Milo Ventimiglia Is a Trooper

He may play one of TV's Heroes, but for Milo Ventimiglia, it's the American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan who are his heroes.

The actor spent his hiatus from the hit drama visiting the soldiers on a USO tour as he is "really supportive of the troops."

"My father’s a veteran, my uncle’s a veteran, my grandfather was a veteran," Milo tells OK! at NBC's TCA party. "I nearly went into the navy myself when I was 18 so I got a chance to go overseas and give the armed forces a little bit of respite from the situation."

While many travel over to entertain the troops, the 31-year-old said he was purely there to talk to them.

"I said to the USO people, ‘I’m not a musician, so I can’t sing a song and I’m not a bombshell, so I don’t think they’ll want to stare at me, but if I can, I’d love to speak to them,'" he says. "That’s what I got a chance to do. A lot of them watch Heroes."

As for his view on the war itself, Milo remained diplomatic about the situation. “I think there’s a lot of activity and things going on around the world that I wish were better," he says. "I’d like to see a lot of the troops coming home, but I understand that is their job and it’s within the interest of, sometimes, our nation as well as others to have a presence in many different countries.”

Now Milo is back stateside and hard at work after the writers’ strike interrupted the last season of Heroes.  “I’ve done a lot of stunt work so far,” he dishes.

By Carole Glines