Plucky Letters to US soldiers in Iraq

February 25, 2005

Dear Army Guys,

I spend a lot of time wondering what you guys are doing at Fort Stewart, GA.

I can clearly picture groups of about a dozen of you running to and fro while wearing heavy backpacks and sweating copiously. I see you climbing massively constructed timber ladders that lead nowhere but up. I imagine you driving around in doorless humvees which leave choking plumes of red Georgia dust in your wakes. My imagination is unable to provide me with any idea of where you’re going, but I figure you’ve got to get there in a hurry.

I assume you often gather in tightly ordered formations to stand around looking fierce and ready. (For the record, it’s a good look, and would scare the bejeezus out of our terrorist enemies, had they the sense they were born with.)

It is remarkably easy for me to imagine you in a mess hall, eating boisterous meals at long, noisy tables, much like the children at the grade school where I serve as a Lunch Lady. I have a hard time imagining your barracks, however, since I was not allowed to enter the one and only barracks I’ve visited in my son’s Army career. Rudy and Dylan were able to go in and take a look around, but I had to wait outside due to the archaic gender rules enforced at Fort Campbell, KY. (Far be it from me, the person who GAVE BIRTH to this soldier, to view his living arrangements! Somebody in charge at Fort Campbell is apparently unable to distinguish between the completely unrelated conditions of being “female,” and being “Mom.”)

I fill my mental barracks blank by imagining the Girl Scout camp I attended the summer I was 11. I am hopeful that conditions at Fort Stewart are better than at Camp Peairs, which consisted of damp platform tents peopled by cruelly adolescent girls guilty of throwing one another’s hair brushes into the primitive latrines. I also fervently hope there is no poison ivy growing anywhere in the vicinity of Camp Stewart. I got a dreadful case of it that summer at Girl Scout camp and I would not wish it upon my worst enemy; not even the wicked girl who threw my hairbrush into the latrine.

I try to imagine you at meetings because my son says you have them. It’s difficult to get a mental image of an Army meeting. In my experience, a “meeting” is characterized by disgruntled, uncooperative business people sitting around bitching about their easy jobs while some poor bastard makes a fool attempt to get them to care about things that nobody in his right mind could possibly care about.

In my imagination, an Army meeting takes place in a tent, and includes lots of maps and one of those pointer sticks which the guy in charge uses to point to various important locations on the maps. The soldiers involved are able to memorize everything without taking notes, and everyone present looks intelligent and profoundly interested. As I look around my imaginary Army meeting scene, I become increasingly certain that someone in that tent is a communist spy! (Perhaps I’ve watched a few too many hours of History Channel programming.)

I also imagine you marching on wheel-rutted rural roads between fields of cotton with one of those little drummer boys tagging along. I realize there aren’t any little drummer boys in the Army anymore, but I can’t resist the pure iconic romanticism of the image. If I were in the Army, I’m quite certain I would be the little drummer boy.

“What do I, a little drummer boy, have to offer?” I would ask. And the rat-a-tat-tat of my little drum would accompany you, my heroes, into the annuls of history.

Pah-rum-pa-bum-pum! Boy, I sure hope there’s a parade when you guys come home!

Much Love and Pride,
--An Army Mom