Bruce Springsteen tops an eclectic group honored with first-ever awards for those striving to improve the lives of veterans and their families.
Ten recipients of what are being called the Lincoln Awards were announced Tuesday by the Friars Club and its charitable arm, the Friars Foundation.
They are sponsoring an awards program Jan. 6 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, followed the next day by a celebrity-studded concert.
The event is being held on the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's Second Inaugural address where he pledged the nation "to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan."
Springsteen is being singled with an Entertainer Award for "several decades" of performing his music in support of veterans and military families,, according to the Friars Club. Themes about the plight of veterans run though much of his music, songs like The Long Walk Home, Lost in the Flood, Devils and Dust and Born in the USA.
Other honorees will include:
• Ken Fisher, a New York real estate magnate and chief executive of the Fisher House Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by his uncle, Zachary Fisher. The foundation builds the Fisher House homes on military campuses where the families of wounded veterans reside while caring for their loved ones. Ken Fisher is receiving the Citizen Award.
• Segway inventor Dean Kamen, who will receive the Medical and Science Award for improving on the science of bionic arms for wounded veterans.
• Walmart, receiving the Corporate Citizen Award for outstanding providing job opportunities, hiring 100,000 veterans and 150,000 of their family members.
• Retired Rear Adm. Dick Young, honored with the Standard Bearer Award for lifetime achievement in service to other veterans.
• Kayla Williams, a former intelligence specialist with the U.S. Army and now a RAND Corp. researcher, receiving the Artistic Award for two memoirs, Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the U.S. Army and Plenty of Time When We Get Home: Love and Recovery in the Aftermath of War.
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