Gardens provide peace of mind to soldiers at war

There's a long tradition of planting gardens by soldiers at war. They provide peace of mind, hope, and a connection to home, among other benefits.

(Page 2 of 2)

"The longer we stayed in-country, the more hyper we got," says Beardall, now director of Grounds Management and Fleet Services at North Carolina State University in Raleigh.

Enlarge

Related stories

"Our big helicopters drew a lot of fire; took a lot of hits. It was always time to shut down after a tough day, and there were lots of tough days. The garden did a lot for me. I'd go back to my hooch and just sit and stare at it."

Justin Wanzek was with a North Dakota National Guard unit deployed near Tikrit, northwest of Baghdad, in 2004. He started gardening with a buddy in Iraq because it reminded him of his farming roots near Valley City, N.D.

"Coming from North Dakota, everybody likes to stay busy, even when off-duty," Wanzek says. "We were always planting or digging irrigation ditches by hand. Our garden was nothing big, but it reminded me of what once was and what someday would be again."

And then there was the late John Creech, a World War II infantry officer who survived several German prisoner-of-war camps to become director of the US National Arboretum in Washington in the 1970s. He jokingly introduced himself to Helphand as "the only soldier ever awarded a medal for gardening."

There was more to it than that, of course: After being moved to a camp in Poland that had an unused greenhouse, Creech talked his captors into letting him operate it for raising edibles.

His "barbed wire garden" supplemented a moldy bread and watered-down-soup diet for 1,500 fellow prisoners. It also earned him a Bronze Star for merit, which he was said to have valued more than the Silver Star won earlier for gallantry in action.

"All such gardens were an assertive action, not a retreat," Helphand says. "Some gardens were attacks. There was a certain defiance about them."

-----

To read more about gardening, see the Monitor's main gardening page and our lively gardening blog, Diggin' It. Both of these have new URLs, so we hope you'll bookmark them and return. Want to be notified when there's something new in our gardening section? Sign up for our RSS feed.