Category Archives: Military

The Sack Lunch

On Veterans’ Day, we remember all those who have sacrificed to serve in the United States’ Military and those who have died just to keep us safe and free. People around the world know the devotion our men and woman play in keeping their nations free, as well. Let us always be grateful and remember them.

This is a wonderful story I recently received and wanted to share it with you…

I put my carry-on in the luggage compartment and sat down in my assigned seat. It was going to be a long flight. ‘I’m glad I have a good book to read. Perhaps I will get a short nap,’ I thought.

Just before take-off, a line of soldiers came down the aisle and filled all the vacant seats, totally surrounding me. I decided to start a conversation.

‘Where are you headed?’ I asked the soldier seated nearest to me. “Petawawa. We’ll be there for two weeks for special training, and then we’re being deployed to Afghanistan.”

After flying for about an hour, an announcement was made that sack lunches were available for five dollars. It would be several hours before we reached the east, and I quickly decided a lunch would help pass the time…

As I reached for my wallet, I overheard a soldier ask his buddy if he planned to buy lunch. “No, that seems like a lot of money for just a sack lunch. Probably wouldn’t be worth five bucks. I’ll wait till we get to base.” His friend agreed.

I looked around at the other soldiers. None were buying lunch. I walked to the back of the plane and handed the flight attendant a fifty dollar bill. “Take a lunch to all those soldiers.” She grabbed my arms and squeezed tightly. Her eyes wet with tears, she thanked me. “My son was a soldier in Iraq; it’s almost like you are doing it for him.”

Picking up ten sacks, she headed up the aisle to where the soldiers were seated. She stopped at my seat and asked, “Which do you like best – beef or chicken?” “Chicken,” I replied, wondering why she asked. She turned and went to the front of plane, returning a minute later with a dinner plate from first class. “This is your thanks.”

After we finished eating, I went again to the back of the plane, heading for the rest room.
A man stopped me. “I saw what you did. I want to be part of it. Here, take this.” He handed me twenty-five dollars.

Soon after I returned to my seat, I saw the Flight Captain coming down the aisle, looking at the aisle numbers as he walked, I hoped he was not looking for me, but noticed he was looking at the numbers only on my side of the plane. When he got to my row he stopped, smiled, held out his hand and said, “I want to shake your hand.” Quickly unfastening my seatbelt I stood and took the Captain’s hand. With a booming voice he said, “I was a soldier and I was a military pilot. Once, someone bought me a lunch. It was an act of kindness I never forgot.” I was embarrassed when applause was heard from all of the passengers.

Later I walked to the front of the plane so I could stretch my legs. A man who was seated about six rows in front of me reached out his hand, wanting to shake mine. He left another twenty-five dollars in my palm.

When we landed I gathered my belongings and started to deplane. Waiting just inside the airplane door was a man who stopped me, put something in my shirt pocket, turned, and walked away without saying a word. Another twenty-five dollars!

Upon entering the terminal, I saw the soldiers gathering for their trip to the base.
I walked over to them and handed them seventy-five dollars. “It will take you some time to reach the base.. It will be about time for a sandwich. God Bless You.”

Ten young men left that flight feeling the love and respect of their fellow travelers.

As I walked briskly to my car, I whispered a prayer for their safe return. These soldiers were giving their all for our country. I could only give them a couple of meals. It seemed so little…

A veteran is someone who, at one point in his life, wrote a blank check made payable to The United States of America for an amount of “up to and including my life.”

That is Honor, and there are way too many people in this country who no longer understand it.

Please pray for our brave soldiers…

“Oh God, hold our troops in your loving hands. Protect them as they protect us. Bless them and their families for the selfless acts they perform for us in our time of need. Amen.”

Now pass this on…and leave your comments below.

Fiancees Find Themselves Another Casualty Of War

As we honor the servicemen and woman who bravely defended our nation and its people, and gave the ultimate sacrifice, I am reminded of this article from several years ago which gave a very telling view of the disenfranchised grief a fiancee find themselves after their beloved was killed.

