Gilroy group plays major role in nationwide organization that
extends a hand to troops
Gilroy – Letters abandoned, unread by troops. Girl Scout cookies, rotting on the shores of Kuwait. On the home front, people want to extend a hand. But overseas, that hand can weigh troops down, as well-intentioned gifts clutter platoons, and divert men and women in uniform from training.
“It creates a huge logjam of stuff over there,” said Jane Schwartz, vice-president of Operation Interdependence. “They’re a fighting unit, not a post office.”
Sixty percent of gifts sent overseas don’t make it to troops, said Schwartz. Some pose security risks; others just take up too much space.
Givers want to do good, but OI aims to do good better. Matching military efficiency with home-front heart, the organization delivers Civilian Rations, aka C-Rats, to troops overseas, coordinating with commanders to cut out waste.
“We don’t want to burden the troops when they get packages from home,” explained Karen Humber, Gilroy’s co-area manager. “We experience the chaos of the sorting, the deciding, here – so they don’t experience the chaos of sorting, distributing, deciding who gets what over there. They have plenty of other worries than to worry about how to get these goods from well-meaning people at home.”
At OI’s Gilroy warehouse, pint-sized American flags stand at attention, planted between cardboard boxes of Thin Mints. A cutout of a grave-faced soldier, dressed in camouflage, greets visitors at the door. Volunteers meet here every Tuesday, sealing granola bars and packets of hot cocoa into plastic baggies. With 15 volunteers filling at least 10 boxes every week, and 50 C-Rats packed in each box, they’re doing a lot of good: 42,000 C-Rats sent since January, according to co-area manager Susan Hamilton. Community events bolster the total, with 62 boxes packed Nov. 5.
“In Gilroy, we’re the least expensive shipping office on the West Coast,” she explained. “It costs us about $9 to send a box. From Oceanside, it costs $14. With 200 to 300 boxes a month, it adds up.”
Located close to the Fleet Post Office in San Francisco, Gilroy’s site is the cheapest in the west among 14 shipping centers nationwide, Schwartz said. That makes it an important site, as the national organization sends as many goods as possible to Gilroy, to keep down its shipping costs nationwide.
And the local group runs a tight ship, using donated space, donated chairs, donated toothbrushes, moist towelettes and socks. The only thing that costs money, said Hamilton, is the postage.
Each C-Rat is a collection of home comforts, from tea bags to lip balm, from sunflower seeds to beef jerky. Even seemingly oddball objects, such as tampons, find ready use overseas. One male soldier, shot in an ambush, used a C-Rat tampon to plug a wound, said Hamilton. When medics arrived, they said it saved his life.
“Volunteers come in and see us packing tampons, and they start laughing,” said Humber. “They say, ‘I bet you the males really appreciating getting these!’ And I say, ‘Yeah, they do!’ ”
Not every donation is appropriate. Gilroy’s OI office has donated 6,600 pounds of goods to local non-profits: heavy things such as soda and gallon bottles of ketchup, impractical things such as Halloween candy that isn’t factory-sealed. C-Rats are screened three times by specially trained OI inspectors, before reaching men and women in uniform. Anything that can be tampered with or tainted won’t go.
But the most important part of every C-Rat is also the simplest: a letter. Volunteers read hundreds of letters, sent by kindergartners, seniors and everyone in between, to cut out identifying details, and screen out misguided missives, like one grade-schooler who wrote, ‘I hope you kill all the Iraqis.’
“Spend five minutes writing a letter,” urged Humber. “It can be on an index card. It can be on the back of a receipt. It’s not the form that it comes in that’s important, it’s the fact that somebody took their time to let the guys know that they’re remembered.”
As Americans sour on the war, some might have mixed feelings about writing the troops. But Operation Interdependence isn’t a pro-war effort, says Hamilton. It’s not an anti-war effort, either.
“The bottom line is, all of those kids are ours,” she said, tears gathering behind her glasses. “Whether the war is right or wrong – they’re ours.”
