CityView Magazine

City angel Bandanas for Bragg By Stephanie Brigman laughed and joked as they folded and packed 720 bandanas. What began as a gift for one person has turned into a full-scale operation, a source of hope for hundreds of soldiers serving overseas. Just two years ago, Gray couldn’t Z Above | Volunteers package bandanas for soldiers serving all over the world. Each bandana is printed with the words to Psalm 91. have imagined the demand. “This is bigger than me,” she said recently, “a lot bigger than me. But I serve a big God and if He wants to accomplish a task, it will get done.” As a military wife and mother, Gray wanted to offer encouragement and support to her son, who was serving in Iraq. She searched the Internet and found a company that produced camouflage bandanas. But it was the words on the bandana that really struck a chord. Printed on one side was Psalm 91, sometimes referred to as the soldier’s psalm. After purchasing a bandana for her own son, Gray wished she could send one to every soldier stationed at Fort Bragg deploying to Iraq and Afghanistan. “I thought they were so precious and beautiful that I wanted to give them to all of the soldiers on Fort Bragg,” she said. But how? Gray met with Pat Hash, command chaplain for the 18th Airborne Corps. “But I don’t think he knew how serious this woman was,” Gray recalled, laughing. 64|February/March • 2009 iploc bags, rubber bands and stacks of bandanas lined the tables at Village Baptist Church. Mary Gray and a small army of volunteers So serious, she traded in her sedan for a Toyota 4Runner large enough for the towering stacks of cardboard boxes she often carried into the post office. She even dedicated a room in her Fayetteville house for the ministry’s many packages and supplies. But that was only the beginning. Operation Bandanas currently has an executive committee with 11 board members plus a diverse group of volunteers, military wives, senior citizens and veterans who regularly assist with folding and packaging the bandanas. As a result, more than 62,000 bandanas have been delivered throughout Iraq, Afghanistan and across the nation. Although the demand has increased dramatically, members of Operation Bandanas are not intimidated. Rather, they embrace these requests and lay their hands upon every cardboard box as Gray prays for each soldier who will receive a bandana. “We try to envision the young man or woman who will receive the bandana,” Gray said. “Our prayer and hope is that a young man or woman who has never opened a Bible will read this Psalm and because God says His word will not return void, it will lead them to open a Bible.” Jeffrey Hawkins, a former brigade combat team chaplain for the 2nd Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, received a bandana shortly before he left for Iraq. “What makes it more than special to me is that totally unknown to me, my wife, Lori, memorized Psalm 91 and for

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