This link is from the At War blog at the New York Times news website. Although the article itself is pretty brief, just knowing that these small comfort items are available in surreal form to soldiers in Afghanistan brightens my day a little bit. Check it out. On that note, I recently finished The Things They Carried, and it was incredible. I really appreciated the writing style. I also enjoyed the way each of the stories wound circles around each other, and that any kernel of truth, if there even was one, was morphed into another kernel of untruth by the next segment of the text. Fantastic quick and emotional read. I've also started Animal Dreams by Barbara Kingsolver, who wrote The Poisonwood Bible.