At Becky Reid’s flower shop, just across the bay from Mobile, Ala., the wedding season extends well into fall. In normal years, Becky is exuberant about business as she works late on Thursday and Friday nights twisting roses and lilies into bridal bouquets.

But this is not a normal year.

Her fiance, a gentle giant of an Alabama National Guardsman named Christopher M. Taylor, 25, was killed Feb. 16 by a bomb while on a convoy in Baghdad.

She quickly learned that the emotional trials and practical challenges of being a war victim’s survivor, without the official status of “widow,” placed her in a uniquely vulnerable group. But it’s the emotional struggles that hurt most.

Now, late on Thursday and Friday nights, Becky can be seen through the windows of her shop bending over her tables with a cell phone propped between her shoulder and her ear, chit-chatting with her friend Laura or her father while she crafts corsages and bouquets.

She desperately needs the distraction of a conversation to keep her heart from aching over what her hands are doing.

To chase off worries during the nine months Chris was in Iraq, she dreamed on nights like this about the floral arrangements she would make for their wedding. Now she’s making corsages for other brides, reminders of the nuptials she and Chris will never have.

“OK, so, I don’t want to sound like this Southern gal who’s telling you about losing the love of my life,” says Becky, 24. “I had the normal dating life — five years of fending off dirtballs and jerks. Then I finally met a man who knew how to treat me right and would help me on with my jacket at a restaurant, or help start my car. Well, he’s gone now. He’s not coming back from Iraq. Eight months later, I’m still devastated, but all my girlfriends are asking why I’m not dating yet.”

This is just one of many emotional challenges for fiancees or steady girlfriends of soldiers killed in Iraq, a generally ignored group of survivors. Because they fail to meet the Department of Defense’s technical requirements for next of kin, fiancees do not qualify for the generous death and insurance benefits awarded to immediate families.

The families of their fiances often reject them as financial threats or painful reminders of the son they lost. Girlfriends insist they should “get over it” by starting to date right away. Men consider the grieving fiancees uniquely vulnerable and lunge at them at parties or in bars.

“This is a group of survivors from military deaths who . . . fall through the cracks,” says Bonnie Carroll, an Air Force Reserve major who founded a nonprofit organization, Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors, after her husband was killed in an Army National Guard helicopter crash in 1992.

TAPS has created a national network of peer support mentors, hot lines and chat rooms that support families and friends affected by a military death, and has even persuaded Veterans Affairs to accept fiancees and other survivors for counseling and grief therapy.

“The Department of Defense is forced by its regulations to look at very fixed things,” Carroll says. “Who is legally authorized to receive benefits? Who is legally authorized to receive a body? Well, fiancees, siblings, even the parents of a married soldier just aren’t included in these legal definitions. But their problems can sometimes be just as great as the next of kin and they can take years to heal.”

There’s little doubt that the fiancees left behind by soldiers killed in action in Iraq already number in the hundreds. Morten Ender, a sociology professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, prepared a 1996 study of “nontraditional families” left behind by soldiers killed in action, and this summer he surveyed 1,000 servicemen in Iraq during a stint with a civil-affairs unit.

“It’s clear that at least 25 percent of active duty personnel are either engaged or have a strong attachment to a significant other,” Ender says. “In Iraq alone, we’re talking about 25,000 soldiers with a connection back home that’s very meaningful if they are injured, missing or killed. The results can be both emotionally and financially devastating, especially if it is, say, a woman back home relying on a soldier for financial support.”

TOGETHER THEN SEPARATE

Sara Patch, a dormitory manager at Connecticut College in New London, who lost her fiance in a Marine helicopter crash in 2001, grew closer to her fiance’s family after his death.
She is familiar with all of the social problems Becky Reid experienced and points out another problem that often occurs with military fiances. She and her fiance were planning to share the house he had bought in North Carolina just before he was killed, and she already had quit an earlier job at Smith College to join him there.

