War zone trees a sparkling success
It’s not easy to ship a Christmas tree to Iraq.
Jim Ward knows. In an elaborate and admittedly eccentric campaign dubbed Operation Christmas Tree, he managed to get 75 live conifers to homesick troops in Iraq and Afghanistan this winter. Now his effort is snowballing into a massive national drive to ensure that each of the 150,000 U.S. troops in the two war zones receives a tree next holiday season.
“These soldiers are risking their lives over there and can’t even spend Christmas with their families,” said Ward, 33, a truck driver from Westminster, Md., who delivers trees for a nursery. “Don’t they at least deserve a Christmas tree to remind them of home while they’re stuck there?”
Ward’s Christmas tree effort started with one soldier: his daughter, Army Spc. Luisa Gonzalez, a 22-year-old medic who was deployed two months ago to a base north of Baghdad. When he thought of her alone on Christmas in Iraq, he decided that the best way to give her some holiday cheer was to finagle a Christmas tree there.
He ended up shipping 35 trees to his daughter’s company and the rest to Marines from Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md., and his brother-in-law’s unit in Afghanistan. “It just kept bothering me that my daughter was going to get one and other people there weren’t,” Ward said.
The live potted conifers arrived in a box emblazoned with the logo Operation Christmas Tree, along with battery-operated lights – for the soldier without access to electricity – and sparkly ornaments.
“Everyone was just in shock, Gonzales recalled. “Here we are in the middle of Iraq, and suddenly it smells like Christmas.”