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At Dulles, a Long-Awaited Welcome Center
Army Sgt. 1st Class Jay Rippel praised the summer camp program Operation Purple, for children of deployed service members. His daughters attended last summer and made friends with others in their situation, including the Zottis from Crofton. From left, Cydney and Carly Rippel and Kendall and Katherine Zotti.
(By James M. Thresher -- The Washington Post)
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The Dulles lounge includes a hospitality desk that will be staffed 365 days a year by USO volunteers. It also has a large-screen television, free snack bar, Internet access and free telephone. During the center's first week of operation, a USO volunteer helped a young soldier coming from Iraq who arrived at Dulles at 5:30 a.m. get home to Puerto Rico to be with his dying father, Rogers said.
The USO lounge at National, in the meantime, is to be replaced this year by a larger facility in a more prominent location in Terminal A.
A Camp to Call Their Own
Life for Priscilla H.M. Zotti's three girls is filled with many of the "little heartbreaks" experienced by the children of thousands of service members deployed overseas.
The girls' father, Marine Col. Steven M. Zotti, served 13 months in Ramadi, Iraq, and is now stationed at Okinawa. His three daughters -- Caroline, 13; Katherine, 11; and Kendall, 10 -- must do without him at many events such as father-daughter dinners, sporting events and family gatherings.
While classmates at St. Mary's School in Annapolis are empathetic, none has parents deployed overseas with the military, said Priscilla Zotti, a political science professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.
This year, as they did last summer, the girls will attend an Operation Purple summer camp in Upper Marlboro. The program, created by the National Military Family Association in Alexandria, is offering free week-long camps at 34 locations in 26 states for the children of deployed military members.
"There's nothing like talking to another kid whose dad is in the same place, to not always be in the position of being the different kid," said Priscilla Zotti, who lives in Crofton.
Zotti and her daughters attended a news conference last week on Capitol Hill, at which the girls were reunited with friends they made at least year's camp: Cydney Rippel, 12, and her sister, Carly, 9.
Their father, Army Sgt. 1st Class Jay Rippel, a reservist from Upstate New York who deployed to Afghanistan in 2003 with a surgical team and is now stationed away from home at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, said the camp helped fill the void left by his absence.
"One of the things I realized was the Army has been training me for 20 years to deploy, but didn't prepare my family as well," he said.
During the news conference, the Sierra Club announced a $1 million donation that will enable an additional 1,000 children to attend camps this summer.
Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope said that while the group rarely sponsors another organization's efforts, the Operation Purple program is unique because it offers military children "a hands-on education on conservation and the opportunity to cope."
Space is still available in some camps, said Lauren Rebeiz, Operation Purple program director for the military families association. Information is available at http:/
"What this is doing is filling the void on both sides of the family," said Army Maj. Gen. Michael H. Sumrall, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for National Guard matters.
