Jackson Soccer Club collects personal items for local war heros

Jackson, NJ – I won’t sit here and pretend to know anything about soccer other than it’s a game kinda like hockey, but played on the grass and doesn’t have forechecking, poke checking, offsides and glove dropping fights, but I do know what is important to our troops overseas and what the Jackson Soccer Club did this evening for our mem and women will be greatly appreciated.   I grew up taking the football, baseball and hockey route in sports and the only time I played soccer was one time at Camp Lejeune, North Carolina when we played a game with our flak jackets and helmets on a gravel parking lot with full contact rules, so to say I don’t fully understand soccer is a bit of an understatement.   This year I was introduced to soccer with the Jackson Soccer Club as my daughter played in the recreation league for the first time.   It has been a wonderful organization that our whole family is proud to have become a part of.  

In the Club’s first annual Coache’s Ball game, the Jackson Soccer Travel Coaches defeated the Recreation Coaches. I can’t say by how much or who scored goals because I did get there towards the end of the game, so if anyone is interested in reporting in on names and goals in the game, please feel free to do so.   What I did see was the amazing generosity shown by Jackson residents for our troops and this fundraiser was spot on.   Back in the 1990’s, I was a Marine in Twentynine Palms, California overseeing Marines who were being deployed to the Middle East to confront the Iraqi Army in the first Gulf War.  While my mission was preparing fellow Marines for their upcoming fight, I also spent many weeks and months with my fellow warriors in the desert and care packages were always Godsend to us all. 

I remember being in two consecutive MCAGX (Marine Corps Air Ground Exercise) operations, lasting four weeks without pause and we lived out of our Humvees.  Our showers and baths were plastic garbage bags laid inside MRE crates and we all had to share the same box.  Fortunately, we had our own trash bags.   We’d fill the boxes up with water from a water buffalo (water tanker) that was sitting in the desert for a few weeks that was not fit for consumption and scrubbed down with a dirty bar Ivory Soap.    For us, that was better than any spa treatment.

One day, our team received a care package from local residents and one of the items in the package was a bottle of Strawberry Suave shampoo.   We hadn’t seen shampoo in several weeks since our own personal supplies dwindled and we weren’t due to go to the PX for 6 more days between exercises.    It was  a strange gesture, a bottle of strawberry shampoo for a ragtag bunch19-24 year old goat smelling men in the Mojave desert.   But that night we all thought it was the best thing in the world and we were the sweetest smelling Marines on the block.  I of course won’t get into the crude humor that followed or how comm platoon was made fun of for the next few months for smelling so fine, but it’s a memory that lasts to this day.

So when people in the community get together to collect toiletries for our men and women serving overseas, just remember that no package of q-tips, clean socks, soft toilet paper, shampoos and yes, playing cards is too insignificant and they do have a huge impact on the well being of our service personel serving in hostile environments.

I was told lots of items were collected tonight and that they will be going to local residents serving in Afghanistan, Iraq and other hot spots around the world.   Thank you to the Jackson Soccer Club for this great idea and to our great community for the generous donations tonight.   It will make any soldier, sailor, airman or Marine and their sections or platoons extremely happy when they receive it and trust me when I say, they will appreciate the gifts more than you can imagine.  So, my contributions of course, were bottles of shampoo, but I could not bring myself to buy strawberry scented ones!