Broken mail: A soldier’s Christmas story
Note: This was an article I wrote for the Chicago Tribune in 2003
This story, with a little embellishment appropriate for all war stories, starts in Saudi Arabia in 1990 during Desert Storm, several weeks before Christmas. We were an infantry heavy task force of about 950 men living in tents. We had been in the desert for four months and were quite used to the flies, the heat, and then the cold as winter set in, not to mention the bad food.
We didn’t mind. The uglier it was, the nobler we felt for being there.
But we could not get used to the lack of mail from home.
As I went around the battalion, that was the only complaint I ever got from the troops. Complaining up the chain of command resulted in responses from the rear that the mail handlers were processing four times the amount of mail required on a given day. They were lauded by the brass for being such stalwart souls in their efforts to take care of the front line. “So quit bitching, the mail ain’t broke,” was the response from the rear.
But the mail surely was broke.
About this time one of my company’s first sergeants came to me and said that he had a detail of soldiers who wanted to volunteer to go back to help with the mail. On the surface this sounded reasonable, but I had never experienced a first sergeant volunteering for anything. I was looking for the catch.
I also wanted to know how the troops would know where to go, whom to report to, and so forth. The first sergeant told me not to worry, that a man I remember as Staff Sgt. Smith from first platoon had found out all the information needed and was leading the detail and had also volunteered. My antennae really went up at this point.
Smith was the meanest sergeant in the battalion, if not the Army. He never smiled, he never joked, he just smoked his cigarettes and looked at you with his hard, judging eyes.
And it wasn’t that Smith was mean to his soldiers; he wasn’t. He was just hard and unrelenting. There were no soft edges and everything was always business, and the business was war and all the things you do to prepare for war 24/7 in Smith’s view. I told the first sergeant I would only approve this adventure after I had spoken to Smith.
Smith reported with his usual unsmiling face and a sharp salute. I told him to relax, which he did not do because the proper command is to “be at ease,” so I had to tell him, “Be at ease, Sgt. Smith” in order for him to move from his position of attention. Even then, he only went to parade rest. I decided that was the best I was going to get, so I asked Smith why he was volunteering to go sort mail and work for a bunch of clerks in the rear.
“Sir, I’m running low on smokes.”
Now that made sense. Unless you smoked one of a few overpriced brands carried by the makeshift PX we set up in a tent, your cigarettes came from home via mail. I understood immediately because that was how I was getting my cigarettes and I too was running low.
Yes, this was a worthwhile project after all and I now understood all the newfound volunteerism going on. I gave the venture my blessing and told Smith to watch the troops like hawks around the female clerks back in the rear. I didn’t want to get any reports of lewd remarks or other inappropriate behavior like leering and ogling from his men. I was trying to make a joke, but I should have known better. All I got was a laconic, “I’ll make sure they behave, sir.” I wished Smith luck and told him to be back in two weeks, which would be Christmas Eve.
We got several reports from the troops back sorting the mail during that first week. The first of which was to explain why we had tons of Christmas cookies from people we didn’t even know and almost no personal mail.
(The Christmas cookies were a huge hit initially with the troops until they tired of them and began to feed them to the local camels. This marriage between east and west caused its own problems as a result of the camels becoming quite familiar with us. We learned that if a camel thinks you have cookies in your tent and you’re holding out on him, he will come into the tent despite the lack of sufficient headroom.)
The troops would rather have had their personal mail and dispense with the cookies. The explanation of why so many cookies and so little mail was quite simple: Many well-meaning souls back in the States put out the word that you could send stuff to the troops even if you didn’t know any of them personally by sending the packages addressed to “Any soldier” and the Army Post Office address in Saudi Arabia.
This resulted in hundreds of tons of packages, cards and letters being sent to the theater by fellow Americans who were just trying to brighten a soldier’s day. And all those packages overwhelmed the mail system and lowered morale. The mail clerks quickly learned that they were being judged on quantity and not quality, so they would fill unit mail trucks and sacks with “Any soldier” mail, because it did not require sorting.
All personal mail that came in had to be sorted by hand, which was tedious and took forever to do right.
And to make matters worse, when Smith and his reinforcements arrived, the first sergeant for the mail clerks told them just to load every truck with Any Soldier mail ASAP because he wanted to exceed his earlier record for amount of mail moved in a day.
Ignoring that edict to the best of their ability, Smith and company waded through hundreds of tons of mail, getting the battalion’s mail sorted out. Smith was rumored to have come close to a smile when he and his boys sent back the first truckload of real mail.
