There's an article cited today on the consistently excellent IAVA blog that's well worth reading -- and celebrating! -- about one John Powers, 23 years old, formerly of Cumberland, RI, a non-veteran/private citizen, who created what sounds like an extraordinarily helpful, and exhaustive veteran's resource guide, as a testament to a veteran friend in need. Woo hoo! Here's a link to the Veterans Task Force in Rhode Island, but it's strangely silent about the guide, although ideally in the future there will be more info forthcoming from them on it. My sense is everyone is gonna want one of these!
Powers' fantastic, selfless work brings to mind the alleged Abraham Lincoln quote, to wit: "Honor...to the citizen who cares for his brother in the field, and serves, as best he can, the same cause." To that we might add, the brother or sister in the field, or returned home from same.
It's as good a time as any, then, to mention some of the other do-gooding efforts by other individuals and organizations on behalf of veterans, some of which have gotten less fanfare than others. They include: Homes for Our Troops -- building and remodeling specially adapted homes for the most severely wounded of our veterans, like triple-amputee Joey Bozik and his wife, Jayme, who consistently blogged about his recovery; Helmets to Hardhats -- finding construction jobs for returning veterans; the Wound
ed Warrior Project -- providing disabled sports opportunities for veterans; Quilts for Soldiers -- quilted comfort for veterans and their families; Sew Much Comfort -- volunteers sewing adaptive clothing for injured, hospitalized and rehabilitating troops; and the adorable Jessica Porter's project, begun as a teenager, Operation Homefront Quilts (see also this link) -- a way to make sure every returning veteran's service is honored. There's also the Minnesota organization, CaringBridge, which provides informational websites free of charge to injured vets (among others) and their families, to keep people posted on their conditions. And in case all this do-gooding is too hard on the eyes, there's the fundraising calendar of Freedom is Not Free -- featuring the hunkadelic, practically NSFW cover pic of Rudy Reyes, formerly seen with a few more clothes on, in Nate Fick's fantastic book, "One Bullet Away: the Making of a Marine Officer" (see sidebar).
