CHRISTMAS Tighter security makes travel a challenge

Some troops were able to speak to family through a video conferencing system.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Terror threats on the home front and troops risking their lives in Iraq made it a bittersweet Christmas for many Americans.
Army Reserves Spc. Gregg Bly, 34, sat in the Philadelphia airport Thursday waiting for the next leg of his flight home from Iraq to Columbus. The 15-day visit would be his first with his 5-year-old daughter since January, and he said he was "kind of shaky, kind of nervous."
"I'm just happy to be able to see her," he said. "She doesn't know I'm coming."
Bly was one of the lucky ones. Many of the 130,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq were away from home during Christmas for the first time.
A dozen Massachusetts National Guard families took advantage of a video-conferencing system to wish their loved ones about 8,000 miles away a merry Christmas.
Sgt. Marc L'Italien, 24, spoke to his parents by video conference for the second time in a week. His absence was particularly tough Christmas morning, said his mother, Pauline.
"He's the one that usually wakes us up and wants to open his gifts," she said from a base in Milford, Mass. "We miss that an awful lot."
Elsewhere, travelers struggled to make their way home for Christmas as airports tightened security after reports that terrorists could be planning a jetliner attack on a U.S. target.
Jean-Marie Buchet, 54, of Paris, was traveling to Los Angeles to spend the holidays with family when her Air France flight was canceled -- one of six flights between Paris and Los Angeles that were canceled Wednesday and Thursday because of terrorist concerns.
"We had to wait nearly six hours without any explanation as to what was going on," she said.
Getting into the spirit
Others got into the spirit of the season by giving gifts.
In New York, volunteers for God's Love We Deliver prepared and delivered a Christmas feast: 2,500 full meals of corn chowder, cornish game hens stuffed with wild rice and mushroom sauce, mixed vegetables and gingerbread cake.
Roz Gilbert has volunteered for the group delivering food to seriously ill New Yorkers -- mostly with HIV/AIDS or cancer -- since her own son, Fred, died of AIDS in 1991.
"So many people don't have much, and to be able to bring them all this -- it's very rewarding," Gilbert said Thursday.
At the National Guard base in Milford, Wasic and her son's wife, Wendy, got to see him for the first time since he shipped out in March -- via video cameras and an 8-foot by 8-foot screen.
On his first Christmas away from home, he told them, he had Spaghetti-O's for dinner because he didn't like the military food available.
"He said we all looked great and he can go to bed happy now," Wasic said. "It made his Christmas too."