Though seemingly opposed in message, the two Web sites have more in common than a cursory glance might suggest–both were started by family members of deployed soldiers, each aims to serve as a support network for soldiers overseas and for the families who miss them.
Pamela Bates launched her adopt-a-soldier Hugs To Kuwait Web site from her home at Fort Benning, Ga., in January to show her support of her husband’s 200-man unit, the 110th Field Artillery Bravo Battery. “I’m absolutely proud of him that he would, even in the face of people protesting and speaking out against the military, still ask no questions when it was time to go,” Bates says of her husband, Sgt. Daniel Bates. “He packed up and said goodbye.” On an average day she says she receives an overwhelming 10,000 e-mails through her site and 1,100 letters from families, individuals and civic groups who want to “adopt” a soldier, which essentially entails taking on a deployed soldier as a pen pal, sending him or her letters and care packages.
“In my opinion, any time any of these guys or girls raise their hand and take an oath to serve our country they’re heroes right there, because they drop it and go,” says Bates, her gentle Southern accent breaking with emotion. “I only wish I could be over there. I’m sure I could find something to do.” Still, there are some who say she’s doing plenty at home–for the work she’s done through her adopt-a-soldier program, Bates will be presented with a special award on April 22 from Fort Benning’s commanding general, Paul Eaton.
But up in Boston, Nancy Lessin and her husband, Charley Richardson, say they are showing their support in a different way. They say they’re doing their part for Charley’s son Joe, an Arab-language radio specialist with the Marines, by demanding an end to a war they cannot endorse. “This distinction between supporting the war and supporting the troops–it makes no sense to us,” says Lessin, who with her husband launched the Web site Military Families Speak Out last November. “Everything that we are doing–from stopping a war from happening to stopping a war that has already happened–is supporting the troops.”
The MFSO Web site went up after Richardson tired of attempting to single-handedly halt the onset of war by meeting in person with Massachusetts Reps. Marty Meehan and Stephen Lynch and Sen. John Kerry. With attorney John Bonifaz, Richardson and Lessin, along with other parents of U.S. troops and six members of Congress, even went so far as to seek an injunction against President Bush on constitutional grounds. “If I saw my son get in a car with a drunk driver I wouldn’t stand and salute, I would do everything in my power to get them not to drive,” says Richardson. “There’s a person who’s drunk with power at the wheel. But not only is my son at risk–not only are the troops and not only the Iraqi people at risk–but the whole world is as risk with this notion of preemptive strike and a go-it-alone mentality.”
Lessin estimates that MFSO boasts 300 member families from across the country, six of which joined during the first night of U.S. bombing on Iraq. The growing community posts poems online and sends letters, attends protests together and shares e-mails from their soldiers.
For all the dissonance in their political messages, Hugs to Kuwait and Military Families Speak Out share a common cause: to show support for American soldiers, and provide a network for their families. Bates, Lessin and Richardson, who started their sites to help themselves cope with deployment, inadvertently launched a community of surfers in similar situations with nowhere else to turn. Visitors to Bates’s Web site receive information on what to include in care packages to their deployed loved ones and adopted soldiers (hint: lip balm and eye drops are more useful in desert sandstorms than playing cards and candy). And 1,100 miles to the north, Lessin and Richardson believe there is no better way to honor those fighting than by protesting the very reason for their absence. At a recent peace rally, says Lessin, “one veteran came up and hugged me and said ‘I wish my mother did that when I was in Vietnam’.” Despite their obvious differences, both sides can agree on one thing: they’ll sleep easier when their soldiers have come home.
