How about happier news for a change?

http://kvoa.com/Global/story.asp?S=5851660
Dec 22, 2006

National Guard on border duty to get special holiday deliveries

National Guard soldiers and at least some Border Patrol agents working on Christmas Day along parts of the Arizona-Mexico border are in store for some special delivery treats.


In some cases it'll be holiday turkey dinners. In others, it'll be pie. In some instances, likely both.

Elsewhere, some off-duty National Guard soldiers will be lavishing gifts on newfound friends.

Guardsmen have been assigned since June in Arizona and the three other states bordering Mexico as part of Operation Jump Start, assisting the Border Patrol in efforts to diminish illegal immigration and to help achieve operational control of the border.

"Right now there's about 2,000 guardsmen in Arizona," said Staff Sgt. Dan Heaton, an Arizona National Guard spokesman assigned to the Border Patrol's Yuma sector, which takes in slightly more than the 100 westernmost miles of the Arizona-Mexico border.

Guardsmen from at least a dozen different states are in the Yuma sector currently, Heaton said. National Guard soldiers from units in additional states are operating in the Tucson sector, which encompasses the remainder of the state's frontier with Mexico.

In Yuma, guardsmen will continue to man an unspecified number of observation sites close to the border over the holiday weekend, watching for immigrants crossing illegally into Arizona.

The observers, operating in four-soldier units called Entry Identification Teams, notify the Border Patrol if they sight crossers so that agents can respond and take them into custody. They don't take part in any apprehensions, however.

A local Veterans of Foreign Wars post is helping provide a turkey dinner for all the soldiers and airmen working on Christmas Day, Heaton said.

For other guardsmen, "we will have a turkey dinner with all the fixings delivered Christmas Day by the commanding officers," he said.

Meanwhile Border Patrol officials have arranged for a helicopter holiday food delivery to a forward operating camp deep in the desert.

"We actually take a helicopter out to Desert Camp Grip, to take some meals out for the agents on duty out there," said spokesman Al Bosco. The permanent camp complex located a few miles north of the Mexican border in the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge _ about 60 miles southeast of Yuma _ is manned by several agents for a week at a time.

A number of Border Patrol stations organize a holiday pot luck or sponsor a turkey dinner on Christmas Day, said J.B. Houston, one of two chaplains in the Tucson sector.

That will "afford agents the opportunity to roll in for five minutes and pick up something to take back with them, or at muster give them an extra five or 10 minutes," he said.

Also on Christmas Day, an Army chaplain assigned to the Guard operation _ being referred to as Operation Pie Forward _ will be delivering pies to soldiers.

"They're mostly pumpkin pie, but at least one soldier from North Carolina put in a special request for sweet potato pie, and we're hoping the other three soldiers with him like sweet potato pie," Heaton said. "Although as I understand it, the chaplain will have a variety of pies with him."

Meanwhile, some soldiers from the Oregon National Guard who will be off-duty on Christmas Day plan to visit patients at a local rehabilitation center in Yuma, including veterans of Pearl Harbor whom they met there previously, to bring and help open presents, Heaton said.