Posted By:
MAF Blogger Danny
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We awoke in Tucson and left the hotel promptly at 8:30 AM.  The sleep deprivation on these tours is something that starts to wear on you by about the 2nd or third day, especially if you didn’t sleep much on nights leading up to the tour! I slept on the bus for a while, it was supposed to be a 4hour drive to get to El Paso and I slept for about an hour on the bunk in the bus so the time passed quickly.

We had budgeted lots of time to make the trip so we actually arrived an hour early. We asked the manager of this Wal Mart where we would be allowed to park the bus and they allowed us to put it right up front!!! Awesome!

There were lots and lots of people passing by, doing their holiday shopping and wandering curiously over to see what was going on and why there was a huge red bus sitting on the sidewalk at their local superstore.

Even though it was a Monday and therefore not the weekend, one might expect to have only a sparsely populated Wal-Mart at 2pm, actually though, the parking lot was absolutely JAM PACKED. Another thing you notice, walking through the store, is that El Paso is REALLY a military town! We saw soldiers from Fort Bliss walking around all over the place!

This is also the first stop on our tour at Wal-Marts…we chose to do lots of Wal Mart stops to try and encourage new people to find out about MAF, instead of only those who hear about us and get our emails from friends. Well we also needed some more pens and we were sorely in need of more printer paper (you never remember what you forgot to pack until you need it!) so Calvin and I were secretly plotting a shopping list while we helped people get shirts and explained the Candy Diplomacy tins.

While standing around I met a wonderful lady, the mother in law of Sgt. Javier Cardenas who is in Iraq right now serving his country. Her daughter is still here in El Paso taking care of their little boy who is six years old and who already seems like he wants to follow in his daddy’s footsteps. She told me that when he hears the pledge or allegiance he knows how to salute, and does so. Just thinking about that caused her to shed a tear or two while Diana was singing our national anthem.

Let us also not forget Suzanne Pollack, whose son Robert Eby just joined the U.S. Army. She told me that her son Robert joined in the Army’s delayed entry program, so he signed up even before he was 18 and went straight from high school right to basic training.

Robert is 18 now and is stationed at Ft. Gordon, GA in the Signal Corps. He is an only child which worries his mother sometimes, especially because it’s a very real possibility that Robert could go to Iraq next year. “If he does get sent to Iraq, that’s the real nail biter,” Suzanne told me, “but I am proud of him. I am so proud.” Robert comes from a tradition of military service, his father and uncles served and that, his mother says, is what she thinks inspired him to join the Army.

We also got a chance to talk at length with Duane Simmons and Benny Modkins who work on Ft. Bliss. Duane, originally from Charleston, SC is an instructor and Benny, a native son of El Paso, is training for deployment to Iraq.

Benny told me he would be leading an infantry group on missions such as day to day security patrols but with the emphasis and lead taken by Iraqi security forces. He also emphasized the transition of Iraqi National Police and Sons of Iraq into a regular, more conventional police force. This transition is probably the most important mission our troops have right now and our troops are helping and training the Iraqis every day to take over security for their own neighborhoods.

It was an awesome time to be out there with all those soldiers walking around the Wal-Mart. This store really supports it’s troops and it’s community. But…leave it to Move America Forward…we got there early and yet somehow managed to start late and run the program late!!! We were already pressed for time and we hadn’t even made our supply run yet! After a rushed shopping spree where we got some Airborne to keep us healthy and some duct tape, we were off on the road again!