Georgiana Ayer, right, presents the clothing she received from retailer Land’s End to Chaplain (Col.) Eric Holmstrom at the Landstuhl Regional Medical Center on Friday, while her husband, Maj. Philip Ayer unloads more boxes of donated gifts. (Ben Murray / S&S)
LANDSTUHL, Germany — Signaling the unprecedented amount of gifts for U.S. servicemembers that have inundated military hospitals in the United States and Europe, chaplains at the Army’s main hospital in Germany spend their workday literally tripping over donations.
Boxes of movies, books, socks, snacks and letters line the hallways and spill into the chaplains’ offices, where they talk almost matter-of-factly about a recent donation of 600 jackets, or another of 2,000 sweat suits.
“Quantity-wise, yeah, it’s been a big surge and a big push,” said Landstuhl Chaplain (Col.) Eric Holmstrom, who manages most of the incoming donations for servicemembers being treated at the hospital. “We’re in the process of looking for more warehouse space.”
Holmstrom’s office is straining under the weight of the same kind of generosity that last week prompted major military hospitals in the United States to ask people to stop sending gifts for a while, saying they had months’ worth of donations to give out and no room to store any more.
Holmstrom said Thursday that Landstuhl has come close to reaching that point, but the chaplains decided not to put a block on incoming gifts for servicemembers.
“I raised that issue and our decision was, ‘We don’t want to say no,’” Holmstrom said, though he then added quickly, “That’s not an appeal for more planeloads or palettes of things.”
Even amid the urgent need for money and relief needed by victims of the tsunami disaster in South Asia, people in early January have continued to heap more onto the Landstuhl pile, Holmstrom said.
One such person is Georgiana Ayer, co-leader of an Army family readiness group in Mannheim, Germany, who showed up at the hospital Friday with several large boxes of new clothing from retailer Land’s End.
Ayer’s story is similar to the thousands of others that have combined to create the logjam of boxes at Landstuhl. After hearing in November that the hospital needed clothes for patients, she pooled some money to buy a few things, and started an effort that snowballed into a donation from the Land’s End clothing company that included sweat shirts and sweat pants, coats, hats and boots, among other items.
“I wasn’t expecting anything big,” Ayer said. “[But] I came into the office one day and someone said, ‘Oh, we got four giant boxes,’” she said.
Holmstrom said cash donations to the chaplains’ office are the easiest thing for the staff to handle these days, though the hospital will take other gifts. Anything extra that doesn’t get used at the hospital will eventually find a grateful servicemember somewhere, possibly in Iraq, he said.
“If it’s not used here, it goes downrange,” he said.
