At Dulles, a Long-Awaited Welcome Center

By Steve Vogel
Thursday, May 3, 2007

Since the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq began, hundreds of thousands of U.S. service members have passed through Washington Dulles International Airport, many of them on their way to or from areas of conflict.

Unlike Reagan National and Baltimore-Washington International Thurgood Marshall airports, where the USO has operated lounges for many years, there was no place at Dulles for traveling troops to make free calls to their families, get a cup of coffee on the house or find help dealing with travel problems.

But on April 16, a small lounge operated by the USO of Metropolitan Washington officially opened at Dulles. It was overdue, officials said, for an airport where an estimated 300,000 service members pass through every year on commercial flights.

Donald Winter, then a senior executive with Northrop Grumman serving on the USO-Metro board, recalled coming into Dulles several years ago from an overseas flight and seeing 50 to 75 uniformed service members returning from service in the Middle East -- "none of them really having a suitable reception."

"It really bothered me to see so many of them using Dulles and not really receiving adequate support," Winter, now secretary of the Navy, said during the ceremony last month. "The idea of not having the USO at our nation's principal airport didn't seem to be the right thing."

Past efforts to open a USO lounge at Dulles did not get anywhere. "I'm not sure people really wanted to have one here," Winter said in an interview.

USO-Metro raised the issue around the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991, but the conflict ended before the effort picked up much steam. "The airport didn't really know how much military was coming through," said Elaine Rogers, president of USO-Metro.

Rogers and Winter began a new push before Winter left the USO board and took the Pentagon job last year. They found a ready ally in Christopher U. Browne, who moved from National to take over as Dulles airport manager in 2005. "When I joined the staff, it seemed clear that this was a shortcoming that needed to be addressed," said Browne, a former Navy aviator.

Money had to be raised from private donors to construct the $500,000 lounge. "A project like this doesn't just happen," said John Marselle, chairman of the USO-Metro board. "It's not always an easy sale."

Major contributors include Northrop Grumman, Verizon, Cisco Systems, URS and Turner Construction.

BWI, which is a hub for Air Mobility Command military flights, has a 5,000-square-foot USO lounge in the international terminal that has served more than 50,000 military travelers in each of the past six years.

By comparison, the 770-square-foot Dulles facility is tiny. But it has a prime location across from baggage claim area No. 12, and USO-Metro leaders expect it will serve 40,000 military travelers a year.

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://www.nmfa.org.

"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.