and i suppose having a few people open them first to check would be out of the question...Last year my son and I hand-carried letters to the National Naval Medical Center and Walter Reed. We were invited by security to go right up to the med/surg floors and hand the cards to the nurses at the nursing station cards addressed to “any sailor” “any Marine” or “any soldier”. It would have been a little more inconvenient if we lived more than 30 minutes from Bethesda.
Just peachy.
and i suppose having a few people open them first to check would be out of the question...This is absurd.
Maybe Walter Reed can’t open 450,000 pieces of mail, but they could surely open at least SOME of it. Or even most of it, if we are talking about mail arriving over the course of a year.
In truth, the reason is far simpler. While the USPS is able to handle high volumes of mail, the small companies that are subcontracted to handle mail delivery to military hospitals are easily overwhelmed.
So far, the total number of US casualties in Iraq is less than 30,000. Many of these are “returned to duty”, and personnel who have been wounded multiple times, missing one duty day due to injury or illness.
Of those who have been seriously wounded, and returned to the US, many have left the hospital and gone one with their lives. So how many *right now* are in military hospitals?
1,000 to 2,000, as a wild guess. And many of them are outpatients, in for just a few hours at a time.
So what are military hospitals supposed to do if they receive 400,000 get well cards? What about a million or more? If they forwarded them to wounded personnel, they would have a pile of get well cards all over their room several inches deep.
That’s great, our guys can go to war for our freedom and a bunch of candy-asses are too busy or scared to screen mail that might help them get through the holidays. Just great. What’s next, virtual mail, sanitized for content, through your public affairs officer? We are going due south...
“Since the Sept. 11 attacks and the anthrax scare, the Pentagon and the Postal Service have refused to deliver mail addressed simply to “Any Wounded Soldier” for fear terrorists or opponents of the war might send toxic substances or demoralizing messages.”
Sign of the times. The United States - and the world, for that matter - has gone insane.
Why not seek prosecution or at least public exposure of the treasonous Left who'd deliberately demoralize the troops they "claim" to support?
Since we are in a state of war, can't that be the procedure now?
Remember, the military is under civilian CONTROL, but the military has it's own rule of law.