White socks and Spam: Mail Call

Mail = Morale. Mail always has been, and always will be, a great thing to receive. You just can’t beat the feeling of receiving a letter or package from a loved one or someone who cares. We get our share and we can’t get enough.
In this day and age of texting and e-mails letter writing is somewhat of a fading art. Not many people take the time to write. It’s the same for us. We don’t write home that much either. The convenience of technology has made us lazy. We are all guilty I suppose. This blog is a perfect example; one blog = hundreds of letters....right?

But, it is much more exciting when we get U.S. snail mail. The days of troops gathering around a jeep and listening for their name to be called have almost vanished. At COB adder that has been replaced by the mail clerk coming around our office and saying, ‘Sergeant Johnson, you have mail.’ It doesn’t make for a great Hollywood war film moment but it gets the job done.

There are quite a few organizations that send care packages to ‘Any Soldier.’ They stuff boxes full of things and mail them to a list of soldiers whose churches or families have signed them up to receive stuff. SGT Sam Murphree, one of my Intelligence Analysts, has managed to get his name on a couple of these lists. Every few weeks or so he gets boxes filled with things from chapstick to toothpaste, popcorn and tuna, gold bond powder and soap….anything you can imagine. We make sure it is all distributed to all our soldiers. by the way, I want to thank all the hotel chains across America for unknowingly donating a zillion mini-bottles of shampoo and tiny little soap bars. We get a lot of those.

White socks seems to be a popular item. For some reason America thinks the deployed soldier needs white socks. We get them all the time. White socks. Most of the time we wear Army-issued green socks. Only with our fitness uniform do we wear white socks. Believe me when I tell you we don’t do that much PT…but we’ve got plenty of white socks if we ever choose to workout more. Hey, I’m not looking a gift horse in the mouth but we do get a lot. Thanks America! Thanks for those white socks.

My friends the Cannons from Minnesota always send some great stuff. Rich is also a soldier and he’s a good friend from High School. He and his family helped raise a lot of school supplies for Iraqi children during OIFII in 2004. They know some really great stuff to send soldiers: energy drink mixes, vitamins, unusual snacks, and other useful stuff. But amazingly enough….Rich and his family have never sent me any socks.

The mail also brings us hand drawn pictures and thank you cards from kids. They are always fun. You get everything from hearts and crosses to army soldiers and oddly striped American flags. The Cannon and Lynch girls’ artwork is proudly scotch-taped to my CHU wall. We also get Kid’s questions like, “How big is your tank”, “Have you killed all the teroists?” “What’s it like to live in a fox hole?” and all kinds of crazy, funny, innocent stuff like that. Art Linkletter would have had a ball with our letters from elementary school kids.

I genuinely thank all of you who have taken the time to write a letter, send a package or donate to an organization that sends us packages. You’ve really helped us out. Our morale is high and the postal clerks are eating their Wheaties because mountains of Christmas mail is right around the corner.

America, keep the artwork coming, never stop sending spam and you can throttle back on those white socks. I think we’re good.

SABER 02,
Out.