Pins of honor

BRYANT — Tracy Pitonyak wants the families of soldiers who have died in Iraq to know they are not forgotten.

"I grew up as a service brat," she says. "My dad's a retired Marine. He served two tours in Vietnam. Maybe that's why I'm very conscious and aware of soldiers dying."

So she has created a Soldier Tree memorial by putting each name on a clothespin and placing them on a Christmas tree in her home.

In October, she began buying clothespins. She visited stores near her Bryant home and amassed around 2,800 pins. Her dad, Billy Ray McCollum, shopped near his farm in Stuttgart and found another 1,000. Her mother-in-law, Joan Pitonyak of Stuttgart, bought 500 more.

Tracy began printing and gluing slips of paper with the soldiers' names and dates of death on the clothespins. When she started there were 3,851 names of American soldiers who had died in Iraq.

As a family, Tracy, her husband Mike, daughter Billie Jean, 16, and son Joseph, 13, decided to adorn their 9-foot-tall Christmas tree with the pins. They all clipped them on, seeming to fill the tree.

Tracy checks the Department of Defense casualty list on the Web site www.defenselink.mil every day and adds each name to thetree.

Until this year, the family's holiday ritual was to cut a tree for Christmas. But the Soldier Tree had to be artificial.

"It won't come down until the last soldier gives his life in Iraq," she says.

Tracy says their tree is to "honor the soldiers and provide a visual of what that many names look like. ... I would love for [the war] to be over tomorrow and my tree would be finished. Unfortunately I have to keep working on it. It's heartbreaking."

Tracy still has about 500 pins. She realizes she may have to put up another tree, but adds, "I hope not."