Soldiers love your letters
Published Wednesday November 12th, 2008
Copies of T&T 'Letters from Home' arrive in Kandahar, messages loved by all troops serving there
Rod Allen
KANDAHAR AIR FIELD - Dear Ms. Molly McGinn,
Greg Agnew/Times & Transcript
Soldiers were very appreciative of copies of Letters From Home, delivered by Times & Transcript editor Rod Allen in Afghanistan yesterday.
You are so right.
Folks, Molly is a teacher at Hillcrest School who asked her Grade 6-8 English Language Arts class to participate in our now successfully completed 'Letters from Home' project.'
They responded very well and we send this letter right back to them:
"Mission accomplished, kids. Your letters graced a display table at New Canada House, a gathering place for our soldiers here at KAF, but only briefly. Our troops love these letters and snap them up. They keep them for luck.
A little more, a little later on Ms. McGinn and the children of Hillcrest School, and all the children and people from all over New Brunswick who wrote.
A letter also to Mr. Dan Strang of Malden: mission accomplished, sir; more or less."
I did manage to track down (which is to say stumble upon) one of our Southeastern N.B. boys and it was a great pleasure to chat with military engineer David Hepditch about many things, including you. Don't worry it was all good.
A letter also to Mr. Joe Bonnevie of Moncton and all over Canada:
"Mission accomplished, sir; pretty much."
It was my great ambition to get your little teddy bear in Canadian military gear, whom I've named 'Joe,' out to one of the Forward Operating Bases our soldiers maintain out in the wild mountains beyond "the wire." But apparently there's a war on out this way and it didn't come off.
However, 'Joe' now guards the fort at another gathering place called Old Canada House in another Canadian neighbourhood of this enormous military city.
Joe sits by your wonderful Canadian flag signed by people from all over Canada during your nationwide bicycle tours and offers copies of 'Letters from Home,' a special edition of The Times & Transcript containing some of the letters all your fellow NBers sent to us.
To all my crew at the dear old T&T and to our military partners here at KAF and back home in Ottawa: Mission accomplished in full, sirs and madams.
Those copies, three big honkin' boxes, were accepted gracefully and with much thanks not only by our gallant New Brunswickers but by all Canadian soldiers and all the NATO partners; the Brits, the French, the Dutch, well . . . there are 48 nations here.
I'm not kidding, they all loved them.
And a special thanks to those officers here who got a big package of them out to the FOBs and the 'strong points' in country, where their welcome is even greater.
But back now to Ms. McGinn who writes that the children were excited and enthused to share their feelings with our troops.
Our project, she says, "served as an interesting starting point for a discussion about the larger issues of the war."
Now that truly is a mission accomplished.
We have lost 97 soldiers in this conflict and hundreds more have been injured, but many thousands have been rotated through here and all of them make great sacrifices.
This is a well-run camp but it is also a war zone. A week here gives only a hint of the privation, the labour and the harsh conditions our soldiers endure.
Canada is not like Afghanistan; we have so much and they so little.
Our soldiers' 'great struggle' here, or rather in my opinion their magnificent one, is to create a decent life for this country and it should be remembered every day.