Helping Injured Soldiers

     As I was flying from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh this evening, I started to flip through the US Air magazine.  On the next to last page was an article that caught my attention.  There was a picture of an American soldier, sitting in a wheelchair, having lost his legs as the result of an IED explosion.  The article was called Helping Heroes and was about how you can donate US Air frequent flier miles to any of 5 different organizations, one of which - Fisher House - was being featured in the article.

    Fisher House, I learned, is an incredible organization that helps the families of injured soldiers to visit them wherever they may be rehabbing or being treated.  Donated frequent flier miles are used to help fly these family members around the country so that they can be with their loved ones and support them through their recovery.  This seemed like a pretty darn good way to support our troops.

     When I finally got to my hotel this evening, I went on line to see how I could donate some miles.  It was pretty easy.  Just log into your US Airways account (I'm sure all airlines have similar programs) and then you can choose how many miles you want to donate and to whom.  Though all the organizations seemed absolutely worthy, I chose to donate some of my miles to Fisher House.  

     There are so many different ways we can all support our troops.  I was glad to discover (and act upon) yet another way.

Supporting Our Troops

     Today was my regular day to write to my adopted soldier in Afghanistan.  Knowing that I'd be doing some traveling, I brought paper and an already-addressed envelope with me on my vacation.  As usual, my note was filled mostly of small talk - news from the US, sports talk, etc.  To be honest, I feel a little "lame" writing such trivial things, but carrying on a totally one-sided conversation is proving to be somewhat of a challenge.  Hopefully I'll hear from him soon so that we can begin to engage in some back and forth dialogue.  If not, I'll have to keep reminding myself that any mail he receives is definitely better than no mail.

     The process of writing these weekly letters to an unknown and unseen person, with no feedback, has me thinking about the importance of discipline.  I think of discipline as the ability to get myself to do what I know I should do, even when I don't feel like doing it.  It requires a strong focus on the value of the goal.  In this case, I have total belief in the importance of our soldiers receiving mail to keep their spirits up and to know that they're appreciated.  I also believe strongly in the importance of honoring commitments.  As a condition of adopting a soldier, I made a commitment to write a letter every week throughout the rest of his deployment.  Even though I don't necessarily feel like writing, especially with no feedback, I'll continue to be steadfast in following through because it's important and becasue I said I would.  That's what discipline is all about.