FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:.

Contact Information: Tracy Della Vecchia, Founder MarineParents.com, 573-449-2003 (voice), tdv@marineparents.com

Headline: Hundreds of U.S. Marine Families Meet in Houston in April

Dateline: Columbia, Missouri, February 3, 2006

The MarineParents.com family of Marine families, meeting in Houston for their 2006 National Conference will share their Marine family stories in a rich mix of national speakers, noted Marine Corps authors, Marine displays of every variety, and workshops on more than 20 special Marine family issues including Marine Corps history, boot camp experiences, preparing to welcome your Marine home, and how to help comfort, support and advocate for a Marine family touched by injury or loss of their Marine.

When the parents and family members of hundreds of U.S. Marines gather in Houston April 21-23 for the 2006 MarineParents.com National Conference, they’ll meet face-to-face with other Marine parents, spouses, siblings, fiancés, and friends that they’ve previously known only by their sign-in names on MarineParents.com, the international on-line meeting place for Marine families from all points on the compass.

Some of these families actually met as they waited together for their Marines to arrive at their home base after foreign deployment. They traveled from across the country to the home bases to welcome their Marines’ return from Iraq, meet and re-meet each other, to hug and laugh and cry and support each other during the last hours of painful, joyous waiting. Once acquainted in person or on the MarineParents.com forums, they’re always extended family for each other. Semper Fidelis is the motto, and Marine families live by it – “Always faithful”!

Marine families all share and sometimes worry about the fact that they have family members serving in the Marine Corps. These MarineParents.com correspondents share support for all possible events in a Marine family, from the joy of engagement announcement, marriage and childbirth to the tragedy of news that their son, brother, sweetheart, husband or father has been killed or injured in the line of duty in a country 8,000 miles and 7 time zones away. Sometimes great joy comes from hearing from another family in your Marine’s unit that their son or daughter reports “all O.K.” at their location without disclosing just where that location is.

Huddled together physically and emotionally, these strong U.S. military families help each other through emotional survival while their Marines are away from home, working daily in harm’s way. The word, “Homecoming” has no meaning like a Marine Battalion riding in on chartered buses after midnight directly from the nearest military air base, still dusty with foreign sand, tired from all-night flights but racing, each to hug and hug and hug his sweetheart or wife and children or parents, and sometimes even grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins.

So, when the MarineParents.com families get to Houston in April, they won’t be strangers. They will, proudly, be closer than you can imagine to each other and to “The Few, The Proud, Their Marines”.

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