Mightier Than Wooden Swords
Mike Smith
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In recent years, there has been an on-going political debate over whether or not our country’s troops, in Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, have been getting properly equipped with the supplies they need. Do our troops, some ask, have sufficient funding for the best weapons? Do they have the best body armor? The best vehicles? Do they have the best handmade wooden pens?
Congress and President George W. Bush have made numerous compromises with each other, to try to meet our soldiers’ requirements for the most advanced weaponry, the toughest armor, and the safest troop transport vehicles, but when it comes to the deployment of individually handcrafted wooden writing utensils, it seems our national government has sadly fallen short.
Enter, then, Artesia High School—in the oil refinery town of Artesia, in Eddy County, in southeastern New Mexico—where six male students from Murry Avery’s woodshop class are taking the troops’ need for custom-made pens seriously—taking the matter into their own hands.
According to an article by reporter Samantha Morin in the May 4, 2008 Artesia Daily Press:
The students have been making wooden pens to send overseas.
The effort stems from the Freedom Pens Project. According to the Freedom Pens Web site, “Freedom Pens are being made by individual woodworkers everywhere, from small towns to our largest cities; amateur woodworkers are donating their time, talent and personal funds to create custom pens as a symbol of support for our military men and women.”
These genuinely good-hearted students—Travis DeMerritt, Luciano Duarte, Pablo Lopez, William Lovelace, Gerardo Rodriguez, and Justin Sanchez—receive pen-making kits through a sponsor of the project, Penn State Industries, and then shape the kits’ wooden “pen blanks” into stately writing implements using chisels and lathes.
The six young Artesians then work to carve and shape the pens—in batches of ten pens at a time—and then send them on to their sponsor, who in turn sends them to Iraq. So far, according to Freedompens.org, the overall project has resulted in 73,134 handmade pens being sent overseas to a comparable number of expectant, homesick, and perhaps momentarily puzzled soldiers.
But should this small band of Artesian students (and their larger program) really be forced to bear the entire burden of arming America's troops with adequate wooden pens? Is it it fair to place such a sizeable responsibilty solely on the frail pubescent shoulders of a single New Mexican woodshop class? Can we as Americans honestly afford not to demand that our elected leaders take into account our troops' need for handtooled ink-bearing instruments? Can we, as conscionable citizens, ever deserve to rest at night knowing that somewhere in the Middle East, the men and women of our armed forces are struggling through sandstorms and firefights, fighting for our freedoms without so much as balsawood ballpoint?
"The Daily Strange" would suggest that the answer to all of these questions is...well...maybe.
We are talking about pens, right? Wooden pens?
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Reader Comments (2)
But I'd argue that the biggest obstacle in any war is less low troop morale, and more enemy combatants trying to kill you.