Money needed to get boxes to soldiers
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Parties, a police escort out of town, and many other gestures were complemented by a generous outpouring of support. The local JROTC unit was flooded with dozens of donations to the point where instructors had to ask the community for financial help to ship them.
Lost in the shuffle, however, were hundreds of soldier-related donations that were being stored at the National Guard Armory on Security Circle.
The armory has been a place where donations get dropped off, but they also stay there awhile, as there are not enough funds to ship them, family members of deployed soldiers said. The unit’s Family Support Group sent 150 boxes recently, but there is still plenty left to turn over to the soldiers.
Vicki Gibbs and her niece-in-law, Pat Combs, said they would like to change that.
Gibbs’ husband, Johnny Gibbs, is a National Guard training sergeant with the 117th RTI in Smyrna and was the former 1st Sergeant with the local 278th. Combs’ husband, Sgt. Michael Combs, was deployed with the local 278th as a mechanic, but is currently attached to a Wisconsin unit in Iraq.
The pair spent a good portion of Friday morning packing up boxes full of personal items for soldiers. They are each taking on some of the financial costs of sending what they can, and hope to be able to ship as much as they can.
“The 278th is just like family to me,” Gibbs, a Rock Island resident, said of her affinity to the local unit and her intentions of shipping more than 100 boxes to the soldiers.
“They had asked for donations of personal items and people have just brought it down here. They were under the assumption the armory would be shipping it, but they don’t have the money to do that. So we came down and organized the boxes and we just take a box and put one of everything in it. We want to ship a box to each soldier in the unit.”
Combs, a Centertown resident, said with the help of donations she already received, she is planning to send 15 boxes, but the pair has basically offered themselves as caretakers for the goods at this point. Boxes cost between $7 and $16 to ship, depending on the contents.
Soldiers with the 278th are dispersed throughout Iraq and are having different experiences doing different missions, so there is no one particular item in dire need, but Gibbs said she has heard soldiers do need dog flea collars. Soldiers place the collars around their ankles to ward of sand fleas.
Phone cards are always helpful, according to I Troop’s readiness technician and retired 1st Sgt. Jackie Bandy, but there is a particular type of card that was recommended by the soldiers’ family members. They recommended a Web site for obtaining the cards, and the Web address is www.oif.spawareurope.net
Gibbs said anyone who wants to help out with shipping the remaining items may contact her at 686-2057. More questions about specifics on the phone cards or other donations may be directed to the local National Guard unit at 473-2565.