Mail Call

By: AARP | January 16, 2003

There were hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops stationed in Vietnam in the fall of 1967. One of them, Sgt. Billy Thompson, rather than writing to Santa, decided to send his Christmas list to advice columnist Dear Abby. He asked for just one thing: "A letter from home."

Touched by the request, Dear Abby shared Sgt. Thompson's letter with her readers, who proceeded to flood the mail with letters of support for America's men and women overseas. Every holiday season since, Dear Abby fans have been sending their best to American troops stationed at home and abroad via Operation Dear Abby.

Now, AARP members can do the same.

AARP invites its members to participate in OperationDearAbby.net, the online home of the long-running letter-writing campaign. The Web site is the only way to send messages of support to the general population of troops.

The Operation Dear Abby program made the transition to the Web in November 2001, when the Department of Defense stopped delivering mail not addressed to a specific person in the wake of the anthrax scare. Since its launch, OperationDearAbby.net has received more than 450,000 messages. Older Americans who have lived through previous times of conflict often send the most meaningful messages.

"I'd say the more senior and more experienced people are the ones that write the most detailed and advice-driven messages to the troops," says Capt. William Hendrix, associate director of the Navy's Lifelines human-resources project, which now manages the OperationDearAbby.net site.

Getting Americans to write messages of support is the easy part; making sure that troops actually read the messages is a bigger challenge.

But the communication pros in the military are doing their part. Public affairs officers print out the messages and distribute them at mail call and post them around bases and ships—most notably, "on bulletin boards in the chow hall," points out Capt. Hendrix. The troops themselves also log on to computers—lining up for a chance to read messages of support like they used to line up at phone booths.

And the result is more than 25 million views of the various messages on OperationDearAbby.net by both service members and civilians alike.

Troops can sort the database of messages by state/territory and branch of service to find the most applicable messages. Most greetings come from women and children, and messages from service veterans are especially appreciated.

"Being away from family at the holidays can be a real downer," says Dear Abby. "Veterans know firsthand what these soldiers are experiencing."

The History of Operation Dear Abby

The Department of Defense originally dubbed Dear Abby's campaign "Any Service Member," and, shortly thereafter, renamed it "Operation Dear Abby." Every letter would go to a special post office in the Pentagon. From there, letters were distributed to troops all over the world.

"When you're out on the end of the string, you feel like nobody knows or cares about what you're doing," says Capt. Hendrix, who received some Operation Dear Abby letters while serving as a public affairs officer in Bosnia in 1996. "But when the clerk handed out the mail, he just made sure everybody got the Dear Abby letters. We all got mail. I wound up with a pen pal—a young man who wanted to be a jet pilot. Don't they all? His mom helped him send the letter."

So when security concerns prompted the Department of Defense to cease mail delivery to the general population of troops, Capt. Hendrix and his fellow Lifelines staff were dismayed. They knew how much the letters meant to soldiers, sailors, Air Force, and Coast Guard personnel deployed around the globe.

Although the Lifelines staff hadn't been involved in Operation Dear Abby, they felt sure there was an electronic solution to the delivery problem. "We thought, well, we've got the expertise here, so we'll just plunge forward," says Capt. Hendrix. The result: OperationDearAbby.net, powered by the military Web site anyservicemember.navy.mil/

Dear Abby was "overwhelmingly appreciative" of the efforts to keep her letter-writing campaign alive, says Capt. Hendrix.