By JOSEPH KELLARD
"Hey what's going on?" McQue wrote in his first reply to a batch of letters that Kathy Scheiner's third-grade class mailed him in December. "It was so nice to get letters from my old school."
A specialist in Company B of the Fighting 69th stationed in Baghdad, McQue, 21, has assumed various duties, from supplier to gunner to radio operator to intelligence gatherer. Add to these, unofficially, pen pal to Scheiner's students, who now each write him a letter per month. Their missives often contain an array of questions whose topics range from army food to loneliness. During his free time, which is usually spent catching some well-earned Z's or eating chow, McQue does his best to compose a two-page reply that answers some of the students' queries.
In his first letter, dated Jan. 20, McQue told the Hegarty kids that he joined the National Guard and was in boot camp while still in high school, and that he signed on to the military full-time for the pay and to support his country. "He said that he's over there to keep us safe," said Alexis, one of Scheiner's students.
Some of the surprising things the students have learned from McQue's letters are that it rains in the desert, and that nighttime temperatures there can drop to 60 degrees or lower. Scheiner has capitalized on her students' enthusiasm about adopting McQue as a pen pal to teach them lessons in geography and history. She noted that they previously knew little to nothing about Iraq, but that has changed dramatically.
"Now when I hear 'Iraq,' I think about Keith," said one student, Lea.
Her classmate, Peter, said, "He's really become a big part of our life."
Once, some teachers dug up some photos of McQue as a Hegarty student, and after he mailed the class a picture of himself as a soldier and the third-graders learned about him through his words, he became increasingly real to them. "We're writing back and forth now and learning more and more about him," Alexis said.
Last September, while McQue was in his second year of studying criminal justice at John Jay College, he was deployed to Iraq, initially helping to prepare armor for vehicles. He expects to return home this October, when he promised to visit his pen pals at Hegarty.
Their letter-writing campaign began after McQue's mother, Janet, who now lives in Florida, sent Diane Hart, a teacher at Hegarty School, a newsletter that mentioned her son's activity in Iraq. When Hart talked with the staff, Scheiner recognized McQue's last name, having had his older brother, Brian, as a student when she taught kindergarten. Scheiner then came up with the idea of having her students write McQue in Baghdad.
Currently her students are preparing new letters, having sent McQue some Valentine's Day cards last month. They subsequently learned that he recently got engaged, and expressed a longing to see his fiancee. Responding to one pen pal who mentioned the weather at home, McQue said he missed New York and the snow, but didn't miss shoveling it. As an aside, he mentioned that he caught the final quarter of the Super Bowl, but unfortunately his Philadelphia Eagles lost to the New England Patriots.
Some students mentioned that when the TV is on at home and news comes on about Iraq, they always keep an eye out for McQue. Of course, some of the news coming from the insurgency-torn areas is grim, so there's always the possibility that something bad might happen to McQue.
"It's something I really had to think about before doing this," Scheiner said. On the other hand, Scheiner's encouraging her students to send McQue letters, cards and snacks has proved to be a morale booster for him. He wrote in his original letter, "You guys put a big smile on my face and give me extra energy." In his latest letter, he apologized for the delay in getting back to the students, having been busy providing security for the Iraqi elections on Jan. 30.
Until McQue meets his pen pals at Hegarty next fall, Scheiner's students will continue to adorn a closet door of their classroom with his letters, a photo of him in his fatigues, a map of Iraq with Baghdad highlighted, and letters from his mother. They've designated the area "Keith's Corner."
In one of Janet's letters to Scheiner and her third-graders, she told them her son told her that their initial letters to him "were very good, very cute, and made him smile." Knowing how their letter-writing efforts have made his days in a dangerous place a little brighter, she wrote, "You made my son happy, made him smile - and that makes me very happy and very, very, very grateful."
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