Operation First Response: a Focus on Everyday Needs

Twice a week, Peggy Baker and her husband, Steve, drive down their gravel driveway and head 80 miles north

to visit families of wounded soldiers at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, in Washington. Their Dodge Durango makes the trip loaded with groceries, shampoo, toothpaste, handmade throw blankets, and even a compact refrigerator or two that the Bakers spread out in the lobby of Mologne House, a hotel on the grounds of Walter Reed where recuperating soldiers or visiting families often stay. In addition to distributing the goods, the Bakers dispense conversation, hugs, and quick hellos.

“Whatever they ask for, we bring them,” says Ms. Baker, who never gave much thought to the military until her eldest son, Joshua Nickel, watched the plane crash into the Pentagon on September 11, 2001, from the roof of his office building. He enlisted in the Army shortly afterward and is now stationed in South Korea. “It just changed our lives,” says Ms. Baker, who has three other children. “We all joined at that point.”

Ms. Baker, who had been busy teaching her two youngest children at home, looked for a way to support her eldest son.

Two years ago, through the Internet, she found a charity to join and started visiting families at Walter Reed as a volunteer. Unhappy with the management of that group, Ms. Baker and Elizabeth Fuentes, whom she met while volunteering, started Operation First Response a year ago. News reports about the war in Iraq had prompted Ms. Fuentes, who has two grown daughters and no connection to the military, to start volunteering to help the troops.

Aiding 300 Families

The women have raised $65,000 in cash and donated products to help more than 300 families of wounded soldiers with everyday necessities, household bills, and travel, either to see loved ones recuperating at Walter Reed or to allow recovering service members to take short visits home.

The group sent a soldier at Walter Reed to his family reunion this summer, which was a surprise to his relatives. “They need to have some sort of life,” says Ms. Fuentes, who commutes monthly from her home in Cheraw, S.C., to Culpeper. “They need to stay in contact with their families because that’s part of taking care of them.”

In addition, the group gives combat hospitals backpacks filled with clothing, hygiene items, and prepaid telephone cards to give to wounded solders. Some amputees have difficulty holding bags, so the backpacks come in handy as carriers.

The charity also sends a car and driver to local airports to pick up families visiting relatives at Walter Reed.

“Imagine coming into one of the worst situations of your life and you don’t know where you are,” says Ms. Baker, adding that some families have never flown before. The driver knows where he is going, helps carry luggage, and makes sure everyone is settled in the car. “To me, that is just an extra arm of comfort,” she says.

Operation First Response offers services to all wounded military members, not just those who served in Iraq, unlike many of the charities created in recent years to help the troops.

“We feel if they are in uniform and need our help, that is what we are there for,” says Ms. Baker. And unlike many other groups, Operation First Response is more flexible about help. For example, other charities might not pay for travel to a family reunion.

But Ms. Baker, who has gotten to know most of the families that her group has helped, likes deciding where the money goes on a case-by-case basis.

For example, she notes, at the request of an official at Walter Reed, the group recently sent the stressed-out wife of a wounded solider to a spa for a day of beauty treatments. The charity does not usually pay for such treatments, but the woman had not been out of her husband’s room for weeks and needed a break, says Ms. Baker.

“What is unique about us is we are open to whatever situation is put in front of us,” she says. “I don’t want somebody to say, ‘No, you can’t purchase that,’ or ‘No, you can’t fly that family.’ I want, ‘We’re going to find a way to do it.’”

Operation First Response works with several other charities, including USA Cares, in Radcliff, Ky., and Operation Family Fund, in Ridgecrest, Calif., to ensure families’ needs are met. “None of us are big enough to do it alone, and if we are not going to work together, we are not going to make a difference,” says Ms. Baker. “We don’t care if we get credit. We just want the soldiers’ needs taken care of.”

Operation First Response, which has applied for tax-exempt status from the Internal Revenue Service and is awaiting a decision, has no office space or cadre of volunteers to help stuff backpacks. Yet donations of supplies, frequent-flier miles, and money have continued to roll in, filling Ms. Baker’s basement storage shelves.

Ms. Baker says her four-person, all-volunteer group has had no time to devise a formal fund-raising effort. Several service members who the group has helped send small monthly donations, and one soldier asked his wedding guests to contribute to Operation First Response rather than bring gifts.

The charity also benefits from fund raising by Chuck Thompson, president of the American Legion Riders State Charter Chapter, in Des Moines, a group of veterans who are motorcycle enthusiasts. At the charity’s request, Mr. Thompson raised money to send the siblings of a cancer-stricken soldier from Iowa to a military hospital in Germany for a visit. He has since traveled to more than 15 legion posts in Iowa to talk about the charity and has raised more than $6,000 for the group.

“They treat these kids as if they were their own sons,” he says of Operation First Response’s leaders. “If you need a hand, if your family is in trouble and it’s worthy, they are going to help.”

Calculating Expenses

Administrative costs, including gas and Ms. Fuentes’s trips to Culpeper, come out of Ms. Baker’s and Ms. Fuentes’s pockets, as do some flights where the charity could not acquire enough donated frequent-flier miles. For example, a mother was visiting one wounded son at Walter Reed when she got word that another son was returning from Iraq.

“It was important for her to be there for his homecoming,” says Ms. Fuentes, who paid for the mother’s flight home.

To get the charity off the ground, Ms. Baker spent $10,000 and Ms. Fuentes estimates her share at $3,000. As donations come in, the women are slowly reimbursing themselves. “We are not wealthy enough to say, ‘Hey, write that off,’ and never think of it again,” says Ms. Baker. Ms. Baker’s husband is a self-employed fiber-optic network installer, and Ms. Fuentes’ husband, Dale, is a plant manager for Weyerhaeuser Company, which makes paper and lumber and builds homes.

However, they do not plan to reimburse themselves for administrative expenses or travel costs. Once the charity receives its tax exemption, the women plan to solicit corporations and foundations for assistance.

By now, Ms. Baker is a familiar presence at Mologne House, and families who know her refer others to “Miss Peggy” for help.

For those who don’t know her, Ms. Baker is careful to wait for a family to approach her, realizing that many people desire privacy during a difficult time, no matter what their needs might be.

The charity receives referrals from officials at Walter Reed, other charities, and veterans groups, and Operation First Response’s vice president, Carolyn Crossley, works as a nurse at the Army’s Landstuhl Regional Medical Center, in Germany, and meets wounded soldiers before they fly back to the United States for additional treatment.

Ms. Baker hopes the charity will one day have the money to go beyond helping military troops and family members in small ways. Her goal is to help wounded service members who face long recoveries cover their household expenses.

“I don’t want a mother to have to chose, ‘Do I go home to my job or stay here with my child?’” says Ms. Baker. “I want them to be where they need to be.”