Plucky Letters to US soldiers in Iraq

Tuesday, November 18, 2003


Dear 101st Airborne Guys,

I’ve been worrying about you guys lately. Are you eating enough? Are you warm enough? Are you taking vitamin supplements? (Well, don’t! I read that those vitamin supplements can actually damage your liver.) Eat a wide variety of fresh foods and you won’t need any vitamin supplements. Avoid anything “lite” or “low-fat.” It’s fake food. Eat only real food. Don’t overdo it on the exercise, either. Exercise is good, but too much activity makes you crazy. It is very important to sit around staring into space for at least 30 minutes a day. Trust me on that.

However, it is possible to become addicted to sitting around staring into space. This is especially true if you have lots of interesting and entertaining thoughts, like I do. I’ve noticed lately that it takes me two days to do one load of laundry. I tend to get very busy sitting around thinking. I just ignore the dryer buzzer. I figure it will still be there tomorrow. The next day I have to turn the dryer back on to “freshen up” the dried clothing. That gives me 30 minutes of freedom to think or read. Eventually guilt and self-loathing drive me to get the damned laundry out of the dryer and into my family’s dresser drawers, but I take my sweet time about it. It’s a good thing I have a part-time job. Else I might not complete a single meaningful activity in any given 24 hour period.

I am so lazy I gave away Dylan’s 20 gallon fish tank yesterday because I didn’t want to clean it out. (Well, Dylan wasn’t cleaning it either!) I told some guy he could have the whole system if he would come over and get it. He thought he would be picking up an empty tank. HA! He had to siphon out the water, disconnect everything, and haul it out of Dylan’s room with no assistance from me whatsoever. Hey, it was free, right? Guppies and algae-eater included!

It’s not that I’m totally comatose or anything. I go to work every day, and I never call in sick. I am very active in the PTO, I volunteer at school every week, and I keep a clean house. I just like to do things in stages. Today I vacuumed all the floors. Tomorrow, after Chess Club, I will wash the kitchen floor and clean the bathrooms. Friday I will dust and wash windows. And, obviously, I do some portion of laundry every single day. (Today I moved the washed clothes from yesterday into the dryer. Tomorrow I’ll be forced to take them out of there and make room for the next load. It never freaking ends!)


What do you want Santa (me) to send you for Christmas? From what I hear it is getting cold over there. Maybe you need some long underwear or a heating pad, or some insulated boot liners. I was leafing through the Spiegel catalog the other day and saw something I would LOVE to send you guys: an electric fake fireplace. The ones they have now are very realistic and quite attractive. I wish I had an extra $500 to buy one for you. I think it would be so great if you could hang your stockings in front of a realistic looking fake fireplace! But the shipping would cost as much as the fireplace, and my husband is no way going to give me $1,000 to spend on fake fireplaces this year. He claims we are broke, due to our recent basement remodeling project.

So, since I cannot send a fake fireplace, you’re going to have to fashion one yourselves from items you might find lying about the Iraqi landscape. If you can lay your hands on some concrete blocks and a large wood plank, that’s really all you need. Stack the concrete blocks in a fireplace shape against an outside wall and put the wood plank on top as a mantle. If you can manage to paint the concrete blocks red, that would be even better. Lay a few logs in a nice stack inside and cut some “flames” out of colored paper. (I will include a few sheets for your convenience.) Voila! Instant fake fireplace! Now you can hang your stockings with pride and be the envy of your barracks neighbors. I think the fake fireplace idea would be a real morale-booster for everyone involved.

Let me know if there is anything in particular that you would like Santa to bring to you this Christmas. Otherwise, I’ll just guess.


Much love and upcoming holiday cheer,

--An Army Mom

May 23, 2003

Dear Rob,

This morning I sent you a box of stuff to give to the local children. Ethel donated a lot of prize items the food companies provide to school lunch programs. Pencils, pencil cases, key rings, change purses, that sort of thing.

My favorites are the “Got Milk?” zipper-pulls. They say “Milk. The All-American Drink!” You gotta love the idea of 100 kids running around Mosul wearing “The All-American Drink” on their zippers. I included two coloring books, some crayons and color pencils for you, and some stuff to read.

Tomorrow we’re leaving for a three day trip to Wisconsin Dells. It’s one of those marketing tour deals. They sell you a cheap vacation at their resort in exchange for getting to try to sell you a unit or cabin, or whatever. Rudy bought it last year and it’s going to expire, so off we go to Wisconsin! Supposedly, all we have to endure is a ninety-minute sales pitch on day two. We shall see. I plan to announce right off that we are no way going to buy anything. I’ll say we are in year 1 of a 10 year scouting mission to select a location for our retirement. Our plan, I will say, is to travel to a different potential location every year for the next ten years, at the end of which we will select the nicest place to spend our golden years. Basically, show me what you’ve got and maybe I’ll call you in 2013.

