They leave children behind

John Kass of the Chicago Tribune (registration required) writes about the Special Operations Warriors Foundation, set up to pay for the college tuition of children of special forces soldiers killed in action:

Some soldiers killed in Iraq have left children. They’ll grow up with only one parent. It’ll be tough to pay for college.
Yet if they are the children of soldiers assigned to the U.S. Special Operations Command, which comprises the Green Berets, the Army Rangers, the Navy SEALs, Air Force Combat Controllers, Delta Force and aviators who fly in support of those highly trained commando teams, something will happen.
Every surviving child of a Special Operations soldier will be given the chance to attend, free, the college of his or her choice. It’s not a government program. It’s all about volunteers.
The tuition is covered by the Special Operations Warriors Foundation, run by retired Special Ops soldiers, to help the children of their fallen comrades.
. . .
Most Special Ops soldiers are staff sergeants or sergeants first class, or in the SEALs, they’re chief petty officers. They are the professional soldiers, those heroes who went into Baghdad before the conventional forces got there and marked the bomb targets or rushed a hospital at night to save Pfc. Jessica Lynch.
For that, they make in the mid-$30,000 range. The survivors receive about $18,000 a year in military and Veterans Administration benefits. For a surviving family with two or three kids, that’s not enough.
. . .
The Special Operations Warrior Foundation’s mission is to send the children of killed Special Ops soldiers to college. They rely on donations. They are a registered, licensed charity, and they fill out the necessary paperwork. There are only five full-time paid staff members–and the overhead for those five, including office expenses, is $145,000 a year.
We checked the Special Operations Warrior Foundation with the Department of Defense and we were told the group is extremely legitimate.
. . .
Whatever can’t be covered by scholarships or VA grants is paid for by the foundation, including living expenses and school supplies. The group will scrape it together somehow, but there will be more scraping, as the war on terrorism continues and Special Operations soldiers are increasingly asked to kick in the doors at night in bad places.