It's That Time Of Year, Again, Folks...

That's right, it's Christmas season; time for families to gather over rock-hard fruicakes and undrinkable Scandinavian holiday beverages (thank you, Denis Leary,) time for huge holiday purchases that could have been gotten more cheaply in June, time for charities to go all out yelling about "the children," as though children only starve at Christmas, and remain, despite desperate poverty, well-nourished the rest of the year.

It's also the time of year when tons and tons of our service personnel, stationed at places - some domestic, some foreign - who are available for leave, to sit at their post wishing they could get a ride home to see their family and friends.

Which brings me to MY annual charity event.

Those of you who have been reading my posts for a while will recognize this immediately.

That's right, y'all, it's time to send money to Let's Bring 'Em Home.

LBEH is the brainchild of Ernie Stewart, who with the help of a very, very small pool of volunteers has been collecting money and frequent flier miles to buy round-trip holiday tickets for eligible service personnel, for the last several years.

He does this in his spare time; LBEH is not a year-round operation. It's strictly non-profit, and basically consists of Ernie, and a chick who works at American Airlines.

And yet last year, Ernie collected over $75,000 and managed to get 150 service personnel who would otherwise have been stranded at work tickets home.

Now, I know some of you who only think things through to a certain extent - and therefore may not have realized the true situation as yet - will most likely ask, "But what about MAC flights?"

Well, here's the deal. MAC flights - Military Airlift Command - are available to service personnel free of charge. However, it's what's called "space-available transport," which means if the plane is full of actual military equipment and blah blah, too bad, so sad, and you're left standing on the airfield wondering what to do next. It also means anyone who outranks you and wants to fly can boot you off the plane to make space. It is by no means guaranteed transportation in either direction, especially considering the strain the MAC is currently under supplying the needs of the troops in combat actions, and considering that missing your designated return date WILL result in discipline possibly including JAIL, most service personnel choose, barring airfare for civilian flights, to simply stay at their post.

This happened to me a couple of times; it sucks.

LBEH allows those same personnel to put in a request for a ticket home; if donations will cover it, they're given a round-trip ticket home and back on civilian airlines. That simple.

Now, for me, I have a ton of respect for our troops; having made the same sacrifices of family, effort, risk, and time as they're making, I know exactly how much of a drag it is.

In fact, a bit after Thanksgiving of 1999, a Fox News reporter in Kosovo received The Deadly Eyebrow™ in answer to the question, "how do you feel about being away from home during the holidays?" Well, you retarded lamb chop, how do you THINK I feel about being in a bizarre country where the people we're theoretically helping are equally pissed at us as the ostensible "villains" while it snows on me and I get to stand guard outside, because they just tried to blow up the headquarters with a car bomb two days ago?

So, I kinda have a feel for the whole "OMG I WANT TO GO HOME" vibe, ok? The folks in combat zones are - by and large - stuck; but that doesn't make it suck less for the folks deployed in, say, Korea, or Okinawa, or, hell, even HERE if it's far enough away, if their whole family is coming together - except them, for no reason other than that some fat colonel needed a ride more than you did.

LBEH is one of the only three charities I ever give money to, the others being Make-A-Wish and AMFAR. (That, BTW, is the American Foundation for AIDS Research. AIDS is still 100% fatal, communicable without external indication of infection, and can in fact lurk for years without symptoms; and it's totally incurable; this makes it scary enough that I think we ought still to be scared of it.)

They're your holiday dollars, and granted, nobody has enough of them to go around. But if you have any to spare, LBEH is a good way to do something actually constructive for the troops. Give something back; they give up a hell of a lot to make sure you don't have to.