Dylan is quite excited because he has his own discount card for various Wisconsin Dells attractions. He seems to believe there is some chance we will visit the Wisconsin Dells water park, whereupon we will all gleefully swoosh around on waterslides for endless hours of lively family fun. What I have not told him is that the temperature is forecast to be around 65 degrees.

Thus, even if I were inclined toward such aquatic frolicking (and I am not), it will doubtless be too cold. A good thing, too, because I cannot for the life of me imagine Rudy plunging breathlessly down a water slide. Might be worth the cold to see such a sight, but NOT worth having to engage in such an activity myself!

I tend to avoid doing anything remotely athletic while publicly garbed in less than half a yard of brightly colored Lycra. And I instinctively know that the general public is grateful for my restraint. Thankfully, Rudy seems to share my inhibitions. I have yet to see him cavort about out of doors without a shirt. In fact, I have never seen him do anything outside without a shirt, except lounge around a hotel swimming pool. I’ve never even seen him mow the lawn without a shirt. Remarkable compatibility, considering that both of us are in fairly decent physical condition. We’re just modest. If we lived in Iraq we’d wear matching black tablecloths.

There’s a question. Why don’t the Iraqi ladies ever wear brighter, more fashionable tablecloths? A decorous pinstripe for business wear might be appropriate. Maybe a nice light floral for summer outings. Of course, white is only appropriate after Memorial Day or for KKK meetings. Perhaps I should send you a few JC Penney White Sale catalogs. You could hand them out as a humanitarian gesture and let all the lovely Iraqi ladies know what the fashionable American tables are wearing this season.

Okay, enough of this nonsense! Time to go pack for the Dells. (What the hell is a dell, anyway? I’m sure Papa would be happy to enlighten me.)

TTFN (Take Tons of Fotos Now!)

Much love,
--Mom

Monday, July 21, 2003

Dear Rob,

Yesterday Rudy and I took your truck out on a country drive, just to keep it in good shape. We drove it all over the county visiting little cemeteries. That’s our hobby- we like to visit out-of-the-way cemeteries and look at all the gravestones. It’s really interesting because you have to try to guess at why people died, what their lives were like, and what their relationships were. For example, yesterday in the Merna Cemetery we saw three identical headstones lined up together. Two women and a man, with the names and dates as such:

Illia Mae Giles
1893-1949

Minnie Mae Giles
1893-1955

John Matthew Giles
1893-1957

So you really have to wonder what is their story?? Were they triplets? Did none of them ever marry? It stretches the imagination to think John Matthew Giles had one wife with the middle name Mae die on him and then married another with the same middle name! Rudy and I find these things intriguing, but our favorites are the newer headstones. You would not believe the bizarre things people are doing with their eternal resting places these days.

Many Central Illinois farmers, for example, have their John Deere tractors emblazoned on their grave markers. Some have a bird’s eye view of their entire farms etched into the stone. Yesterday we saw one progressive grave marker depicting a blonde couple, both wearing Levi’s blue jeans, standing together on a beam of light being ushered into a small chapel in a wooded prairie scene. What was remarkable about this is that it was somehow done in color.

Last summer we discovered a couple in LeRoy Cemetery who had their small tract house, similar to Grandma & Papa’s home, depicted on their stone. I guess they are making the statement:
Look, this is where we lived, and it was good.

The worst ever is also in LeRoy. A couple in their mid-sixties has their most recent anniversary photo etched into the stone by an unskilled monument worker. It is hideous beyond belief. If I were among this couple’s progeny, I would have the thing removed and install a more tasteful headstone posthaste.

Vehicles are particularly popular. We’ve seen everything from Harley-Davidson motorcycles to VW Bugs memorialized in marble. Yesterday I saw a Chrysler PT Cruiser on the headstone of a 37 year old dead man. There are also a wide variety of shapes going into the grave stone concept these past five years or so. There is one in Funks Grove in the shape of a large book, complete with binding and a pages effect on top and right side.

The late-20th Century graves of young people are most interesting. Seems the parents of children and teens who tragically die are not content with the time-honored granite lambs and cherubs of old. They want something more relevant.

Hence, the grave in the Lexington cemetery of a 4 year old boy. The poor little dead kid has the Blues Clues dog forever carved into the center of his eternal marker. “This is my worldly resume,” says this kid to future generations, “I liked to watch Blues Clues on TV.”

