Updated:
Mar 17,
2004

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A Gift
of Love: Cookies for Troops

BY JOHN
CHAPPELL: Staff Writer

Ten-year-old Callie
Boone wanted to do something to show her support for American soldiers
fighting in Iraq.

Boone, a
fourth-grader at Academy Heights Elementary School, is a Girl Scout. She
is a member of Carolinas of the Pines Girl Scout Troop 942. With the
annual Girl Scout cookie sales under way, she came up with the idea to ask
people to buy a box of cookies for soldiers as well as for themselves.

“My daddy was sending some medical stuff to the children in Iraq,”
Callie said Tuesday. “We sent some Beanie Babies over a little bit later
last year. Girl Scout cookies seemed like a good idea, because I know a
couple of soldiers who really like Girl Scout cookies.”

Her father, Bob Boone, a former U.S. Army captain and vice president at
FirstHealth of the Carolinas, says they often talked about soldiers
overseas and the war. He suggested she give them some of her cookies, but
his daughter took the idea a big step further.

“She’s the one who came up with the idea of asking people to buy a box
for troops,” Bob Boone said. “She made it a regular part of her sales
pitch.”

A lot of people are on diets these days. They don’t buy cookies like
they used to or would like to. Callie asked them if they wouldn’t want to
send a box of cookies to a soldier.

It worked like a charm.

“If they said no, I said ‘Well, I am doing a donation to the soldiers
in Iraq and soldiers going overseas,’ and most of them got cookies and
some of them just donated some money,” she said. “I gave that to them.”

Stack of Boxes

Before the sale was over, she had a stack of 153 boxes of Girl Scout
cookies promised to soldiers. Now she had to find a way to deliver them.

Her father heard that a National Guard brigade from North Carolina was
being deployed to Iraq at the end of February. This brigade is the first
National Guard unit to be deployed to a combat mission since World War II.

Through friends, the Boones got in touch with the National Guard office
in Raleigh. Arrangements were made for the cookies to be delivered Feb. 24
as the soldiers were preparing to board the planes to Iraq.

They headed for Fort Bragg with 153 boxes of Girl Scout cookies piled
in the car and no idea exactly what would happen once they got there. Each
box had a sticker giving credit to the troop.

“We used my old military ID to get on post and found the chaplain, Lt.
Col. Goodwin,” Bob Boone said. “We went to their headquarters building. It
was in one of those old World War II buildings over there.”

Goodwin interrupted Brig. Gen. Danny H. Hickman who was in a meeting.
He told him there was a Girl Scout there with cookies for his troops.

“The general came out to thank her and tell her how remarkable a thing
it was for her to do,” Bob Boone said. “Told her how truly her act was an
act of love and caring for the troops. That’s where the grin came from you
see on her face in the pictures.”

Soldiers Help Out

Soldiers helped unload and stack boxes of cookies.

“They were really tall, to me — I’m such a
kid — and they were really polite,” she said. “Chaplain Goodwin
was pretty funny. I liked him. The commander let me get a picture with one
of the sacks they are taking with them.”

Gen. Hickman helped Callie try on one of the 70-pound backpacks that
the soldiers will all carry.

“I could not lift it off the ground,” she said. “It was really heavy.”

The general had another surprise for Callie. After thanking her for her
efforts, Hickman presented her with the Com-mander’s Award of Excellence,
an enamel and brass coin bearing the unit’s crest and motto.

“I think it is really an important award,” she said. “My daddy told me
he only gives out five or six of those a year. I was really pleased about
getting that.”

Callie wants her cookie customers to know how happy a simple gift like
a box of cookies made American soldiers heading into harm’s way.

“Some of them I saw were feeling a little bit down,” she said. “They
were really tense. When they saw me coming up with the cookies, they
started smiling and laughing and heading for the office to see what we
got.

“I think it made them really happy considering how sad they were
feeling about having to leave their families.”

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