March 12th, 2004

What happens to those "To Any Soldier" care packages

Commentator and novelist Christian Bauman recalls the excitement of receiving mail from anonymous well-wishers back home during his deployment with the U.S. Army in Somalia in the early 1990s.

This was a fascinating listen.

The coup, of course, was getting a letter with a snapshot or two inside. I don’t know why, but the further west the return address, the more likely the envelope had a picture. And the more north, the more likely the picture was, shall we say, “revealing”. Triangulate this equation, and you discover that the girls in the northwest get a real charge out of showing the troops exactly what it is they are fighting for.

Make sure to stick to the end for the punch line. (Every good story has a punch line.)

Author

Raymond has been involved in the evolution of Windows for more than 30 years. In 2003, he began a Web site known as The Old New Thing which has grown in popularity far beyond his wildest imagination, a development which still gives him the heebie-jeebies. The Web site spawned a book, coincidentally also titled The Old New Thing (Addison Wesley 2007). He occasionally appears on the Windows Dev Docs Twitter account to tell stories which convey no useful information.

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