The beige concrete fortress that houses Bob Williams' Support the Troops Inc. also holds a six-month stash of food, water and anti-intruder "devices" for Williams and 49 of his favorite people. Should Armageddon ever happen, Williams' wall of pork and beans alone could sustain a platoon for a month.
The fortress most recently withstood an assault by Pasco County and the state Department of Transportation. They fought for years to knock it down for the widening of State Road 54. Williams won. The highway is now being widened, but the fortress stands. The new road comes within three feet of the front door.
Williams does not quit on anything. Over the last 29 years he has mailed thousands of care packages to U.S. soldiers in battle zones. He has mailed Q-tips, refrigerators, popcorn poppers, red-dot laser scopes for .45-cal. handguns, toilet paper, tampons, Da Bomb hot sauce, coffees he grinds himself, deodorant, bulletproof vests, fly swatters and IV solutions for dehydrated Army dogs. He just filled an order from Kandahar for 10 smoked turkeys and 20 cans of pumpkin.
He mails directly to "guys getting shot at." He has no official relationship with the military. At the same time, Williams has a gloomy world view, believing that the way things are going, keeping a six-month survival stash is just common sense. He preaches that the best solution to the war in Afghanistan is to remove everyone but the Taliban, then level the place.
Williams, 63, father of three, wears the same outfit day after day. He wears camouflage shorts with a military switchblade knife in his pocket, an Army green Support the Troops T-shirt. He has a buzz cut and big ears. He hobbles on a black knee brace, owing to a bad fall he took while in the Navy.
His warehouse has an air of intrigue, an "if I told you I'd have to kill you" mischief. His office is full of combat souvenirs, including tank shells, a rocket-propelled grenade and an 1859 Enfield rifle, taken off a Taliban fighter. It was once used against the British, he says. It was last used against Americans.
• • •
Back in 1981, Williams began sending care packages to friends in the military who'd been deployed. It was not a big operation. At the time, he was running two businesses, one that made bakery sifters and another that made dust filters. In his spare time, he'd simply send snack packs and extra socks to his buddies, mailing them at the post office just 200 yards behind his warehouse.
Then 10 years ago, he turned the businesses over to his sons. He kept half the warehouse and borrowed their forklift for his care packages. He began putting in 60-hour weeks for Support the Troops.
He now sends to 19 places, including, he says, the Horn of Africa, Bosnia, Iraq, Congo, Afghanistan, select Pacific islands, and an airbase dear to his heart in Kyrgyzstan. It's a former Soviet satellite deep in mountainous Central Asia that now serves as a hub for U.S. troops going in and out of Afghanistan.
Williams says he recently sent the base 100 Walmart toilet seats after a contractor neglected to include them on new latrines. So beloved is Williams in Kyrgyzstan that soldiers named a park for him after he visited there. A military buddy later notified him that he had personally urinated on the Bob Williams Park sign. Williams sent back a photo of himself pretending to pee in his friend's pool.
He works on Support the Troops from 4:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. For the first couple of hours he reads his e-mails. Some are deeply sentimental, others raunchy. One seeks a pediatric walker and orthopedic shoes for a 7-year-old girl with polio. In another, he's mooned. Most are grocery lists. One pre-Thanksgiving request from Afghanistan asks for 30 boxes each of stuffing and potato flakes, 20 cans each of cranberries, green beans and corn, 10 smoked turkeys and 10 hams, and five bags of marshmallows. P.S., don't forget the cigars.
Most of his day Williams spends filling orders. Zephyrhills Water provides the cardboard boxes. His mailing list of about 300 includes a host of hospital and base chaplains, one general and dozens of privates camped behind sandbags in remote outposts, names provided to him by their families back home. Only one of those "points of contact" has been killed, though many of their units have sustained heavy losses.
Military Catch-22s complicate his shopping lists. He says he shipped a record 700 boxes each of the last five months because the Army shut down 65 PX's in Afghanistan. After he sent popcorn poppers, the military stopped issuing popcorn. So he had to send popcorn and oil. He sent pancake griddles. Chaplains told him they'd stopped getting pancake mix. So he had to add that.
Williams cleans out dollar stores, buys toaster ovens and microwave ovens en masse during Black Friday sales after Thanksgiving. He scouts out free samples and calls the manufacturer. "How'd you like to send 200,000 of those little shampoos?" If he hears about a new sunscreen, he rings up the company's marketing department. "I'll send it to 100,000 people who will really use it."
He gets huge donations of goods from Sweetbay and Whole Foods Market. Starbucks and Peet's have donated thousands of pounds of coffee. Richly caffeinated coffees are the most popular item he sends. Soldiers get a single one-cup packet of Taster's Choice instant coffee in their Meals Ready to Eat packages. No one has ever asked Williams to send more Taster's Choice.
Williams prides himself on getting the most bang for his buck in every situation. He recently went shopping for his own future cremation. He laughed at the crematorium saleswoman who gave him a price. "All I want," he told her, "is a little propane and a box." He demanded to speak to the manager. He offered the manager a "two-fer." He'd throw in his wife, he said, if he could get 10 percent off.
• • •
Williams only generally describes how he pays for all this. Support the Troops is a tax-exempt 501(c)(3) charity. It solicits donations through a credit card PayPal link on its website, ourtroopsonline.com. In 2009, Williams reported donations of $113,883 and expenses of $108,000.
But Williams says he reports only donations to Support the Troops. In many of his solicitations, he asks donors to write checks made out to Postmaster. He says he doesn't know exactly how much money he collects that way, but it is at least as much as he gets through Support the Troops. He likes checks made out to Postmaster, he says, because "I've tried for years and years not to touch money."
His thousands of post office receipts are stored in large bags rather than filed.
His office provided a "Support our Troops Fact Sheet" that listed $38.5 million spent on postage since 1981 and more than $400,000 already spent on postage this year, but Williams says the fact sheet is wrong. He also says he covers many expenses out of his own pocket, but doesn't report that amount either, and won't say how much he has given.
He showed a customer receipt from the post office for Oct. 19, when he mailed 331 boxes to combat areas. The bill came to $13,256.25. He says the Support the Troops account was short $8,000 of that. He says he covered it. He says he has cashed most of his life insurance to cover shortfalls.
Williams says the most important figures are those at the bottom of his IRS return. They're the figures for compensation and expense allowances for himself and five employees who help him. The amounts listed are zero.
• • •
It's all part of why Williams has a fortress. He doesn't trust the government. He trusts only the guys in the trenches, he says. He has a plan for when it all goes up in smoke.
Bad times are coming, he says. It could be a hurricane like Katrina. It could be terrorists. It could be a bankrupt government or a worldwide economic collapse.
"Imagine government getting us into a place where money is worthless. No food stamps. No credit cards. No ATM cards. The average person wouldn't last two months."
Williams is sitting behind "impenetrable" walls. He has a well with a hand pump. He has backup generators. He has "devices" to keep the bad guys out.
"I hope I never have to," he says. "But it's better to be prepared."
http://www.tampabay.com/features/humaninterest/wesley-chapel-mans-support-the-troops-gets-needed-items-to-military-posts/1133823
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