Sunday, November 02, 2003

When David Lancia, a combat medic, was shipped to Baghdad in March, he figured he'd be needed mainly by American soldiers. Then he met Ia.

	Melissa Lancia, with assistance from her five-month-old daughter Natalie, sorts through some of the candy that will be sent to the children in Iraqi. Her husband, David Lancia, is a combat medic in Baghdad. (Darrell Sapp, Post-Gazette)

Ia just turned 4, so she's not much older than Elana, his daughter back home in Brookline. Ia has third-degree burns on her back, chest, abdomen, legs and face. Lancia explained that on the back of a photo of him and two of his fellow medics standing with Ia and her six siblings. There are some big smiles.

"I visited her every other day for two months to change her dressing and make sure no infection set in," Lancia wrote to his wife, Melissa. "People asked why I was doing it. My answer was it is the humane thing to do. That little girl wouldn't be burnt up if we didn't bomb them."

Melissa Lancia handed me the photo, and others of her husband with smiling Iraqi children, as we stood in a cluttered room in the basement of the Brookline Assembly of God Church. Here is where Melissa, her mother, sister and others sort, box and stack clothes, toys, toothbrushes, pencils and paper for shipment to Iraq.

There are 130,000 American troops in a place that Newsweek magazine calls "Bush's $87 billion mess." Yet in a place where your life can depend on knowing friend from foe, the soldiers keep writing home, asking for gifts they might give to the children they're meeting.

Dental clinics need everything from sophisticated supplies to toothbrushes. Schools need chalk, paper, pens, pencils, maps and first aid kits. Iraqi families need clothes, but toys and candy are a relief for them and the soldiers who distribute them.

This isn't France or Italy in 1945, when the American GI was seen purely as a liberator, freeing a nation from foreign occupation. The United States toppled a homegrown dictator in Iraq. We are the foreign occupier, like it or not. So when our soldiers throw candy to laughing mobs of children in Baghdad, one has to stay in the Humvee, scanning the streets with his gun.

Some needs are simple enough to cut through the complexity of geopolitics, just as some Americans are generous enough to want to help any kid anytime anywhere.

Members of Mt. Lebanon United Presbyterian Church, the St. Mark Lutheran Evangelical Lutheran Church in Brookline and American Legion Post 540 in Brookline, as well as Melissa Lancia's fellow workers at Manor Care Health Services in Green Tree have helped out here.

When a friend of mine heard about this, she said, "Thank God, we're sending Twizzlers over there."

OK, so a few love offerings may not mean much. But you don't know.

A couple of years ago, I was in Bedford, Va., for the unveiling of the National D-Day Memorial. I met a Frenchman, Richard Catherine, who told me he had come from his little Normandy village to return the generosity American GIs had shown him as a boy of 7.

He had visited American camps daily for two months after the invasion, and never left hungry. Struggling to describe in English how these moments felt for a boy who had known only Nazi occupation, he said, "It was like if the Martians landed. Everybody would be impressed for the end of their life."

In today's war, the American GI must seem even more mysterious, and he has to be more wary. But Melissa Lancia said her husband had been welcomed into the home of man who had lost a limb, whose 8-year-old son had a lost a limb, and had no anger toward Americans.

So the soldier and his wife connect through gifts they don't exchange, but pass along. David and Melissa Lancia both look forward to February, when he is scheduled to return home and meet Natalie, their 7-month old daughter who was just a Ladybug for Halloween. She was born May 30, while her father was across the world, helping a child her sister's age.

Anyone wishing to make a donation may do so through The Brookline Assembly of God, 601 Brookline Blvd, Pittsburgh 15226. Enough clothes have come in, but candy, toys and school supplies are still welcome. Checks to the church to cover shipment should include "for our soldiers" on the memo line.

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