Five Pencils

My son has served our country as an American G.I.
G.I. That's the term we Americans often use to denote our nation's soldiers. When our troops recently returned from Iraq, our family went to the airport with the yellow ribbon that had hung on our flag for the past year, and we welcomed our G.I. home.

"G.I." originally was an abbreviation adopted by U.S. soldiers during World War One to refer to equipment as "General Issue" or "Government Issued." Like the phrase "Dough Boys," from that war, the term denoted uniformity; stamped from the same piece of dough, meeting a government standard.

By World War Two, in the mind of the public, the term had become synonymous with the American soldier. But calling a soldier a G.I. was a wry acknowledgment of something beyond "General Issue." These were the fathers and sons, brothers, nephews, daughters and cousins of the American people. By virtue of this connection to the public, then as now, G.I.s often exhibit values ingrained in home and community; values the G.I. has carried to all corners of the globe.

Now that our soldier is home again, and adjusting into everyday life, the quiet stories come.

The year my son was in Iraq with his National Guard unit escorting convoys, he would toss ziplock bags to kids alongside the roadways. Each bag contained five pencils and a little school-kid pencil sharpener. Each also contained a sheet of paper with five mazes for the kids to run their pencils along, trying to solve the way to the center.

Why five pencils and mazes? In hopes that the kids who snagged the ziplocks would look at the paper and pencils and perhaps realize they were to share.

Only geometric mazes had been photocopied so that no person's religious restrictions on art in the form of "images" of people or animals would be offended.

There was a message on each pencil; Democracy Is Freedom From Fear.
Should someone translate the phrase, perhaps the kids would internalize that message. Then, should a village elder or an insurgent or even a town bully take the pencils away, the message would have even more meaning in the hearts and minds of those children.

My son could have just grunted out his time; he didn't have to think about the kids, but he did.

The American G.I. really isn't 'Government Issued' when you think about it.
That G.I. is home grown.
And I am proud of mine.


.jfox.