Topless From Tacoma (Mail Call) -originally broadcast on NPR's All Things Considered, 2004 (audio link here) -adapted from a piece written for Neal Pollack's The Maelstrom, March, 2003 A nice lady on the radio recently recommended sending letters and packages to our troops overseas. You write down some friendly, supportive words, throw in a few candy bars, address it to Any Soldier, Any Unit, Iraq. Man, we used to love getting those envelopes. It was great just to hold them, to know someone back in the world remembered we were alive. Whoever was on mail run the day a bag of Any Soldier letters came in was a lucky guy. All letters are not created equal. Fights would break out over them: some were perfumed; always a good sign. Some had little hearts all over them, or smiley faces, or stickers -- someone's little sister. The coup, of course, was getting a letter with a snapshot or two inside. Some sweetie from Oklahoma City. Or Laramie. I don't know why, but the farther west the return address, the more likely the envelope had a picture. And the more north, the more likely the picture was, shall we say, revealing. Triangulate this equation and you discover that the girls in the Northwest get a real charge out of showing the troops exactly what it is they're fighting for. And do the troops appreciate it? What do you think. There was always a lot of food in the Any Soldier mail. And it was always melted. Or spoiled. We didn't care. We ate it anyway. Nothing like a brownie from Vermont that's been melted, reformed, melted again, reformed, crushed, radiated, and sniffed over. Yeah, man. Lots of Bibles. No offense, but those were the sucker packages. You took your chances with one of the six brown boxes in the mail pile, went to your little rock, sliced open the paper with your knife, already tasting the moldy month-old cookies that awaited you...and a Bible came out instead. There's a hill near the port of Kismaayo in Somalia where I'll bet a pile of those Bibles still sit today. So this nice lady on the radio, soliciting for Any Soldier packages. She ended her little speech with a giggle and the statement: "Of course, any kind of alcohol or pornography is strictly prohibited." "Lady," I'm thinking. "That's all we ever wanted."