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A gift of the Fourth of July at home

Jul- 1-2004 » Filed Under: Homefront

The following is a great article describing what one community has done for deploying soldiers.

[Link to Full Article]
By Kris Axtman, The Christian Science Monitor

BATON ROUGE, LA. – Kelsey Mire can locate Iraq on a globe. It took some practice, but the 5-year-old has it down. First, she finds her home state of Louisiana, then slowly twists the globe to the left, tracing her finger over a big white blob - the Pacific Ocean - and past a patchwork of shapes until she finds Iraq nestled half a world away from this Cajun country.

"That's where my daddy's going," she says, having found it proudly. "He's going to Iraq to make the whole world safe."

When her father, National Guardsman John Paul Mire, learned of his brigade's deployment this spring, he brought the globe home so Kelsey would always know where he was. But thanks to the citizens of his home state, Lieutenant Mire will have one more opportunity to see his family before being shipped overseas for 18 months.

Taking part in "Operation Independence Day," Louisiana residents donated over $300,000 so that these 3,000 soldiers could come home from Fort Hood, Texas, where they've been training for several months. The troops were recently granted leave over the July Fourth holiday and, while many could afford the trip, many could not. Now, anyone who wants to return can - and that's about 99 percent of them.


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