MCMINNVILLE Ore. (KPTV) - At Gunner CrossFit in McMinnville, sweat and strength meet service and sacrifice.

The gym was started by married veterans Melissa and Faustino Alonzo, both deeply changed by war and what came after it.

“Just finding a new self, a new identity, a new place in life, it was pretty hard,” Melissa Alonzo said.

Faustino, a Marine, and Melissa, a Naval Hospital Corpsman, were both deployed to war in Iraq and Afghanistan. They first met while stationed together, but reconnected years later at the Wounded Warrior Battalion at Camp Pendleton in California.

Faustino was recovering from a battlefield explosion, Melissa from a traumatic brain injury.

“I saw her in the distance of the hallway of the hospital, and she was walking Gunner, her service dog,” Faustino Alonzo

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