Parents are also shameless in their capacity to eternally humiliate their dead teenage boys. Countless 16 year old car accident victims are memorialized with sappy and pathetic poetry writ large on the backs of their tombstones. Here’s an example from Lexington Cemetery.
Front of stone:
Shane Smith
1985-2001
(lots of decorations)
Back of stone:
"You are my son Shane,
My only son, Shane
You make me happy
When skies are grey
You'll never know, Shane
How much I love you
Please don't take my son Shane away."

Obviously a private little song mommy sang to Shane when he was little, and it certainly did make the tears well up in my eyes when I read it.

But do we really think 16 year old Shane would have wanted mom to broadcast it to all the world, for eternity?

Personally, I think Shane would die all over again from embarrassment every single time a girl from his school visits his grave. There is a bench graveside, so I’m sure lots of people visit young Shane. (The bench is chained down, which brings a whole other graveyard issue to mind, but I'll let that go for now.)

Having this sort of hobby makes one stop and think about how these things happen. I think it’s because people in a state of grief are not very good at thinking long-term. They’re thinking that somehow whatever they put on the grave marker is for the dead person, rather than for those who come along later.

It also makes me think about what I want my gravestone to look like. Nothing too fancy, but personalized for sure. No pre-fabricated religious symbols. I happen to believe that quite a few of the folks resting in peace under etched symbols of crosses and praying hands probably were no more religious than the rest of us, but their surviving family members just picked something out of a Monument Catalog of some sort. Many, many of the gravestones we’ve seen are clearly catalog ordered. Check out how often you see the joined wedding rings with “Together Forever” carved below. Yuck! What gravestones need, in my opinion, is more geneological information and less pre-fabricated crap.

I’ll try to make it a point to buy my headstone before I am "called away.”

That’s another thing I frequently see carved on people’s headstones- something about how they are not really dead, they’re just “away.” What the hell kind of bullshit is THAT? Does it mean you can leave a voicemail and expect they will call you back when they “return?” I hate those “he is but away…” carvings on people’s headstones. As if nobody wants to admit they’re dead. What is that? Some sort of way of dealing with it that allows you to pretend that Grandpa is just taking a little trip to the other side, but he’ll be in the office next Thursday? (He is “but away…”)

No, I think dead people are most likely gone for good; that’s the way it works around here as far as I can tell.
Maybe I'll have my gravestone say:
"I'm dead.
How are you?"

Just kidding. Sort of.

Much Love,
--Mom

(Here's an oldie from Rob's Korean tour of duty...)

December 26, 2001

Dear Rob,

I’ve been thinking about your recent interest in the social sciences

I think it’s important to keep ever in mind that sticking the words “social” and “science” together might not have been an entirely accurate way of expressing what all those psychologists, sociologists and various other “ists” are doing. Common sense went out the window when somebody wanted to get a kazillion dollar federal grant to watch people do stupid things. They had to stop shouting “Smile! You’re on Candid Camera!” and start referring to the exact same thing, sans commercials, as a groundbreaking psychological inquiry.

The kazillion dollar in federal grant money question is, of course, why people do stupid things. The answer, which will cost another gazillion tax dollars to discover, is really quite simple. (that’s why the ists can’t figure it out- it’s too easy for the overeducated mind to grasp)

The reason so many people do stupid things is because so many people are stupid. This may seem hard to believe because we all know quite a few smart people who persist in doing stupid things. Don’t be fooled into thinking there is some deeper significance in this: the simple fact remains that smart people do stupid things because beneath all those brand spanking new smart brain cells lie the original stupid cells every person, regardless of intellectual destiny, is supplied with at birth.

If you think about the actions of any newborn baby, you’ll realize I speak the truth here. Ever see a newborn grab a slide rule and calculate the distance between the planets? No, because newborns are equipped only with stupidity, which will plague them for the rest of their lives no matter how many social science courses they take at universities and community colleges.

That is not to say that social scientists are themselves stupid. No, you’ve got to be a pretty sharp scalpel to slice through all that governmental red tape, not to mention writing proposals worthy of grant-getting. The craft of persuasive and dignified begging may be a science in it’s own right and I find it amazing that most universities fail to pay homage to it with a degree program. (This could, in fact, be an opportunity area for the community colleges.)

Any decent social scientist worth his salt knows how to spin a common social irritant, such as angry, gesticulating motorists or the public display of drunken ex-family members, into the much more important (and fund worthy) “social problems” of road rage and homelessness. The really good social scientists have the statistics, and the tax dollars, to prove that they must be allowed to study these problems forever (or until tenure) so that a proper, but impossible, solution can be found just in time for them to comfortably retire to Palm Beach.

