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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Tuesday, July 26, 2005

Troops could use support in writing

by brian mcinnis
Advertiser Staff Writer


OPERATION UPLIFT

You may send letters of support to Hawai'i National Guard troops deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan or to other military people. Addresses will be posted beginning Monday on the Hawai'i National Guard Web site, www.dod .state.hi.us. For more information, call 733-4258.
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If letters to troops are anything like bags of rice, the Hawai'i National Guard will soon have more than it knows what to do with.

Operation Uplift, a new Guard program that asks people to write letters of support to its 2,200 citizen-soldiers deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan, is scheduled to begin Monday.

The primary recipients will be members of the 29th Brigade Combat Team in Iraq, where most Hawai'i-based Guard personnel are deployed, said Maj. Chuck Anthony, Guard public affairs officer.

"(It's) just to let people know that they're not forgotten," Anthony said. "It lets them stay focused and let them know that the folks at home are behind them."

The last time the Guard put out a call for aid — it reported in June that there was a severe "sticky-kine rice" shortage among its troops in Baghdad — local residents responded by sending more than 7,000 pounds of rice.

"The community really came forth on that," said JoAnne Yamamoto, Family Program director for the Guard. "We've gotten letters back from (the soldiers), saying they've got their rice, and thank you to the community."

Yamamoto estimates that the Guard received three pallets' worth of rice in all, and that didn't include donations mailed directly to soldiers. A pallet contains about 120 20-pound bags, she said.

Anthony said that the morale boost from the letters would be especially important now that the soldiers are at the midpoint of their one-year deployment.

Letter-writers need not personally know the soldiers.

"Just anybody at all who wants to help make the day of a soldier overseas," Anthony said. "Because the guard is a community-based organization, we have this close affinity."

While the guard can't release names of specific soldiers for citizens to write to, people can direct their letter to go to a certain type of soldier — say, somebody from Kaua'i or a soldier in the 100th Battalion.

The local support for the last project was so large that the troops still have lots of rice to enjoy more than a month after the initial call went out.