I love email.
With email, there's no muss and no fuss. No paper or pens. No envelopes or stamps to lick. No waiting upteen days for your letter to get to where it's going and or waiting upteen days to get back a reply.
With email, all you have to do is log on, type it, send it, and they've got it. Got it in an instant no matter where in the world your "they" might happen to be. And this is especially wonderful if you're one of the many Americans presently corresponding with friends and loved ones serving in our Armed Forces in combat zones overseas.
With Veterans Day fast approaching, it is of the utmost importance that we here in the safety of our own homes take time to remember the sacrifices our countrymen and women in arms have made for us all. Men and women who sleep with one eye open every night lest our enemies catch them unawares.
I recently received a picture through the email of a dear friend is one in one of those combat zones as we speak and this picture pretty well sums up what I'm talking about. One of her buddies snapped the picture while she and her platoon were stretched out to catch a few winks on the sands of what would appear to otherwise be on the shore of some exotic beach. It shows my friend all dressed up in full combat gear, helmet and all, laid back and spraddled out in a peaceful slumber while at the same time cradling a fully loaded, fully automatic M-16 rifle in her lap.
And you thought you had trouble sleeping.
It's because of people like my friend that I've always stood in awe of our American fighting personnel. These are people who've had the courage and guts to wade into Hell on earth for our sake and who've lived through and seen horrors the depth of which we home bound Americans can never fully know even when those who have been they tell us about them or show us the pictures.
It's even harder for me to grasp that while on the same night my friend was sleeping with that machine gun resting gingerly in her lap I was most likely sleeping lazily in my hammock with my toothless old dog Millie by my side.
In one of her last emails, my friend demonstrated all of the qualities that make American troops so great and so dear to us all. In between her comments on how I live at High Grass Manor and the people where she's at in live in mud huts and at No Grass Manor, and about how she loves the native children who give the thumbs up sign as her convoy drives by, and about how she's learning to drink coffee even though it's vanilla flavored so she can be a good civilian cop when she comes home, she threw in a quick line that didn't quite fit in with the light banter of all the rest. It is a line that seems to have been added more as a quick closing aside than anything else and though this line shows no fear, or real concern on the part of the writer, it quickly demonstrates to this reader the grim reality and dangers of war that my friend and her comrades in arms are facing every day they're away from us.
The line read simply this, "Well, we got mortared again today, it goes on about every other day around here and I always just pray they don't come close and so far so good."
The email is then ended with the word "Later!", punctuated in a way that indicates that even though my friend in a place where mortar fire is seemingly treated as a minor routine annoyance, her spirits her high, her moral is good, and she and those with her are determined to succeed in their mission for freedom.
It reminded me too that this correspondence wasn't with a friend in an office across town or in a suburban American home, but rather with a friend in the middle of a very real war. A war that exists while I sit in the safe office and live in the safe home only because of the bravery and courage of American troops like my friend and those with her, and those who have gone before her.
Be sure to remember my friend and all our troops in your prayers each night before you turn off your lights to go to sleep. Ask God to protect them and to send them all home safe. And thank God for them.