We got a truckload a day, and it was hugely welcomed. Smith and his troops were all cheered when they returned to the battalion on Christmas Eve. The only unhappy folks were the camel herd, because the Christmas cookie supply had almost dried up.
They had to go back to eating thorn bushes again, which was just as well because we knew we had to move out for the war right after Christmas and we wouldn’t have wanted to leave them in a deep sugar crash.
Christmas Eve was colder than normal. We didn’t know it, but the coldness presaged a coming sandstorm that would hit Christmas Day and almost ruin the great dinner we were to have.
I couldn’t sleep as I thought about my wife and five kids back home. As was the case for most of my soldiers, this was my first Christmas away from home since coming into the service. I was restless so I decided to walk around the battalion lines and talk to the soldiers pulling sentry duty on this cold winter’s night.
All the troops were pretty upbeat. They were looking forward to the big meal planned for the next day and they were all happy to have received mail from home. As if to punctuate my thoughts on Smith, I bumped into him.
He was coming out of a tent and looking around to see if anyone was looking. He pretended not to recognize me in the dark, but the desert moon was too bright for that.
I greeted him with a “Merry Christmas, Sgt. Smith” because it was just a few minutes into the new day. He mumbled, “Merry Christmas, sir. Just checking the fire guards. Gotta go now. Bye, sir.” And off he went. I continued on for several more feet before I realized that we had no stoves, and therefore no fire guards detailed to take turns watching the stove to make sure the tent didn’t burn down, but when I turned, Smith was gone. I continued my stroll among the sentries for another hour or so before I finally went to bed, all the while wondering what Smith had been up to. I found out later at the chow tent.
Smith’s first sergeant came up to me all smiles and wishing me a Merry Christmas. He said he had something to tell me and the command sergeant major, so we went outside. The first sergeant was almost giggling as he told us that Smith had delivered a Christmas stocking full of stuff to each of his soldiers while they were sleeping last night.
Smith vehemently denied it but was getting ribbed unmercifully by all the other NCOs for being a softy after all, which made him both very indignant and very profane. The troops were ecstatic over the gifts. Those who dipped got their favorite snuff, those who smoked got their favorite cigarettes, and those who did neither got their favorite candy or sports magazine or whatever.
Only Smith could have done the gifts to each soldier’s tastes and in a stocking with their name or nickname embroidered on it. That explained the skulking Smith from the dark hours earlier. Smith being human after all, this was a subject for great merriment.
I laughed, too, before going looking for Smith.
He was sitting, as usual, by himself. I sat down, quiet for a while. I finally said, “You know, Smitty, that was a damn nice thing to do for your troops last night when I saw you, and oh, by the way, we don’t have any fire guards.”
Smith kept eating but didn’t look at me as he mumbled, “Sir, it was my wife’s idea. She sent all the stuff. I just delivered it, that’s all.” He kept eating and I waited in vain for more. There was no more. I finally said what I was thinking. “That’s bull, Smitty, and you know it. Why did you really do it? Just between you and me.”
“Just between us, sir?” I nodded. “Sir, rumor has it that we’re moving out in a few days to go finish this thing in Kuwait.” Again, I nodded. It hadn’t been confirmed for the troops yet, but anybody with a lick of sense could see the preparations.
Smith continued: “Some of these boys may never get home again, because we don’t know how this is going to go. And some of them have never had much of a family or home life and have never had a decent Christmas where somebody actually cared. I thought it was important to do something nice for them, to show them that somebody does care. If something happens to them, they need to have that. Does that make any sense to you?”
Smith, the hardest sergeant in the battalion, was misty-eyed. His boss was misty eyed too. “It makes all the sense in the world, Smitty. God bless you, but why deny the good deed?”
“Hey, sir, they need to know somebody cares, but they don’t have to know it’s me!”
I let that one go and said, “So the trip to sort the mail …”
“Was to find the stuff my wife sent me for the troops. I didn’t find the damn box until 10 minutes before we were due to come back. Guess it was meant to happen. But it all stays just between us, sir, like you promised? I don’t want anybody thinking I’m all soft or nothin’.”
I solemnly shook his hand and left him to his meal.
The soldiers in his squad were some of the luckiest men I knew. Smith loved his soldiers as only the best of leaders can, and he gave them a Christmas to prize above all others on a dangerous eve.
And later he led them through the war and brought them all home safely, his biggest Christmas gift of all.