Students to send holiday cards to hospitalized troops

Students in Free Enterprise will send Christmas cards to soldiers who will be stuck in the hospital this holiday season.\nOn Monday, there will be cards in the Hoosier Room of the Indiana Memorial Union for all students and faculty who are interested in making Christmas cards for soldiers.\nThe cards will be sent through the Marine Moms program to three different hospitals across the nation. Soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., Brooke Army Medical Center in Texas and Bethesda Medical Center in Maryland will all receive Christmas cards this year from IU.\n“We just want to help show them support,” said senior Annie Cornett, a member of Students in Free Enterprise. “We want them to know that people care about them. Being in a hospital on a holiday is not the best place to be.”\nThe holiday card initiative is a branch of a larger program called Operation USA. This program is working to help veterans who are first-year college students get used to a new lifestyle. There are 800 branches of Operation USA already in existence throughout the country, and it is the first national project that Students in Free Enterprise has taken on.\n“I thought our organization could step in,” Cornett said. “I thought it was a great opportunity for us to get involved. I wanted to give back to the soldiers. I feel we have enough necessities to pull this project off.”\nAt the moment, Operation USA is doing basic research to prepare to be mentors. Students are creating training manuals for students who want to be mentors and are forming focus groups with college veterans who are already on campus.\nNext semester, Operation USA hopes to visit army hospitals and talk to veterans about what they would like to do once they are released from the hospital. \n“We found out that when veterans come back, they want to be a college kid and not necessarily a soldier,” said Mary Embry, Students in Free Enterprise faculty adviser.\nBy fall 2008, Operation USA hopes to approach students on campus and ask them to be mentors for local veterans. The organization’s long-term goal is to connect mentors with veterans and teach them how to do everything from reading a syllabus to finding their way around campus.\n“The advisers prep (the soldiers) in the hospitals,” Cornett said. “They ask them if they want to go to college. They then connect them with mentors, and that’s where we come in.”\nOperation USA will provide all the materials for people to make the cards. They hope to make 1,000 cards by the end of the day.\n“It’s important because veterans need to be recognized,” Embry said. “They don’t get a lot of recognition from their peers. This card program is an overall way of causing awareness of veterans.”