Waging peace with colored pencils

Always a bit of a hell-raiser, my younger brother George played defensive end in high school, hunted deer, collected rowdy friends, seldom walked away from a confrontation. He was an easy mark for military recruiters.

George wound up in the Army, did a tour in Germany.

He alone, among seven children in our family, donned Uncle Sam's uniform.

But George's greatest gifts, from my view, didn't involve taking up arms or preparing for war. Much of his work life has been devoted to teaching and coaching, helping special education students in public schools, conveying the fundamentals of sport to young people after school or in summer recreation leagues in Meridian, Miss., where we were raised.

So it struck me as oddly appropriate that George, now 46 and deployed as a staff sergeant with an Army Guard unit sent to Iraq, has found a way of turning his attention to kids again, even in a war zone.

Serving with the 155th Brigade in a special troops battalion and assigned to Camp Taji north of Baghdad, George signed on with a troops-to-citizens mission that might strike some critics of the war effort as Pollyannaish, but that a growing number of soldier-support groups are enthused about.

It is called, simply, Operation Back to School. It involves marshaling good will and modest donations from individuals in America to provide school supply kits to Iraqi children in rural, badly neglected schools near the military base.

Classroom supplies sent overseas, in small quantities, in the same sorts of reduced-cost military postal packages that carry treats from soldiers' families, are assembled by American and Iraqi soldiers in a volunteer program spearheaded by Air Force Lt. Col E. Kent Wong and Army Major Rob Edwards.

Some deliveries have already been made, and "Team Taji" hopes to hand out 10,000 kits before the year's end....