“I suddenly found myself homeless and unemployed, but I had a wonderful family to support me,” Patch says. “But what about the thousands of military dependents who don’t have that? The reality is that, today, after people are engaged they are already living together, [they’ve] bought a car and are already one. But if you’re not officially the widow after your partner is killed, no one really knows what you’re going through. There’s nothing for you.”

Patch also got in touch with TAPS and participated in its chat rooms. Now she is active in the organization and helped organize, and will run in, the Marine Corps Marathon in Washington on Sunday to raise funds for the group.

Meanwhile, Becky Reid is still working late Thursday and Friday nights, crafting flowers into bridal bouquets. She still struggles with memories and regrets about Chris. Eight months after he was killed, she’s convinced she’ll never find someone else like him, and worries that she hasn’t progressed more with her grief. She feels lonely and misunderstood when her girlfriends goad her to start dating again.

But one thing has changed. Becky has started regular visits to a grief counselor at the Veteran Affairs center in Mobile, free consultations that were arranged through TAPS. Recently, she told her counselor that she was feeling low again, stalled in her grief. Should it take this long?

“My counselor told me that she lost her husband 13 years ago, and she’s still working on all the issues,” Reid said. “Do you know how great that felt? Somebody is telling me that I’m normal. I’m not all alone.”

Uniting Children of Vietnam War Heroes

Today on Memorial Day 2010, I was so delighted to learn about a wonderful organization which was started 20 years ago to unite the children of the 58,260 men who were killed in the Vietnam War.

“Sons and Daughters in Touch” will celebrate their Dads’ lives this Father’s Day, June 20th, as they do each year on this special day, by gathering at the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall at 10:00 a.m. in Washington, D.C.

Its leader, Tony Cordero, lost his dad when he was quite young and I commend him for providing such a heartwarming and healing opportunity for hundreds of thousands of children, who are now adults, who lost their fathers during the Vietnam War.

No one helps us heal better than another person who has walked in our exact shoes. They lived through seeing their Dad come home for short periods of time and be redeployed. They and their family members lived with the fear of not knowing whether he would return. Members of SDIT know exactly what it’s like to walk in those shoes. And nothing could bring more comfort than sharing with a fellow survivor.

If you know of a family who survived the loss of a father, son, brother, uncle, cousin or other relative in Vietnam, please forward this information to them.

I applaud Mr. Cordero and the countless volunteers who help children, whatever their age, acknowledge their grief and celebrate the lives of their beloved Dads.

Can’t We Bury Our Heroes in Peace?

When I first heard the story of protestors disrupting the funeral services of our military men and women I thought it was a mistake. Then I found out it was true.

It seems that radical groups are picketing with signs at the burials of our heroes who have served our nation and died to keep us free. Don’t they understand that it was they who died specifically to give us this amazing gift to actually have the right to speak out. But please folks…

When a family is at the most vulnerable time in their lives…when they have lost someone who meant the world to them, their parent, sibling, child, the last thing they need is a group of ignorant folks intruding on their pain.

What angers me so is that there seems to be a line that keeps getting crossed which raises the stupidity bar higher and higher. Not to mention the disrespectful bar.

If my grandmother was alive, she’d say “Now how were these people raised?” and I would agree with her. Having the audacity to think that your political views are more important than respecting the privacy of a family who is burying their loved one is completely beyond me.

I don’t care what you stand for, whether you try to declare it’s your free speech rights, there is absolutely no reason a person with any conscience would additionally and intentionally cause more grief than was necessary for any family who had lost a loved one.

I grew up learning the Golden Rule…do unto others as you would like them to do unto you. It seems to me if all of us would abide by that lesson, we might just pass along some kindness to our fellow human being. And with all the additional stress that our declining economy and the world has stirred up, it seems we would all welcome a bit more kindness into our lives.

Memorial Day 2009

I had the pleasure of reconnecting with a very dear friend of mine recently in anticipation of our undergraduate college reunion in just a few weeks. (Simply can’t tell you which one…just too shocking even for me to acknowledge!!)

