Fort Hood Hug Lady Makes News in Australia

Fort Hood's 'Hug Lady' promises she will be back from breast cancer treatment 
ABC Australia
Posted yesterday at 7:13am

"Sometimes the line is so long that we have to turn people away."

A woman who estimates she has hugged 500,000 soldiers at Fort Hood, Texas, has promised she will be back from treatment for breast cancer.

Elizabeth Laird, 83, is known as the "Hug Lady" at Fort Hood, where she has given hugs to almost every soldier entering and leaving the base since 2003, when soldiers stationed there began deploying to Iraq. "I don't know when I started hugging, but one soldier hugged me and there was another soldier there, so I had to hug him and it kind of just snowballed," she told the Killeen Daily Herald in 2009. "I hugged all the soldiers. I promised them that. I told them as they left, I'd be here to hug them again when they came back."

Ms Laird has a military background herself, having enlisted in the US Air Force in 1950, the US Department of Veterans Affairs reported in a Facebook post earlier this month. 
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