It was 2003. Nearly 200,000 American troops were in Iraq. This resulted in the removal of dictator Saddam Hussein and led to an extended deployment of allied forces in the region. Among those was West Virginia soldier Mark Bland.
[complete podcast available]
At the time, many school children were urged to write letters of encouragement to soldiers they knew and even those they didn’t. Ways were arranged to get the letters and packages to the troops.
Mark recalls, “We were getting care packages and troop fan mail from all over the country and these would be from kids in second grade to full-grown adults just saying, ‘Hey we’re praying for you guys, we’re thinking about you…We’d love to pray for you...You guys are our heroes, what do you do over there? How’s the sandstorms?’”
And the letters meant a great deal. “Absolutely! Yes. So I was a 19-year-old kid. I was so homesick. So any letter I got from back home – or I didn’t care if it was from Texas or Ohio – it’s just part of home for me, so I cherished them at age 19. I cherished every letter I got. And I carried those letters all throughout Iraq to make sure they came home with me at the end of deployment.” Then, to keep them safe, he mailed the box of letters back to the United States.
Fast-forward 17 years, Mark admits he never had the time to sit down and go through all the letters he had saved. One day recently, Mark was thanking his wife, Hannah, for all the letters she had mailed him in Iraq – more than 300 letters - when she was still his girlfriend. They looked at her letters and then the letters from all the school kids. “And I said, you know what would be a really cool project, to be able to use social media and try to find some of these kids and show them their letter and really just say ‘thank you’ for thinking of me back in 2003.”
And that’s exactly what Mark is doing today at his Facebook blog site, P.S. Thank You. So far, Mark has been able to connect with 15 students, who are full-grown adults now, as well as some of the teachers who helped organized the letter-writing efforts.
We invite you to check out our full podcast below to hear some of the heartwarming responses he’s getting.
