HILL AIR FORCE BASE, Utah (BP)–During his deployment in Iraq, Air Force Maj. Chris Gay learned firsthand that a key component of succeeding in the war is befriending Iraq’s youth and showing them a level of kindness and goodwill they may never encounter otherwise.
Gay now is stationed at Hill Air Force Base in northern Utah and is a member of Mountain View Baptist Church in Layton. A division chief with the 507th Aircraft Sustainment Squadron, he was deployed with an Army unit based in Baghdad from last September through April.
During that time, he visited the largest of eight internally displaced persons camps in Iraq. The camp housed more than 2,500 Iraqis who fled their homes during terrorist and sectarian violence.
When he discovered the children there didn’t have sufficient clothing and blankets to cope with the winter weather, Gay organized a campaign to have his Sunday School class at Mountain View Baptist send boxes of garments that he could pass out to the children.
“I have two kids myself, so I had compassion for the kids,” he told Baptist Press.
In the process of completing what he dubbed Operation Warm Winter, Gay said he gained a better understanding of the Iraqis living in the camp.
“Soccer is a really integral part of life there in Iraq. I haven’t met an Iraqi kid that didn’t love to play soccer or didn’t want a soccer ball,” he said. “What a lot of people don’t realize is we have troops out there every day that interact with the local populous, and if you can win over one kid — I’ve heard stories of this — if you get the children to like you and to appreciate you, they in a lot of ways protect you.
“There have been several instances where our guys were out on patrol and they had been in the area a lot and they befriended kids and gave them soccer balls and other things,” Gay said. “The kids would tell them, ‘Don’t go there. Don’t go down that way,’ and they were protecting our guys from getting into an ambush or getting into an area where there were [improvised explosive devices]. There are numerous instances of kids protecting the troops because they had befriended them.”
If churches want to know what’s useful for soldiers in Iraq, Gay suggested sending soccer balls.
“It’s just one way of interacting with the kids and getting them to understand who Americans are, that we’re there to be friends and not to hurt them,” he said. “We’re there to help, and soccer balls are the way to do it because all the kids love soccer balls. We only had maybe 50 soccer balls to give out, and there were more than 500 kids. The kids would have rather had soccer balls than clothes. That’s just how important it is to them.”
Despite ongoing criticism of the war in Iraq, Gay said he knows the United States is there for good reasons that may not be immediately obvious.
“In my opinion, the war in Iraq is really more of a spiritual war, but we’re not really fighting it that way,” he said. “The only way that Iraqi society is really going to learn a difference than what they’ve been taught all their life is for us to be there and to be an influence by showing them love and kindness. They don’t get a lot of that in their culture, and this is just one means of opening a door to be able to do that.
“There are so many things about the war that I don’t like, but at the same time, having been there, I realize the need for being there. It’s really more of a need for influencing the next generation because it’s a generational process. It’s not something that’s going to change overnight,” Gay said. “It’s going to take a generation of kids growing up around Americans and understanding what we believe and how we interact before there’s really any change in that area of the world.”
The major said it’s unfortunate when he encounters people in the United States who have made up their minds about the war without asking him about his experience on the ground there.
“We are making a tremendous difference,” he said. “A lot of it is just our presence alone and our interaction, showing kids there are other ways of doing things. Being there, you’re an ambassador of the U.S., and you don’t go out and overtly profess your Christianity, but there are so many other ways just by showing them love that are so different than the way their normal culture is, that they see a difference.”
Gay said Americans may not realize the opportunities they have to help protect the soldiers all the way from the homeland. For instance, Special Forces groups may consist of 12 or 15 men living and working on their own in an Iraqi community to weed out terrorists and bring peace. A lot of their safety, Gay said, comes from how well the community accepts them and approves of their presence.
If churches or individuals could send soccer balls and other items that soldiers could distribute to the children in those communities as goodwill offerings, Gay said it would serve two purposes.
“It provides something to the Iraqi kids and to the community, but it also provides protection for our service members. A lot of people don’t realize that simple act of giving somebody a soccer ball could have a big impact on somebody’s son or brother or dad being able to come home.”
Gay said he’s not yet sure whether he’ll repeat Operation Warm Winter when the weather turns cold again, but he has given some thought to the fact that in addition to soccer balls the children in Iraq need school supplies.
“What would really be helpful in the long run would be if you could get a project together where you could get backpacks full of school supplies and send them over. That would be very useful for the kids because they have very limited resources when it comes to those sorts of things,” he said. “If I were to do a follow-up project, it would probably be the backpacks.”
–30–
Erin Roach is a staff writer for Baptist Press.
