WHAT NOT TO SEND TO IRAQ

It is that wonderful time of year again, when folks all over the US want to send some special foods and goodies to let our soldiers know they are remembered and appreciated back home. In addition to the many thousands of volunteers and the wonderful things they send, once in a while we hear about some care packages that, well..... you decide. Keep in mind...these are all true stories.

Thanksgiving Dinner in a Bag
Last Thanksgiving, we were told about a lovely and hardworking person who cooked an entire Thanksgiving dinner for her adopted unit. Then she spent three days sealing it up using one of those "seal-a-meal" gadgets and packed it all up and mailed it to Iraq.

She posted step-by-step directions on our forum about how to do it, and confidently explained that "germs can't grow without air", so it was perfectly safe.

My God, I thought, we just committed biological war-fare against the United States Army. The FBI must be coming over right now! In a panic, I posted urgent messages telling people not to do this, and begged anyone who knew where it was sent to email the unit and tell them not to eat the stuff.

I sweated for days, until cooler heads pointed out that:
1. This was a medical unit, so they had probably passed high-school biology and knew all about anerobic bacteria.
2. They had the training to watch for suspicious food items.
3. Nobody in his right mind would eat what must have been disgusting bags of slime after spending 5 days in transit through the US postal service.


CHICKEN IN A BOX
OK, I just heard about this one from one of my fellow managers at SA, and she heard it direct from one of her adopted medics at CSC Scania :

On a sidenote, someone sent a soldier (our medical Captain -- 'Doc') a chicken in the mail. A live chicken. It was still living when we got it here. It was pecking about it's box quite furiously. I do not know how it survived, or why no one did anything to prevent the chicken from making it all the way here. We released it into the countryside; it will probably not make it. Very, very odd.Take it easy; enjoy the rest of the Thanksgiving weekend!-David K

Personally, I think it might be from the turkey dinner person last year. She probably figured, "OK, they don't want me to send a cooked bird, I'll send a fresh one and they can damn well cook it themselves".


"MAGGOTS FOR SOLDIERS" or

"WHEN GOOD COOKIES GO BAD" or

"ALWAYS CHECK THE EXPIRATION DATE ON DONATED FOOD ITEMS"

another true story
I don't know. I don't want to know.

UPDATE: OK, some one insisted on telling the the story, so now I know. Here it is:

(from an Army Major now returned safely home .... So now I have to tell you a funny story. The #1 box you sent had some XXX Brand Oatmeal Raisin Cookies in it. So this morning I head up for a meeting and figure it was going to be a long one so I better take some munchies. So I grab one of the Oatmeal Raisin cookies packs. I get up to my meeting and my boss sees the cookies and is like “Oatmeal Raisin, my favorite” I open up the pack and he grabs a couple and I grab a couple and my roommate grabs one and we all munch away (can you see where this is going). I put the pack down and the meeting starts, about 10 minutes into the meeting I notice a tiny worm crawling on my hand so I flick it off then I glance a the cookies and notice a couple more crawling in the pack!! So needless to say I did not eat anymore, but looked at the cookies and sure enough between each cookie there was a bunch of little maggot looking worm things. So I left the meeting with cookies in tow meaning to throw them away and when I got to my next stop I was talking to the guys doing some work for me and 1 of them reached for the cookies and right as he was raising to take a bite I told him he might not want to and he did not believe me until I showed him the worms. It was pretty funny looking back on it especially when I told my boss! Don’t worry about it or anything, no one got sick and we all actually chuckled about it. So add that to your speaking tour stories.

-Rog

Lost one of my own last night

I got an email last night. I recognized the email address right away. Hey, I thought, it's from Heather. Heather is one of my former adopted soldiers. She came home in January after a year in Iraq, started going to college, got a job, her first apartment, and adopted a little black and tan puppy that she named Socks, because of the white fur on its front paws. Heather turned 21 in Iraq, and she loved the birthday package that DJ and I sent her. She was always so grateful for everything we sent, but only once did she ask for anything. She wanted small toys that she could hand out to the Iraqi kids she saw on patrol.

I sent her a box full of Beanie Babies, and she wrote how much fun she had handing them out to the kids in the neighborhood. Once, she had the driver stop their humvee, and then hopped out so she could put a tiny bear into the hands of a shy little girl in the back of the crowd, who wasn't going to get one otherwise.

Heather loved kids, and talked about having her own someday.

She was unusual among all the dozens of soldiers that I have written to in Iraq, because she kept in touch after getting home and out of the army. She wrote to me once in a while, told me about her job, how much she loved college, how excited she was to start the next part of her life. That's what I was expecting to read when I opened the email from her account - what's new, what's exciting in her young life.

But the email wasn't from her, it was from a friend of hers.

My friend Heather was killed tonight in a one man car wreck.....

Sacha

http://www.legacy.com/JDNews/Obituaries.asp?Page=LifeStory&PersonId=98478918

I don't know what to say to her family this Thanksgiving Day, but I'll call. And I'll keep in touch after, because that's what Heather would do.

-Rog

MORE EAGLE SCOUTS ASSIST THE WOUNDED

Once again, Soldier's Angels is lucky to have some Eagle Scout candidates who volunteered to work with us and gather supplies for the wounded.

Matt K. of Venture Crew 364 in Phoenix, AZ. Matt collected Shoes, towels, toiletries, snacks for wounded soldiers and shipped them to LSA Anaconda, Air Force Hospital, Balad, Iraq.
This MOUNTAIN of goodies came to 249 pounds of mail, 20 priority packages and 4 parcel posts. Matt raised all the money to pay for shipping as part of his project too.

Jed L. of Troop 142, Decatur, Georgia: Jed collected t-shirts, socks, towels, washcloths, sweat pants, zip-up hooded sweatshirts, dvd's and phone cards and shipped them to the wounded at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. That's 41 BOXES of supplies, that will help Soldier's Angels assist the wounded guys who are evac'd in from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Congratulations and thank you Matt and Jed. I am proud to know you.

-Roger

Veteran's Day 2007

To all who served...

Thank you

Candy, Candy, we got Candy

So, what do you do when you've had all the Halloween candy you can stand. When the idea of just one more "fun-sized" Snickers doesn't sound like all that much fun anymore. When your teeth ache from a near-lethal dose of high-fructose corn syrup....

I had this wonderous and original idea to ask our neighbors to donate any left-over Halloween candy so I could send it to the Medical units. I also passed the word around a few people in my office. Well, it worked great. I got stacks and bags and googles of candy. I also got emails from people around the country who stole my idea weeks in advance of me originating it, though some magical time-travel into the future idea-stealing thing. So our medics are getting dozens and dozens of boxes of candy in the next week or so.

One neighborhood contributed 20 boxes, and are mailing it to a bunch of medics right now. A girl-scout troop in North Hampton, NY including Nicole, Sarah, Meagan, Francesca and her brother Peter(who apparently got roped into the project, and is already learning about the power women in uniform hold over men) wrote me wanting to contribute all their Halloween candy to some soldiers.

This is great timing, since it's cool enough to mail chocolate over there now, and most of the soldiers in Iraq have been going through major Hershey withdrawal for months now.

And then there is Soldier's Angels Susan who has a friend that collected and shipped 275 pounds (that equates to roughly 12,000,000,000 calories, 900 cavities and hundreds of happy soldiers - but who's counting) to our troops.

So, thanks to all the wonderful folks back home who have thought of yet another way to support our medics and sent a little taste of back-home to them.

-Rog