Not One...

There are a lot of charities vying for your attention come holiday time.



There are a lot of them that purport to be supporting our troops.



A lot of those, like the Red Cross, accept donations, and after paying their executives huge sums of money, dole out supplies to the troops, for which the troops are often charged.



Fuck all that.



There's a charity _I_ want to tell you about.



It's small. It's in fact run by two people, both of whom work for free. Their total "for the expenses of the charity" expenditures in six years has been the cost of a single laptop computer to track what they do.



In that six years, they've grown beyond their own wildest expectations. When LBEH started, it was just one guy, a gentleman named Ernie Stewart.



Ernie runs a frequently raunchy, always sarcastic, often hilarious website called EHOWA, short for Ernie's House Of Whoop-Ass.



I know; "oh, THIS sounds like a legitimate charity, and stuff." Oh ye of little faith.



Ernie is a veteran. Like many veterans, he remembered many holidays when he could have taken leave to go hang with his family, but was unable to go due to transportation expenses. Now, the military IN THEORY provides transportation to G.I.s for free, via MAC flights, but in reality those are what's called space-available transportation. Which means if there's no room, you're outta luck. What's worse, you can get stuck on the way BACK, and come in late - and that's against the UCMJ - you can get in serious hot water for it.



Not many G.I.s chance it. Especially with the ever-increasing stretch on the Military Airlift Command.



So, six years ago, Ernie decided that he had gotten enough emails from G.I.s complaining about being unable to take leave, and set up a Paypal account. He posted initially just within the forums of his own website, asking for donations to buy tickets for G.I.s stationed overseas to get home for the holidays.



Let's Bring 'Em Home was born.



Ernie got a wake-up call. The first time - December, 2001 - that he had the PP account open, he got $13,000 from his readers, and was suddenly totally out of his depth. Which brings us to the second member of LBEH - Kathryn Jensen. Kat works in the reservations department of Continental Airlines, and totally saved Ernie's bacon.



The second year, they had so many ticket requests that Kat took a week of vacation time to process them all; Kat and Ernie managed to produce 161 tickets for deployed military personnel.



They also got noticed, a little.



This year, they've received - so far - donations of $25,645.74, and 75,000 frequent flyer miles. They're accepting donations of cash or miles, and donations are tax-deductible.



They've already completed 45 tickets this year, and it's just starting the first week of December.



I can understand if you've never heard of them.



But if there's a charity that deserves our attention this year, guys, it's LBEH. ESPECIALLY all you Democrat "bring home our troops at any cost OMG" folks. You REALLY ought to be giving Ernie a hand.



I damn well will be.



[*Edited to add: I, clearly, am not the only one talking about this. This is good; more people need to be talking about it.*]