Parents ship off scent of Oregon to GI son

OAKRIDGE, Ore. – Lance Cpl. Jacob Hinkle couldn’t make it home from Iraq for Christmas, so his parents, Lang and Candace Hinkle, packed up a Christmas tree and sent it to him.

The 20-year-old Marine’s unit has been in some of the worst fighting of the Iraq war.

In October the Hinkles got an early permit to cut a noble fir from the Willamette National Forest, where their son often hiked with his father.

They wrapped it in wet burlap and plastic to keep it moist, and shipped it off. It got there just after Thanksgiving.

He knew his parents might try to send a tree but was surprised by how strongly it smelled of Oregon.

“Oh, yeah,” he recalled in a phone interview last week. “Right when you opened up the box, you could tell it was a Christmas tree. It was a pretty potent smell. After being out here in the sand all these months, it was kind of nice to smell something from home.”

Decorations include camouflage-clad snowman ornaments made by Candace Hinkle’s second-grade Sunday school class.

“We were all pretty antsy to put it up,” Jacob Hinkle said. “We didn’t have anything for the top, so at first we used a 20 mm shell casing from one of our Cobra helicopters. But since then, we’ve changed it out for a chem light.”

Capt. Carrie Batson, the unit’s Iraq-based public information officer, said fake trees are fairly common but this is the first time she had seen a real one.

Hinkle’s unit has been training to replace Polish troops in Karbala this month. It previously was stationed in the southern Iraq city of Diwaniyah.

In August, the unit, with Iraqi troops, were in heavy fighting in Najaf that killed seven Marines.

“As a parent, you hate to imagine what your child has experienced,” Lang Hinkle said.

Najaf has since quieted down.

Lang Hinkle, an Oregon State Police sergeant, said he was inspired by fellow trooper David Stone of Roseburg to send a fresh tree.

Stone served in Somalia, and the two talked of homesickness and related problems.

“I asked him, ‘What was the most important thing you received that made you feel closer to home?’ and he said his parents had sent him this little fir tree.”

Its needles were dropping and it could barely hold an ornament. But Stone said just being able to smell a fir tree took some of the edge off of being away.

The expeditionary unit is to return to Camp Pendleton, Calif., in February.