Easter In Iraq - hot wings and peeps

It wasn't the traditional dinner, but the medics at the 10th CSH celebrated Easter with Hot Wings, a load of hot sauce along with decorations and some Easter bubbles. The latter supplies courtesy of our Angel volunteers.

And of course, there were plenty of Peeps to mark the day.

-Rog

Mitzvah Day - Homemade cookies for our Troops

A Miztvah is a good deed of service to others. On this Mitzvah Day, the wonderful folks at Temple Israel baked 75 dozen home made cookies for our troops. The Grace Community Church and the Temple, both of Seal Beach, CA worked together to send these gifts to our troops recently.

That's about 900 individual messages of love and support that let a whole lot of our soldiers know someone back home was thinking about them.

Shalom, God Bless
-rog

Amazon defends us from hostile foreign powers!

I recently had a request from a med unit for bread mix for their bread machine. I googled around and found the best deal on Amazon. Damn. That site does ship to APO's, sort of. But they have the strangest rules about what can and cannot be shipped that way. For instance:

Bread mix is apparently a classified, critical war materiel and cannot be allowed to fall into enemy hands. I of course include the french in that category, not that they'd descend to the level of eating bread from a mix. Or a from a bread machine. Or from America. anyway....

Over the years, I've encountered other items that are restricted byAmazon (and no one else) from shipping to APO addresses.

Hair conditioner. Not all brands, only some brands. God help us if their troops has hair as bouncy and shiny as ours!

Ionic breeze air cleaners. Now I called and got an explanation for this one that sorta made sense. Sort of. It turns out that these type cleaners contain a chip that cannot be shipped out of the country. I suspect this is because potentially hostile nations (read: North Korea) could use these chips to build oh, say....ICBM guidance systems. Since Amazon has successfully defended our freedom by blocking the export of these chips, the Koreans must have had to resort to using a Mr. Coffee chip instead, which explains why their latest missile didn't go where it was supposed to.


Score one for the good guys!
- Rog

Soldiers' Angels flag for Camp Bucca Medics

I recently attended a Yellow Ribbon Reintegration program put on by the Army reserve for soldiers who recently returned from deployment, along with their families. It's a great program, geared to help soldiers and loved ones readjust to the return to civilian life.

We had a table with information about Soldiers' Angels programs that could help veterans and families, and I passed out lots of cards, brochures and SA mementos. I brought along one of our beautiful Flags and asked the soldiers to sign it. One of our medical units at Camp Bucca are on a 15 month deployment, and they are tired and want to come home. I thought maybe some messages from fellow-soldiers might cheer them up. Turned out there were a lot of medics there, and some of them even knew who I was. And at least 50% of the 300 soldiers who stopped by told me they'd received packages from Soldiers' Angels members. Pretty cool.
So to my buddy Dave, and the medics at Forward Surgical, Camp Bucca...this one's for you.
God bless, come home safe
-Rog