Camp good grief.

Each year, grief-stricken children who have lost a parent in the military attend one of approximately 20 camps conducted nationwide by a nonprofit organization called Tragedy Assistance Program for Survivors (TAPS).

As one example, back in August, more than 20 children ranging in age from seven to 19 attended a one-day camp in Salado, Texas, near Fort Hood. At the same time, about 40 adults attended a separate seminar nearby.

The activities at the camp are quite different from most other summer camps. At Camp Good Grief, all the children are mourning for a parent or other relative who died while serving in the military.

One exercise the children engaged in was to write letters to their fathers, many of whom were killed in Iraq or Afghanistan. The letters were tied to helium balloons and released into the sky. "Are we gonna send them to heaven?" asked one child.

"Age doesn't matter. The grief process is the same," said camp counselor Vanessa Gabrielson, in an AP interview posted at Military.com. "Every time I go, it gets easier, and I learn something." Gabrielson's own father was killed in Iraq in 2003.

Crystal Becker, the mother of one of the girls attending the camp, and the widow of Army Staff Sgt. Shane R. Becker, who was killed in Baghdad last April, explained her reasons for taking her daughter to the camp:

   Not knowing what will be said about
   this war or what the outcome will be,
   it wouldn't be fair to [my daughter,
   Cierra] not to be around other children
   who've been through this. It's
   hard enough losing someone, but losing
   them to a situation as politically
   charged as this? I'm not going to let
   anything take away from their father.
   They will know he wanted to go to
   Iraq and wanted to jump out of airplanes
   because he loved his country,
   but he loved us so much, too.

TAPS was founded by a woman named Bonnie Carroll, following the death of her husband, Brigadier General Tom Carroll, in an Army C-12 plane crash in 1992. Mrs. Carroll is a major in the Air Force Reserve. She served in Baghdad as the deputy senior advisor for programs in the Ministry of Communications. Though Mrs. Carroll served in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, her mission transcends politics. The stated mission of TAPS is "providing peer support, grief and trauma resources and information, casualty casework assistance and crisis intervention for all those affected by the death of a loved one serving in the armed forces."

The words of the children and their parents who have attended the TAPS-sponsored camps provide powerful testimony that the camps bring great comfort to grieving families.