the keys to its 15th recipient of a home in Florida last weekend. 

Army Capt. Bobby Withers, who lost his right leg below the knee after stepping on a land mine in Afghanistan, will now live with his family at the home in Winter Garden near Lake Apopka. Other veterans, Withers’ friends and representatives of Homes for Our Troops welcomed him to his new house with a ceremony on the back patio. 

“The injury does not define Bobby Withers. What defines Bobby Withers is a fine sense of caring and service,” Homes for Our Troops Executive Director Bill Ivey said. 

Withers said he had gone to Afghanistan to fight not only against bad forces, but on behalf of good ones.

“There are plenty of good people in Afghanistan, and that’s what brought me there,” he said. “Fighting for justice, for people who couldn’t fight for themselves.”