Anyway, my friend Tom and I both grew up on Long Island and, since at that time their weren’t too many folks going to our college from that far away, we became great friends who ultimately would travel home together for weekends.

Tom owned a great little Fiat…you know the kind that made you feel every bump in the road and felt like you were driving inches from the ground…which, of course, you were! So every so many weeks, we’d get together and calculate, based upon exams and activities, which weekends would work out well to travel back home together.

Well, my dear friend Tom, was a practical joker and little Miss Gullible would buy into it every time. One weekend as we’re heading home and already on the road, he informs me that he left his wallet at the dorm and since both of us had so little money as college kids, we were in a bad way trying to figure out what to do about the tolls through the Delaware Water Gap in Pennsylvania and the George Washington Bridge to get from New Jersey to New York.

So here we were…no money and, at least for me, a lot of nerves. When we drove through the Delaware Water Gap’s 25 cent toll I thought, “what’s the most they can do to two college kids for 25 cents?”

But when we came close to GWB, Tom tells me to duck down because he decided to run the toll and since I knew there were those gates that came down in front of each car, all I could imagine was all this wood flying everywhere and some massive group of highway patrolmen chasing us across this huge bridge which crosses over the Hudson River. You know, something out of a movie.

So here we go coming close to the bridge and I remember to this day how nervous I was and thinking if I got a black mark like this on my life, I’d never get a job! Crazy kids.

As instructed, I ducked down low in the seat asking along the way how far we were to the bridge. Tom would update me. Finally, as we get closer he tells me he’s going to run through the gate. I’m freaking out, as visions of wood and windshield glass flying everywhere is racing through my mind.

Seconds later I hear a woman toll taker say…”Thank you,” and this ‘ding’ that proclaims the money has been taken, and I realize my dear friend Tom has tricked me again, only this time over the length of a two hour drive. I thought I would die. All he could do was laugh as I screamed at him. I thought I would kill him. And if I recall I did hit him a few times.

So why am I telling you about this funny story…because my friend Tom, I have just learned, is a proud Veteran of the United States Military. While at college, he was a ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corp)…definition: college students who receive training as military officers for future service in the armed forces.

While a young gal in the sixties (oh, well so much for hiding my age!), I saw my classmates’ older brothers coming home in bodybags from Vietnam. I saw others coming home injured and some had great difficulties coping with life after war. And I was so sensitive to their pain because our country was in such turmoil during that war and I never felt it was right that our citizens punished those who served.

And in my first conversation with Tom in these several decades, I learned he served in Bosnia and Iraq. And I will have the privilege of driving up to our college reunion with him soon to catch up and hopefully he will share much about his life that I have lost out on.

Today in the USA it’s Memorial Day, when we honor and remember those who lost their lives in service to our country and gave the ultimate sacrifice. Let us remember them and their families who miss them.

Let us also salute all the men and woman who now protect and defend us because we can’t, and to their families who have sacrificed much while they are serving and when they come home. I, for one, am an American who is eternally grateful.

These are strong, brave and talented men and woman who put themselves in harms’ way so we might live in this country and enjoy all the liberties we have. The liberty to create businesses as we will, the liberty to speak out against our politicians as we will, the liberty to live where we wish, the liberty to spend our money as we wish, the liberty to vote for those we believe it without having the barrel of a gun pointed at us.

All these very special people give us these liberties that other men from other lands have died to partake in. Let us acknowledge their sacrifice and emotional and physical pain. Let us address all their needs when they arrive back home. Let us honor them today and always, as I do, by walking up to them at the airports and elsewhere and simply saying “Thank you for serving for me.”

Yes, it’s been a long while since September 11th, 2001, but we all know how life changed from that point on. And while we have been blessed not to have experienced another major event on our own soil, our military has kept that at bay.

So I am looking forward to hearing all of Tom’s stories when I see him in a few weeks. And I bless him and the members of all our military branches for their devotion to our country, the United States of America, and its fine people.