It’s been 18 years since we sent trail mix to Iraq.

My son, Bart, was a Marine pilot. He flew the Cobra gunship, an attack helicopter that protected the Marines on the ground. A nasty machine. Having been gone for months, his squadron was deployed to Al Asad, Iraq during Christmas, 2005. His third deployment in three years.

While making family Christmas at home, I was missing him terribly – even accepted that his seat at the Christmas dinner table would be empty. I couldn’t imagine listening to “White Christmas” while living in that hostile desert. And I was having trouble with the constant worry and our inability to do anything about it.

One night watching CNN, the headline zipper running across the bottom of the screen read “Two-man helicopter down in Fallujah.” Both his dad and I stopped breathing. We knew Bart was in Iraq. We didn’t know exactly where he was at any one time. There was no more information. And there was no sleep as every possible scenario played out in our over-hyped imaginations.

When the morning brought no updates, Tom started digging through news sources.

He finally learned the crash was an Army Blackhawk. Breathing a sigh of relief, I also immediately thought, if the news is OK for us, it’s got to be unbearable for two other families.

Finally, all of my anxiety bubbled up into action.

I decided I wanted him and “his guys” to have something from home for Christmas. That whimsy led to thinking about the whole maintenance group that worked for Bart – 89 of them. What could we do that would bring them a smile?