Jeff Harrell has the wonderful story of Captain Jon Powers, formerly of the 2/3 of the 1st Armored Division (the “Gunners”), who returned from Iraq and started a program called War Kids Relief.

I had the opportunity to talk with Captain Jon Powers tonight. He came to Edelman’s D.C. office with a copy of “Gunner Palace.” We watched the movie in the big conference room, then Jon sat with us for an hour and answered our questions.

He told us about what War Kids Relief has planned. There are hundreds of youth centers all over Iraq, he said, youth centers built by Saddam but now abandoned. War Kids Relief hopes, in partnership with the Iraqi Ministry of Youth and Sports, to go to 100 of those youth centers and refurbish them, building classrooms and soccer fields and computer labs. They plan to launch a work-study program that would send Iraqi teens out into the cities and towns to do “Depression-era stuff” like painting buildings and picking up trash for a small wage. Every other week they’ll work; on alternate weeks they’ll receive vocational training at the youth centers.

“We’re trying to reach the three and a half million [Iraqi] kids who aren’t in school,” Jon said. “Because it doesn’t matter where you stand on the war. These kids had nothing to do with it.”

For more information about this very worthy effort, here’s the War Kids Relief web site, at the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation.