Yesterday at work we passed around a Christmas card for one of the guys who is in the army reserve now over in Iraq. Everybody who knows him signed it with a little message to him just to let him know we’re thinking about him. He’s been gone so long now there are a lot of folks there now who never met him (we’re a small company). I scanned it and a friend of his emailed it to him. Luckily, he’s able to check his webmail regularly so he got the message and wrote back today.We were all standing around the Christmas tree distributing gifts (we did a secret Santa this year - with all the new people gifts were getting out of hand) and his friend walked in with his reply. I read it aloud: he was really appreciative that we’d taken even that small effort and let us know it. He wished us a merry Christmas. He wrote that he had just lost a good friend in a roadside bombing that had seriously injured a few more of his "brothers in arms" and wanted us to think good thoughts for their families. It was sureal, everybody was so quiet.