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Warrior comes home and meets his pen pals

Dec-27-2006 » Filed Under: 172nd SBCT

By STEVE MARRONI, Daily Record

Dec 27, 2006 — Mary Bankert could not have asked for a better gift.

Her son is home for the holidays, and he's safe. On a stage in front of a gym full of singing and cheering elementary school students, her son, Sgt. Will Worthington, smiled ear-to-ear, pumped an American flag proudly in the air and wrapped an arm around her as she willed away the tears of joy.

And Worthington, 22, could not have asked for a better homecoming. He was just happy to see green grass.

Worthington spent 16 months as an infantryman in Iraq, serving in Mosul, Baghdad and Tal Afar. The Hanover native returned home Dec. 15 and paid a visit recently to some special pen pals. Students at Clearview Elementary in Hanover wrote volumes of letters to Worthington and mailed care packages to him throughout his deployment.

He and the kids met for the first time at the school assembly.

"It was really nice to get packages and letters from home," Worthington said. "It was heart-warming."

His mother is a Spanish-to-English translator for the Hanover Public School District. One of the teachers Bankert works with, Karla Brezniak, talked to her students about Iraq and about her co-worker's son serving in there.

Brezniak incorporated Iraq into some of her lessons and had pupils find the country on a map as they learned about Worthington and what a Hanover graduate and his fellow soldiers are doing for both Iraq and for the United States.

"It was good for them to make this connection," she said. "This is someone who went to their school. They know his mother, and it made everything going on in Iraq more personal." [...]


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