Honoring Our Heroes at the Holidays

I got this in an e-mail from Col. Buzz Patterson (USAF, Ret.) and MoveAmericaForward. I was blessed to meet Col. Patterson and have dinner with him a few years ago. This is definitely something we can all do.

I wanted to thank you all for the tremendous support you have shown our troops these past few weeks. So many of you sponsored have Thanksgiving Day Care Packages which will bring a taste of home and a message of support to thousands upon thousands of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I can tell you having served 20 years in the service myself that this means the world to our military men and women far away from home at the holidays. In my service, I spent many a holiday separated by thousands of miles from my family, my friends and my nation. This heart-to-heart connection from you to them is so incredibly important to our warriors overseas. We are bringing America to them, and I thank you for that.

We've accomplished a lot for our troops these past few months by working together as a team. Congress has, for now, scaled back their efforts to undermine our troops' missions and the media has begrudgingly conceded that we are making huge progress with our efforts in Iraq.

Now we must shift our focus on what lies ahead, for our men and women in uniform depend on us - in the next few weeks Move America Forward will launch a 40-city pro-troop tour across this nation called "Honoring Our Heroes at the Holidays." Along the way we will collect 100,000 Christmas, Hanukah and holiday greeting cards for our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines. It will be a monumental effort but absolutely deserving.

We'll ship some of these cards to our troops from post offices across the nation along the route of our tour. Our chairman, Melanie Morgan, and myself, will personally hand-deliver the final batch of cards to our men and women in Iraq in mid-December.

All of you can find the complete details as to what we have in store (including a wonderful holiday pro-troop concert honoring our troops - featuring the wounded warriors from Walter Reed Medical Center and Bethesda Naval Hospital as our honored guests in Washington, D.C. on December 14th) at our website: http://www.moveamericaforward.org/

We're working night and day to pull this all together. We have an early preview event in Sacramento that will take place on November 13th and we strongly urge our Northern California supporters to participate.

I also want to ask for your financial support to underwrite this massive and essential effort. Between renting vehicles, advertising our rallies, pulling permits for events, compensating staff, arranging hotels, gassing up our vehicles, etc, we're going to need to raise about $205,000.

I would be honored if you would please make a contribution toward this effort here:
https://www.completecampaigns.com/FR/contribute.asp?campaignid=MAF-Holiday

You can also mail in a contribution to us:

Move America Forward
ATTN: Heroes Holiday Tour
P.O. Box 1497
Sacramento, CA 95812

Thank you all so much for the terrific support of our troops! God bless you all, God bless our troops, and God bless America!

- Lt. Colonel Buzz Patterson (USAF, Ret.)
Vice Chairman, Move America Forward
http://www.moveamericaforward.org/

It will be so very easy, while you are doing your usual Christmas cards, to write a couple of extra ones to our brave heroes and send them to the address above! If you can, please consider donating some money to help pay for shipping.

Brighten a hero's Christmas! Honor them for their sacrifices!