Team,
I hope that this note finds you well. We’ve had a great week getting ready to start pushing socks to our friends forward, as well as having had an opportunity to visit with old friends at the stumps and even making a couple of new ones! In any case, we’ve got a lot of great things to report.
As always, I’d like to thank all of you who have taken the time to help us with our mission by either sending a donation, or signing up to shoot or taking a sponsorship in our upcoming “Socks For Heroes Invitational” fundraising event on 11/14. We’re grateful for your continued support which enables us to help the men and women forward.
With that in mind, our socks are supposed to show up next week, and the first 10,000 pair are already spoken for and we are already through 30% of the 10,000 pair showing up the next week. We’ve heard a lot from the men and women who receive them, and they are more than glad we’re back in business. We’ve got two Infantry Battalions, a Marine Aviation unit and a collection of Coalition Advisers in Iraq that can’t wait until I let them know that boxes are inbound.
Thanks to all of you who make it possible.
A lot of you who have been with us for a while have heard us talk about our friends who are stationed at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in 29 Palms. Where Camp Pendleton is located next to the ocean, Twenty-Nine Palms is in the middle of the Mojave Desert. It is affectionately (at least that’s what they say it is) known as “The Stumps”.
While some would view it as a hardship posting (our friend the SGTMAJ tells new arrivals, that to enjoy 29 Palms, they have to go past the superficial and “look deep”), there is a strong sense of community making for a tight group.
We enjoy going out there as for the Marines, 29 Palms is like a beach near the currents of a couple of oceans, everybody washes up there on a regular basis. It’s always a treat that whenever we go out there, we always look forward to the opportunity of seeing old friends.
We were out there this week, keeping up a tradition that we’ve been doing for the past three years, of taking the remaining socks from the STANCE Camp Pendleton Military Family Appreciation Sale out for the families there. We had so many socks we weren’t able to just use our van and needed to rent a truck. I wasn’t sure if we wouldn’t be bringing boxes back.
As always, we launch our effort and wait to see what the day brings.
One of our friends who is a former 1/5 alumnus, was given orders to act as the 1stSGT of an Artillery Battery for 3rd Battalion, 11th Marines. Their weapon of choice is the 155MM howitzer and their nickname is “Gods of Thunder”. If you haven’t seen an artillery crew at work sending shells down range, you should go onto YouTube and do so. We’ve seen it in person and it’s awe-inspiring to watch a team of Marines loading and sending shells downrange at an average of 3-4 a minute.
We supported his battery during his last deployment and were happy to do so. We didn’t expect what happened next.
We tell our friend we are coming out and he asks if we need some help, as we’ve grown older, we’ve quit saying no. We say sure, expecting to see him at the site. When we get there, we are greeted by a working party of 11 Marines who are all set and ready to go. With their help, our set up is as fast as we’ve ever experienced. We open on time and the families start going through the tables looking for their socks.
I notice that the Marines are still sitting in a group and I ask them what they are doing, and the reply is, “we are here for the duration.” I smile and tell them, we aren’t going to need any help until 1, so go take the morning off and we’ll see you then. However, a couple of Marines decide to stick around.
One of whom is a tall, lanky Corporal who puts $20 in the can, takes a bag, and then fills it up. A few minutes later his phone rings, he puts $40 in the can, takes two bags and then fills them up. The process repeats continuously for the next hour and a half, I kid him about it and he says, “There are guys at the barracks who couldn’t come, I’m getting socks for them”.
During the lull, I strike up a conversation with the young Corporal. He was born in Jamaica and emigrated to the US when he was 19. He was in the country for less than three months and then joined the Marine Corps. He is just back from deployment and has signed up for another 4 years. I ask him if he’d gotten some of the socks we had sent to the battery and he said yes, and that they had come in handy. He told us that some of the units that they were attached to didn’t have the good fortune to have them but that we had loaded them down enough that they were willing to share. He tells me that through the Marine Corps he was able to achieve American citizenship. His new orders are in, he will be leaving the desert to provide security at US embassies.
Meeting him made my day.
We also got the opportunity to see old friends who take a few minutes away from their duties to come out and say hello. It’s difficult to greet each other in our customary fashion of a handshake or a hug maintaining social distancing requirements, but one more time we are overwhelmed by the kindness of these men and their families who take time out of their busy days to make us feel appreciated.
The families and Marines come and go. Our sock pile dwindles and almost disappears. Whatever we have left, we give to the Marines to take home to their buddies at the barracks. We bid good-bye to our friends old and new and make the 3-hour drive home.
Over the course of the day, we received a coin from the Battalion Commander of the Artillery Battalion. This morning as I got ready to write our update, I read it. It has an inscription that says the following:
“God fights on the side of those with the best Artillery. God fights with Third Battalion”
A small reminder that it’s not always the people who are the front lines who win the fight. It’s often the people behind who make the difference.
This is how it’s always been for us. We get the credit, but we couldn’t do it without you.
If you haven’t made a donation lately, please take a moment to go to http://socks4heroes.org and help us with our mission. If you live in the greater Southern California Area, come out and join us or take a sponsorship for the 11/14 Socks for Heroes Invitational. You can register at http://socksforheroes.org/events
Thanks for joining us in our position in this fight.
Jim Hogan
In memory of our son, LCPL Donald Hogan
Posthumously awarded the Navy Cross
KIA 8/26/2009 Nawa, Afghanistan
We honor his memory by caring for Americans wherever they serve in harm’s way.