Kids Across the US Sending Letters to Our Troops

'You're never too young to make a difference,' says Savannah Maddison, who started a letter-writing campaign in fifth grade

Savannah Maddison (C) is the founder of Savannah's Soldiers. The organization sends letters to deployed military members. Courtesy of Monique Ogden

When Savannah Maddison was in fifth grade, she discovered that her best friend’s father was in the military and was going to be deployed to Afghanistan.

“As a civilian child in fifth grade with no kind of direct connection to the military, I didn’t really know what that meant,” she said. “I just knew that she was sad about it, and it made me sad to know that things like that were going on that I didn’t know about.”