Often the many miracles the United States military perform for us every day are forgotten. They fight for our freedoms, fight for our safety, but most importantly they fight for our lives.
IC Supports Our Heroes is a group of eight students who wish to bring this knowledge to the Ithaca College community. We want to establish a relationship between active, reserve and veterans of the armed services and civilians and to further awareness of those who serve and protect us. For me, supporting our troops is very personal to me since my mother, father, stepbrother and stepfather have served time in the army. My dad, a Gulf War veteran, passed away a month before I was three from cancer. I became very independent and mature at an early age because my mom and stepdad would be gone for months at a time for training and deployments. Most of the time one parent was home, but it was still hard. My fiance is in the Marines. Having him in California and in Afghanistan in the future has made us appreciate each other more. Our trust and love for each has grown immensely in the past year. It has made me truly value what time we have together.
In our hopes of building a relationship between active soldiers and civilians, we will be writing letters to soldiers. In these correspondences we will show our support and gratitude for their service. Through personal correspondence, soldiers can open up to those they are saving and protecting.
We also want to reach out to our troops the sending care packages. Nothing makes a person feel more appreciated than a specially thought-out package. Not only will they receive entertainment, reading material that gives them news of home, food and other treats, but they will also receive immense amounts of love and devotion. Through these care packages we want our soldiers to know we not only appreciate what they do for us, but also that they are loved.
But we also need to remember to support our veterans. Veterans have served and have saved our country from peril and should be regarded with as much respect as an active soldier. They have risked their lives and have come out victoriously. IC Supports our Heroes wants to support our local veterans by visiting with them, inviting them to our events — like our planned 1950s style USO dance — and having them participate by sharing their experiences of the military. Our veterans should never be forgotten but revered.
Not only do we wish to establish relationships between students of the college and all military personnel but also with the community. Our ultimate goal is to merge our entire community and the military community together. We want to teach our community about our military so they can better understand what our troops do for us. We want to eventually get the community involved in participating in correspondence, care packages and even extend to other existing organizations including Adopt a Soldier.
Our hope is to bring together, to teach and to establish relationships between civilians and military personnel. But most importantly we want to bring support to the men and women that save our lives every day in many different ways.
IC Support Our Heroes will meet at 8:15 p.m. Thursday in Friends 102.
Krista Robb is a freshman mathematics and economics major. Email her at [email protected].
