Resurrection Church in Portsmouth is sponsoring the sew-in next Tuesday, and they gener0usly offered me a booth at their Fall Festival to promote Operation PFP this past weekend. I brought all the small ACU key fobs with me, set up a booth with Nick’s picture on it (I swear, my Soldier is SO handsome!) and some info about the project. Folks stopped by all day long to either buy a key chain, drop a few dollars in the pot, or tell me about their own troop.

So, now we have a little more money for shipping, and we might even snag a few  volunteers from that booth. Thank you, Eleanor!

Until Tuesday then…HOOAH!!!

One of the boxes contains the 12,000th PFP we’ve made and shipped; kinda sounds like alot — until I remember that we have about 100,000 American troops still in Afghanistan, and as they return home, replacements are sent to take their places.

The current administration is talking about withdrawal sometime in ’14…not soon enough for me.

In the meantime, we will continue working to let these young men and women know that we will not forget them.

Several weeks ago, we shipped several hundred field pillows to this regiment, and we couldn’t have done it without the support of the Churchland Lions Club.

Hello Operation Field Pillow!

Attached is a picture of me.  What you can’t see is the fact that I am sitting on one of your fine pillows.  You see, the seats in a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle are not too comfy and the pillow is perfect for taking the edge off.  Several Soldiers use it for the same reason.  We also take them on our overnight trips driving all over Iraq for when it is time to hit the hay.  So, on behalf of my unit, I wanted to thank you for your hard work that went into making all of those.  I know it wasn’t
easy…just please know that the guys got a kick out of them, they were distributed to Soldiers, and that they are being used.  You’re great Americans!

CPT BRIAN M GALLAVAN

Thanks so much, Brian, for taking your time to write! Your friends and families miss you all; and please know that you are not forgotten.

The first wave of boxes has been shipped, and more will be on the way as soon as we know where to send them. The small box you see on the top is headed to Afghanistan, to our adopted Soldier, Daniel Pena (he’s in Kandahar with the 4th Infantry Division). I heard from a Chaplain with the 3-71 CAV that there were lots and lots of Soldiers who could use a little support from home. He sent me a list of 11 young troops, and I sent the list out to all the PFP volunteers; before 24 hours passed, each of those troops had someone back home to stand up for him.

If you’d like to adopt a Soldier, please just drop me an email or leave a comment.

I spoke to the Churchland Lions Club a few weeks back, and had the chance to talk to a Virginia National Guard dad. He told me his son, along with nearly 1,000 of his closest buddies, is headed to Iraq for a year, and asked if Operation PFP would ship the Guardsmen field pillows. Of course we will!

During the latest sew-ins at Church of the Resurrection and the Beazley Senior Center (both in Portsmouth) we made nearly enough field pillows for every Guardsman from Virginia. The next sew-in is scheduled in 2 weeks, and there won’t be any problem at all finishing enough for all these soldiers.

Here are eight boxes, tightly packed with hundreds of field pillows, ready for pickup — a total of 121.6 pounds. All the boxes are headed for companies with the 2nd Battalion, 87th Infantry Regiment, 3rd BCT, 10th Mountain Division.

Great job, friends! Can’t wait for the next sew-in!!!

I wish our newspapers practiced this concept more.

Hearing from our guys is always such a treat for me; I know this particular commanding officer would rather write his family, yet he took the time to send a letter that I thought I’d share:

Thank you so much for your generous gift for my Soldiers of ACU pillows. They really enjoyed getting them since almost all of them forgot to bring pillows in their kit bags. Every Soldier received one, and we even had a couple left over.

Thank you again for your support, thoughts, and prayers. Living on a [small] outpost so far from home can get lonely, but you brought us a touch of home, and that makes a world of difference to our Soldiers.

Thank you, Jeffrey, for taking the time to write us. Please come home safely, and know that we will not forget you.

In short, any contribution allows us to ship boxes of handmade pillows to American troops spread out all over Afghanistan nearly 8,000 miles away from home. Any contribution helps us ship handmade travel pillows to wounded troops airlifted out of Landstuhl, Germany.

Any every contribution helps us to remind our troops that they are not forgotten.

To all those HRCMOAA members who welcomed me so warmly today, and who listened attentively to one Army mom passionate about the welfare of our troops, thank you all. And if you, or someone you know, wants to know more about MOAA, please visit their website to learn more.

Even as I was lamenting our low funds over the past week or so, someone was stroking a check. And not just one someone, either.

In all, a total of five checks have rolled in during the last week. I spoke to members of Delta Kappa Gamma in Portsmouth a few weeks back — 2 checks came in. Barb Gray, my friend in NJ, rang to say that Linda Weissman’s group had another donation for us and, oh yeah, there’s another group at school (Matawan-Aberdeen Middle School) that wants to help, too. In roll 2 more checks.

Then my good friend, Kimberly Benton (a fellow gym rat) drops off another check from the kids at Covenant UMC – and tells me the kids are ready to stuff pillows again after church.

Now that the 3rd BCT has deployed, we’ve just received names & numbers of troops from our contacts back at FT Drum. Six boxes were shipped yesterday, and another 5 go out tomorrow. All we need is another 400 field pillows finished to send one to every soldier in 2-87 IN, and then we’ll start shipping to 1-32 IN (my son’s battalion). And all those checks will go toward shipping all those boxes.

And that’s why I don’t lose a whole lot of sleep when we’re low on funds. Because there’s more at work here than just us.

I’m not a PR guy, and I don’t know much about fund raising. Several months ago, I spent an entire Saturday afternoon scouring the web looking for email addresses for members of Masonic lodges in Virginia. Then I spent the next day typing a letter, merging the letter with the names and addresses I found for lodge members; spent $50 in postage, mailed all the letters and waited.

And waited.

And waited some more.

Now, I certainly can’t blame anyone who received one of these letters and circular filed it; they don’t know me, we’ve never met, they haven’t been at a local church when we’ve been stuffing field pillows, they have no clue if our project is genuine. So that’s one idea I didn’t implement twice…ditto with my email campaign.

So if you’re reading and have any suggestions, or have a contact with any of the groups below (it really helps if you’ve had actual face time), please let me know.

• Masons
• Lions Club
• American Legion
• MOAA
• Sons of the American Revolution
• National Sojourners
• Military Order of the Purple Heart
• NRA
• Moose Lodges
• Elks Lodges
• Rotary
• JayCees
• Knights of Columbus

For now, it’s back to watching our pennies dwindle; there’s a small group of high school girls who want to stuff pillows this weekend, and there’s another sew-in at Resurrection church in 3 weeks.

It’s been really odd that whenever we’ve been down to our last 20 bucks or so, something happens. I don’t know what it is, but someone somewhere will mention Operation Pocket Field Pillow to someone else, and that someone else tells the friend of a friend, and they tell their neighbor who mentions it to her hairdresser, and the money just sort of appears. So I won’t get my knickers in a twist. At least, not yet.