I think the whole science of social “ists” have dropped the ball and left the truly good stuff in the hands of their not-so-prestigious cousins in the hypnosis field. I mean think about it: a psychologist labors through years of study and academically induced poverty just to get a chance to NOT yell “Smile, you’re on Candid Camera!”

Yet your average hypnotist exerts power enough to make perfectly upright republican housewives do the Macarena in front of hundreds of atavistic county fairgoers without ever taking an SAT exam.

Don’t take the foregoing the wrong way; far be it from me to discourage your interest in the helpful (and potentially lucrative) field of psychology. There are far worse ideas floating around out there than dysfunctional families and penis envy. (but, please, let’s do put the fun back in dys-fun-ctional, and let’s remember that the commandment does NOT say
“Thou shalt not covet Russell Crowe’s ill-placed tube socks.” FYI.)

Perhaps the best psychological observation I can offer as a motivational tidbit comes in the form of a small measure of wisdom from my father, who said,
“Everyone is goofy except you and me, and I’m not too sure about you.”
Which just goes to show that there is not much risk of a work slow-down in the family counseling biz.

I still think the hypnotists have an as yet untapped corner on the crazy market. And no student loans to repay. Something to think about.

Love,
--Mom

September 13, 2003

Dear Rob,

Our basement remodel is coming along. We work on it almost every day. Actually, Rudy works on it almost every day. Personally, I find that smearing joint compound into drywall crevices doesn't meet my requirements for personal fulfillment quite as well as Lifetime Television for Women.

Josh, our carpenter, works like a squirrel. He runs around like crazy, always in a gigantic rush. He’ll show up and charge into the house like he’s on fire. Then he works like crazy, seemingly trying to cram eight hours of work into fifteen minutes. Suddenly he’ll announce, “Quittin’ time!” and drop whatever he’s carpentering in mid-carpent.

This work style alarms me. We’re not paying him by the hour, and I think working at light speed will cause him to make more and bigger mistakes.

At first, I tried everything I could to slow him down. I’d tell him we are in no big hurry. I’d stand on the stairs and make small talk. I’d offer him snacks and soft drinks. Every ten minutes or so, I’d ask him how it was going. I think my efforts may have backfired. Now he feels he needs to report to me his every move.

He pesters me more than I pestered him in the first place!

The only thing that slows him down at all is his cell phone and his wife. One Saturday his wife must have called 12 times. When she calls, he stops working and says things like:
“Hi, Sugar-Bunny! Okay. Okay. Mmhmm. I will. You too, Boompy-Cakes.”
Then he'd launch back into action until she called again five minutes later. Repeat.
He’s always very sweet and nice to her, and it drives me insane. I want to grab the phone out of his hand and tell her to fuck off.

On Thursday I came up with a new, improved Slow-Josh-Down plan. I paid him off. I figured he was in a rush because he needed to get done and get paid, so I wrote him a check and told him to calm down. Guess what happened? Ten minutes later he told me he needed to go get an o-ring for his compressor. I haven’t seen him since. I guess he’ll be back Monday.

I’m thinking of piping in relaxing zen harmonies and burning relaxing aroma-therapy candles throughout the house. Maybe I can slip a Xanax into his Coca-Cola Classic when he’s not looking. Worth a try.

Gotta get this in the mail before the mailman comes!

Much Love,

--Mom

October 8, 2003



Dear Captain S.,

Thank you SO MUCH for the wonderful Certificate of Appreciation you sent. It is absolutely thrilling! I LOVE IT! I framed it and I have been showing it off to all my friends and family. I have moved it three times already, from the family room to the dining room to the library. I’m just not sure where to place it to receive maximum exposure.

Initially, I framed the certificate and put your accompanying letter behind it for posterity. Then I kept having to take it all apart to show everyone the letter. Now I have decided to put the letter in a matching frame and display them together in a sort of museum motif.

I hope you will do your best to one day achieve the rank of Four Star General. That would further upgrade the value of my certificate. If you need me to write letters of recommendation to George W. Bush, or any future Commander in Chief, just let me know.

Now that I think of it, maybe you should try to get elected President of the United States at some point. That would be really great as far as the value of my Certificate of Appreciation is concerned. Also, I think you’d do a pretty good job in the White House. I think you can do the job as well as anybody else. (just delegate everything to a bunch of smart hard-workers and get a photogenic dog.)

Anyway, allow me to say again what a gigantic thrill it was to get the Certificate of Appreciation. I really appreciated it! (ha ha) While I am quite certain my friends and relatives are getting sick of the whole thing; who cares! I LOVE IT! You are my hero! (as well as being future President Four Star General S.!)

Much love and APPRECIATION,

--An Army Mom