Socks for Soldiers
This is an as yet unpublished editorial I wrote about this incredible, but little known, group of people all across the country who support our military men and women overseas by knitting them socks, caps, and scarves. They’re called Socks for Soldiers. My wife Ruth is one of them and inspired me to write this. The fact that I haven’t been able to get anyone to publish it yet is a shame.
I drive an average of nearly 100 miles a day in my job for Washington County here in Oregon. I leave Warren in the morning in time to get to Hillsboro by 7:30am, get my case assignments, and then head off to see my psychiatric patients at the various hospitals around Portland. Then it’s back home to Warren at the end of the day, hopefully early enough to spend some quality time with my wife before heading to bed.
I encounter a lot of people on the road in those 100 miles. Some things never change. Like the text-messaging maniacs who can transition all three lanes of the Sunset Highway trying to shift to upper case on their keypad. Or the intellectually-challenged Hummer drivers who don’t understand that four-wheel drive may get them going 70 miles per hour on ice-covered roads, but won’t help them one bit in overcoming the inertia of what is essentially a two-ton Flexible Flyer when everyone in front of them suddenly stops.
But some things change, sometimes so gradually that we don’t notice them until we have an experience that makes us look for something, only to find that it’s not there anymore. An experience like the 4000th death of an American military member in Iraq. On the day the counter clicked past that number, I realized as I pulled into my driveway at 6:00pm that I hadn’t noticed a single car bearing a “We Support Our Troops” sticker all day.
Four years ago it was rare to see a car that didn’t have one. I’ll admit I personally despised the things, mostly because, as a retired Air Force Chief Master Sergeant, I knew that what our service members really needed was for the American people to share the burden of being at war. Not by taking up arms, but by doing the things within our power–to volunteer our time, to cut back on our use of natural resources, and to back up our mouths with our pocketbooks by paying more taxes, if necessary.
But none of that happened. As we continued to live our lives without feeling any real impact from the war, as the death count moved from the front page into the deeper sections of our newspapers, and as bad news in Iraq was replaced by bad news in the economy, the initial intensity of our expressions of gratitude for their sacrifice gradually faded. Over time, the strength of the magnets holding those yellow ribbons on our cars faded as well. And when they finally fell off, we weren’t even looking.
Just as my faith in this country’s compassion was fading, though, my wife Ruth restored it. She had recently joined an on-line group called Socks for Soldiers (http://groups.yahoo.com/group/SOCKFORSOLDIERS/) and quickly located two other local members, Ruth McCabe and Rae Blank. The three immediately became the best of friends. And when I finally followed their advice and joined the group myself, I found something more valuable and touching than all the yellow ribbons on cars I’d ever seen.
I learned that Ruth, Ruth, and Rae were part of a network of 1400 dedicated people across the country. Led by the group’s founder, Kim Opperman, whose son Tom serves in the Air Force, the members pool their resources to show the troops that someone remembers them—not with tiny cheap magnets on gas-guzzling SUVs, but with something magically personal—hand knitted socks and hats sent to them in the field in unsolicited packages.
Their work has prompted a flood of personal letters of gratitude, tape-recorded thank you messages, and pictures and videos of troops wearing what would seem, on the surface, to be the most insignificant of gifts. But seeing their faces, reading their words, and hearing their voices leaves no doubt that what they wanted and needed from the rest of us wasn’t much at all—simply that we remember that they’re all serving, and far too often, dying in our stead.
And that being able to curl up at night in some treacherous, lonely, and frightening place, warmed by something made just for them by someone they never met, is the kind of personal connection that ties them to us forever.
