A new book relates the story of the unique collaboration between the US Army, TWTD and ITFC which saw Town kit collected and sent to Hamrin in Iraq 20 years ago this year.
Back in 2005, Captain Mark Stoneman, a Blues supporter who moved to the US aged 18, was commanding 106 soldiers in the small Iraqi town in Diyala Province and noticed that the children and young men were playing football in shirts which they wore inside out.
Having asked why this was, he was told the kit bore the legend ‘A gift from the president’, meaning former dictator Saddam Hussein.
This set Mark thinking and he contacted TWTD proposing we collect old Town shirts from fellow supporters.
That we did outside Portman Road at a couple of home games, receiving a remarkable response, amassing shirts, shorts, socks, balls and other kit totalling more than 500 items, with the club adding old stock from the shop and academy.
After calling in favours from friends locally, the logistics firm run by then-Supporters Trust chair Carl Day, and in the US military, the strips eventually found their way to Hamrin.
TWTD and the club were both subsequently presented with framed certificates of thanks by the US Army with news stories appearing in the media in both the UK and US, including Stars and Stripes, the US military’s daily newspaper.
Mark, who retired in 2014 having risen to the rank of Major, has now written a book, Driving Around, Waiting to Get Blown Up: Hearts, Minds, and the Occupation of Iraq, candidly describing his year in Hamrin and featuring the full in-depth story of how hundreds of Town shirts made their way there.
"That episode, that story where you and I worked together and we collected the shirts from fans I never met, and the club helped as well, and we were actually able to get them to the middle of nowhere in Iraq and give them to people who had literally nothing,” Mark, who is still based in the US, recalled recently speaking with TWTD’s Phil Ham on one of his regular trips back to England to watch Town in action.
"They didn’t even have shoes and now they had an Ipswich Town shirt. To see kids and young men wearing it, that was special.
"In many respects that was a bad year, a lot of bad things happened, but that was without doubt a good thing. Any way you want to define it, what we did was a good thing. We helped people.
"You could say, ‘OK, a football shirt is trivial’, but when you give someone something like that, you’re showing that you care and it gives them hope and it becomes a prized possession.
"So it had an exponential effect and it created a lot of goodwill and it made some very poor people happy.
"That was 20 years ago now and I still look back on that as certainly the high point of that year, that deployment, but in many ways the high point of my life, not to wax too poetically.
"It was a good thing and in retrospect a surprisingly complex thing that we pulled off. There was no ulterior motive, we were just trying to help people out. We did that and I look back on that and it’s definitely something I can be proud of.”
Following Driving Around, Waiting to Get Blown Up’s publication, Mark heard from someone who grew up in Hamrin and recalled the Town kit arriving.
"After I published the book I put a thing on LinkedIn,” he continued. "And someone I’d never met and who was a kid at that time in Hamrin, who is now an engineer in Baghdad and speaks English, wrote me a note saying, ‘That’s my town, I remember this and that was a bad time, there were lots of people from outside Hamrin coming in to fight the Americans, but now it’s peaceful and quiet’. That was interesting, someone made a connection years later.”
Driving Around, Waiting to Get Blown Up: Hearts, Minds, and the Occupation of Iraq is available from Amazon here.