How You Can Support Our Troops

All our troops ask is to be remembered. How will you remember them?

What You Can Do Directly

What you can do to support our troops directly is contact your local National Guard, or Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Reserve Center. They're in the phone book. Or you can call your local USO center or Red Cross office.

You can donate money to the Red Cross or the USO to help provide troops with personal items and other things they have a tough time getting. You can also work with these agencies to organize drives to collect items and get them shipped.

You can donate calling cards so troops can call home when they get a chance.

You can donate your frequent flier miles to the Fisher House Foundation so families of injured or ill troops can fly to the base at which their loved one is hospitalized. You can also donate money to the Fisher House Foundation. (Please see my previous post for more details at the above link).

You can locate families of deployed personnel in your area through reserve centers and churches (check in your own congregation) and help those families in any way you can, from helping to buy groceries and clothing, mowing the lawn, fixing something around the house or even baby-sitting if it's someone you know. Families of deployed troops are often in need of some kind of help and support. Be a shoulder to cry on or a sympathetic ear if nothing else.

Help your child's class find a platoon to correspond with and organize a letter-writing campaign or help them organize their own Red Cross or USO drive.

Help their class find a local military family in their school or district to adopt. Depending on age and level of commitment a single class could adopt a few families.

The families with the greatest needs are those with severely injured personnel or those who have lost a loved one. Those families need our support over the long-term. They need financial, household, emotional, and spiritual support. They will need help sending children through college or even providing for them on a daily basis in the short-term. A lost mom or dad often means a severe cut in income to the family, and if there wasn't sufficient life insurance, that family will need your help the most. Severely injured troops need help recovering, getting new training and finding a new career that suits their abilities if they are able to work again.

Know Someone Who Is Deployed?

If you know someone who is deployed, get his/her address and write to them as often as you can. Even if it's just a post card that says thank you for serving, or I miss you, or I'm praying for you, or please come home safe, or I love you and I look forward to seeing you; it helps them feel connected to their families and friends. They need to know we're here for them and thinking of them.

If you want them to be able to write you back easily, send supplies for them to use like post cards, sheets of address labels with your address pre-printed on them, writing paper, envelopes, stamps and pens. They won't have much time to write back to you, but know that even if you don't hear from them often, they are thankful every time they get something in the mail from you. Make that happen often, daily if you can. And don't be surprised when they come home with all the letters and post cards everyone sent to them. Family and friends also keep the letters they receive from their deployed loved ones. Many keep them for a lifetime and hand them down to their children.

The letters and post cards to and from a deployed military member are the real stories of war, and they can become books and articles about a particular conflict. Some may even make it into the history books.

What will you do personally to make a difference?

See the video slideshow at http://beingthechangeiwishtosee.com