MORE REASONS TO BE PROUD OF OUR SOLDIERS

U.S. reservists from a Denver-based combat engineer battalion have adopted a small village in northern Iraq, where - on their own time - they are building playground equipment and restoring an irrigation well...

Elsewhere, American troops are volunteering to fix up orphanages, schools and hospitals, and even kicking in cash from their own pockets to buy refrigerators, stoves and beds for needy Iraqis.

Far from the headlines about the U.S. military mission in Iraq, American GIs are daily making these sorts of contributions to help mend Iraq, both from the ravages of combat but also from a decade of neglect while the country was under U.N. economic sanctions to punish Saddam Hussein.

Accounts of these efforts can be found on U.S. military Internet sites, which some critics might dismiss as puffery or propaganda, or little more than a drop in the bucket to slake the needs of Iraqis. But the soldiers quoted in these stories uniformly cite their participation in these projects as the most satisfying, if least heralded, part of their duty in Iraq.

"Americans who disagree with what we are doing might understand how much we are helping this country and its people," Army Pfc. Amber Bryant, a 1st Armored Division medic in Baghdad, said in a recent Army Web site story. "Maybe not today or tomorrow, but someday, people will see the change we made."

A sampling of a few of the projects conceived and carried out by U.S. troops:

A battalion of the Army's 101st Airborne Division is hooking up the folks back home in America with Iraqi villages, organizing an "adopt-a-village" campaign for sending "care" packages of school supplies, sports equipment, toiletry items and canned food. So far, the 426th Forward Support Battalion has signed up the city of Salem, Utah, several Minnesota residents and a Tennessee car dealership to help two villages.

An Army reservist with the 432nd Civil Affairs Battalion from Green Bay, Wis., dreamed up the "Backpacks for Iraq" project, which aims to ship 2,000 donated packs filled with school supplies given by people in Wisconsin and elsewhere. So far, the soldier has distributed 120 packs, with another semi-trailer truckload on the way...

The Army Reserve's 171st Area Support Group in An Nasiriyah in southern Iraq collected money from its soldiers to buy stoves, refrigerators, fans, televisions and kitchen tables and chairs for three orphanages, which the troops have taken under their wing, in a city where fierce fighting raged during the initial days of the war.