Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, March 28, 1991 TAG: 9103280194
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV-1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: MELISSA DEVAUGHN/ NEW RIVER VALLEY BUREAU
DATELINE: RADFORD LENGTH: Medium
Then the children came in.
They squirmed about in their little chairs, waiting in anticipation. Their teachers attempted to settle them down with songs. But the chatter and restlessness continued.
But when David Kennedy walked in, the room became silent. The children looked at him. All of a sudden they were shy.
That's when Lynn Shaffer, preschool teacher at Central United Methodist Church, stepped in.
"Guys, this is David," she said. "What do you all say to him, what have you been waiting to say to him for a long time?"
And all the children yelled: "Welcome Home."
Spec. 4 David Kennedy of the 82nd Airborne was home from the Saudi Arabia. And Shaffer had promised her preschool children that they would throw a big party for him.
On Wednesday, she kept that promise.
Once the children realized that Kennedy, who turned 23 Monday, wouldn't bite, they began to hurl questions at him.
"Did you ride the camels?" "Did you have Big Wheels?" "Did you have bugs there? Did you use the bug spray we sent?" Whitney King, 4, of Radford asked Kennedy if he played in the sand.
"No, I didn't," he said, "but I did live in the biggest sandbox in the world."
"Did you have beds to sleep in?" asked Patrick McMillan, 4, of Fairlawn.
"No, we had cots," Kennedy said. "But we couldn't take them into the desert with us."
One parent asked what he did for fun. He paused for a moment, then answered, "Well, I read a book."
And the first thing he ate when he came home? "A Wendy's hamburger."
The children also asked him if he got good snacks in the desert.
"No, we didn't get snacks and our food was dehydrated," he answered. The children told him they had a cake for him so he would have a good snack.
So they ate the cake that said "Welcome home, David" and the children sang "Skinamorink," in which they said "I love you" in sign language. And they recited the "Pledge of Allegiance."
After the cake was gone, the children became braver than before. Many of them wanted to touch his uniform.
Liz Troxell, 4, of Radford, gave Kennedy a box of Honey Nut Cheerios so he would have a good breakfast. He had said in one of his letters he didn't have any Honey Nut Cheerios in the desert.
Then she went to hug him. After that first hug, all the other children wanted one, too. One by one, they all got a chance to hug their new friend and listen to war stories.
He told them how his unit had been running and found a stray dog that was almost dead. They took the dog back to the camp and fed it and cleaned it up. After a while the dog, which they named "Richard," got better and became the unit's mascot.
He told them about the jeeps he rode in and about the tracks the tanks made in the sand.
He said he received the packages they had sent to him after Thanksgiving and that he had shared the cookies with his buddies.
And he told them he kissed the United States soil as soon as he stepped off the plane in Fort Bragg, N.C., last Sunday, the day before his birthday.
Kennedy, an artillerly fire direction specialist, had been in the gulf since August. After the ground war started in February, Kennedy's unit and a French unit fought the Republican Guard in Iraq.
Last November, the preschoolers had a special Thanksgiving program that was videotaped and sent to Kennedy, along with loads of stuff he might need - sun block, a Frisbee and cookies.
The children and Kennedy had been keeping in touch since.
He plans to spend the week celebrating and making up for the seven months he spent overseas before returning to Fort Bragg April 5.\
by CNB