CityView Magazine

fused to have a table put between him and the soldiers when signing auto- graphs – he wanted no barriers, noth- ing to suggest he was untouchable. "He wouldn't sit. He would stand with them, he'd wrestle around with them," she said. Kelli Pickler, the singer, had a crushing migraine headache yet turned down offers to leave early and get some rest. "No, how long is the line?" Jackson recalls her saying. Among war-weary troops, these appearances by the famous and fawned-over went a long way to liſt spirits. Boosting morale among our men and women in uniform is still the core of the USO's mission. (Nothing like a Cow- boys cheerleader visiting some mortar- pocked corner of the Kunar province to put a smile on a G.I.'s face.) But the mis- sion goes beyond hosting concerts and meet-and-greets with celebrities. The USO: for your entertainment, and so much more of what we do," said Renee Lane, the director of the USO center on Fort Bragg. "A lot of the entertainment the troops have is really overseas." Here on the home front, the USO quietly and without fanfare goes about making life smoother for service members and their families. The airport travel center is a case in point. It opened in November with a ribbon-cutting ceremony, mak- ing it the first USO center for traveling troops in Fayetteville since 1986. Along with the comfy seats and coffee, the "Entertainment is a very small part 50 | July/August • 2012 900-square-foot room has computers with internet access and a children's area with its own TV and stacks of Lit- tle Golden Books. "It's long overdue," Lane said. Volunteers figure the lounge draws about 80 people a day and up to 3,000 a month. "It's a home away from home, so to speak, when they're trave- ling," said Robby Roberts, a retired air- man who donates his time several days a week there. If any community should provide grand opening of the new USO center on Fort Bragg, and Lane is giving me a nickel tour of the place. We walk past a computer room that's still a work in progress. "We're looking to beef this up from six computers to twelve and have a complete technology center here." Across the hall is a lounge where a this home away from home to soldiers, it's Fayetteville. The city was home to the world's first USO center, opening in 1941. The club took up residence in the old parsonage of Hay Street United Methodist Church before relocating to a building on Ray Avenue, about where Festival Park is now. It remained there as a community center, complete with a roller skating rink and snack bar, un- til 1986. That's when peacetime budget cuts prompted the USO to pull out. Then in 2002, fire destroyed the building. For more than two decades, Fayette- ville and Fort Bragg would not have a single USO center – until July 2008, when the organization opened a club on Fort Bragg, just east of Bragg Boule- vard. Lane describes it as "man cave- like" rather than a place for the entire family, so the USO recently closed it in exchange for space on the bottom floor of Fort Bragg's Soldier Support Center, where 5,000 people churn through each day. "We needed a better spot," she said. "And this is it." It's a few days before the television is tuned to CNN, but a man in uniform and a woman in civilian attire have tuned it out, absorbed in their own personal electronic devices. There's another man in uniform who just walked in with a blonde-haired lit- tle girl. They're partaking of the Girl Scout cookies displayed on a dish for the munching pleasure of passers-by. Specialist Corey Mallard has been in the Army for four years. He remem- bers being a just-signed-on recruit going through the Atlanta airport and feel- ing the relief of finding a USO center. It helped him navigate into this strange new world with its chains of command and codes of conduct. "I didn't know which end was up at that point, you know, so I was just thankful for it," he said as his two-year-old daughter Teagan nibbles on a thin mint cookie. "My re- cruiter had told me when you get to this airport, go to the USO and they'll take care of you." And they did. With a cup of coffee, a bite to eat, and some nourishing words, he was off to basic training. Seated at a table in the lounge, his back to the TV and his face to a laptop screen, Sgt. Louis Macias was working on retiring from the Army. I asked him

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