Sending Rapid Deployment Kits to Soldiers
"I am in Kuwait. I am with the Marines," wrote a corpsman to Campus Crusade's Military Ministry. "We all don't have Bibles. We would like some help," he wrote on a postcard fashioned of cardboard cut from a box of canned apples.
Requests like these have poured in by the thousands. Since 9/11, the ministry has distributed more than 1.5 million Rapid Deployment Kits, which include a camouflage-covered New Testament, a Would You Like to Know God Personally? gospel booklet and a special version of the Daily Light devotional. Packed into a watertight bag, the RDKs are slim enough to fit in soldiers' pockets.
"Right now, we have orders for 42,000 more," says retired Air Force Brig. Gen. Dick Abel, executive director of Military Ministry, "and many of those are from the war zone. In the Armed Forces, the spiritual dimension of one's life [is] extremely important, and certainly with soldiers protecting our freedom and going into harm's way."
