2017 Patriot's Pen
2017 Patriot's Pen VFW Post 1760 winner Melanie M. Bustamante-Pite. Melanie took 4th place in the District 4 level of competition.

The Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 1760 and its Auxiliary proudly announce their winners of its annual Patriot’s Pen youth scholarship competition. Much appreciation goes out for all those students who put in the time, work and effort in submitting their entries.

1st Place – Melanie M. Bustamante-Pite
Carson Jr. High School – Mesa, AZ

2nd Place – Shea A. Rogers
Carson Jr. High School – Mesa, AZ

3rd Place – Diego Garcia
Carson Jr. High School – Mesa, AZ

On Sunday, December 10th was the annual District 4 Voice of Democracy and Patriot’s Pen competitions banquet hosted at VFW Post 9400 in Sunnyslope. Our sponsored Post 1760 winner Melanie Bustamante-Pite took fourth place at the District level.

Much appreciation to all those students that participated. We had 65 combined entries for both the Voice of Democracy and Patriot’s Pen competitions this year.

We have Melanie’s winning essay for everyone to enjoy here:

America’s Gift to My Generation.

By Melanie M. Bustamante-Pite

How thankful are you for living in America? America is one of the countries that respects and doesn’t have war here. Everybody should be thankful for America. Everybody might be thinking “Why should I be thankful for living here, there is nothing good about living here.”. Well it could be worse than living where you don’t have much to eat, there might not be good water, or even worse some countries are at war and some of their houses are destroyed. Living here, is such a huge gift for everyone that lives in America because there are a lot of things happening in other countries and the civilians wish that isn’t happening. Everyone should be thankful because there are many things to be thankful about. There are people that are fighting for us or that used to fight for us, there is also the education we have here.

We should be thankful for the soldiers that are fighting for our countries and for the veterans that already fought for us. The soldiers that are still fighting really do care about the country a lot more then we do, that’s why they are fighting for our country because they care about America with all their heart, that they want to give a thank you back for that America has done for them. The people that already fought they care even more than anyone else does, because they take the time talking to classes about all the wars they have been through. There is one institution that visit classrooms to talk about the war about what they have been through and what they earned when they were in the war, it’s called “The Joe Foss Institution”. We should also be thankful about our education here in America. Not a lot of countries get the chances to be able to learn, read, or even write because of their community in their country. They won’t be able to the things they want to be because of their country because they don’t have enough teachers or people might not even know what they are doing. We should be thankful for a lot. Everybody should be thankful for everything that has happened to us because it’s from America.