Lawn mower riders raise funds for veterans

Lawn mower riders raising funds for veterans.
Lawn mower riders raising funds for veterans.
This weekend a group of veterans will drive their riding mowers on a 26-mile trip from Bangor, Maine to raise funds and awareness for servicemen and women. The tour, called Have Mower, Will Travel, will end at a veterans hall in Fenville, and the lawn mower drivers will head back home the next day.

Gene Maul, an Air Force veteran, came up with the idea to organize a lawn mower ride last year, when six riders made the trip and raised $2,400 for Gulf War veterans and veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan at the VA Medical Center in Battle Creek, the Kalamazoo Gazette reported.

Maul said he was upset that so few Americans seem to know or care about the ongoing wars, which have claimed the lives of 5,000 service members over the last eight years, with many times that injured.

"People don't even know there's a war going on," Maul said, according to the Gazette. "[W]e've got guys coming back from there maimed and blind and everything else and people don't even know it."

In a posting on Craigslist advertising the ride, the organizers ask people to come out "come and show your support, if nothing more than standing with a flag at the end of your driveways as the benefit passes."
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