For all the billions of dollars being spent on the war in Iraq, 14-year-old Brittany Bergquist is surprised that the U.S. military doesn't do what she and her little brother are doing: helping soldiers phone home free.

FULL STORY at CNN.com

By KIRK MOORE
STAFF WRITER
Since early 2003 the Internet-based volunteer group Soldiers' Angels has been coordinating letters and packages to support individual soldiers half a world away. Now the group is assisting parents like Vicky Field when news comes their child has been wounded.

Field's son Jeremy Chad Snowden is recovering from traumatic brain injury after he was shot in the forehead at Ramadi in October. In a written account, Field, a single parent from Granbury, Texas, told how her son's Army friends and Soldiers' Angels volunteers helped her find and stay with him at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C.

Field told how she first heard her son was wounded, when she checked voicemails on her cell phone at church.

"I ran into the church to get help. Some of the elders called the Army back. . . . He had been updated to critically injured but stable at the time. All we heard was that Chad was in a Humvee and was shot in the head and the bullet went straight through the other side, and they had taken him to Baghdad for a five-hour brain surgery."

Two days later, Chad's 17-year-old sister got a telephone call from one of his friends in Iraq, Field wrote. "He promised my daughter and told her to tell me that he and his brother LeRon would go find Chad in the hospital in Baghdad and report back to us."

The pair tracked Chad down. "He whispered to Chad and said: 'Chad it's LeRon, Lonnie's brother from boot camp, do you remember?' and Chad did a thumbs-up.

"He then said, 'Chad, I want you to know we love you, bud, and your mom and sisters love you and they're coming to get you, do you hear me?' and Chad raised his hand up in the air and waved it back and forth."

Soldiers' Angels volunteers helped the family track Chad's progress during a stopover at the Landstuhl Army medical center in Germany, until his parents could meet him at Walter Reed.

APP.COM - Group now assists parents of wounded

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