American servicemen and women are today languishing in Walter Reed, Bethesda Naval, and Landstuhl (Germany) and other military hospitals without access to free telephone service. Few soldiers are able to call home on a regular basis.

Given the enormous resources of the military, including unused satellite and high-speed cable capacity, one would have thought that free telephone access would be provided. However, there is little interest at the Defense Department in helping our wounded maintain contact with home or, for that matter, even calling attention to their needs. Keeping the wounded and maimed isolated may serve a felt need of the military because the Defense Department wants to keep discussion about the human costs of the Iraqi incursion in the penumbra of public view.

There is one readily available opportunity which will allow recovering soldiers to telephonically reach home. Motivated cell phone users could contribute a portion of their monthly minutes, including all unused or rollover minutes, to their service provider. The service provider, such as Verizon, Cingular, and Sprint, could in turn provide the contributed minutes, less a deduction for service costs, to our military hospitals. Given the number of mystifying charges on the typical telephone bill, the cell phone companies could easily add a check-off system to their standard bill without exacerbating customer confusion.

Providing free telephone access to our wounded and permanently institutionalized soldiers is a small but palpably tangible way of making their lives and those of their families more comfortable. Rather than festooning our cars with shibboleths and slogans, which self-righteously proclaim the sunshine patriotism of the driver, we should appeal to the better angles of our nature, as President Lincoln so famously averred, and actually help those American soldiers damaged by the Iraqi incursion as well as the war against the Afghan Taliban.

Karl Eschelbach