With good wine and a wonderful view of the water, the women in Portsmouth gather on Tuesdays at Carol Brown’s house on Fischer Circle to wrap up the cookies and underwear and socks and put considerable distance between themselves and those who don’t give a damn.

Carol Wilcox sends out the e-mails to let the women know if it’s toiletries, DVDs or boxers and socks that will be added to the baked goods in a particular week.

“In World War II, people made sacrifices,” says Wilcox, who works with the Visiting Nurse Association in Fall River. “They sold war bonds and rolled bandages. We don’t do a damn thing.”

Ah, but on Fischer Circle they do. They go against the prevailing indifference and revive a tradition as old as soldiers and wars and home cooking.

And they do some talking. They talk some about Vietnam, about how the troops can’t be treated now as they were treated then. They don’t agree on everything. There are pro-war and anti-war sentiments in Brown’s kitchen as the goods are prepared to send to the troops. But they share the belief that too many people are shutting the war out.

“No one seems to care,” says Joan O’Leary.

O’Leary definitely cares. Her son Paul surprised his family by joining the Marines. Last year, he went to Iraq and The Crumby Mummies, as the women call themselves, adopted his platoon. And Joan found a wonderful way to help her through those long anxious months before her son returned.

“When he came home, there were banners all along the street,” she says. “And Paul got out at each house to thank people.”

The Marine corporal also told his mother that the best thing about being over there was getting the packages from over here.

It is difficult to gauge what a difference one of those packages can make — how members of a unit might gather to see what is pulled from the box and passed around. It is a priceless connection. There might be some hometown papers, books, photographs. It is a big box of back home.

So they continue in Ports-mouth, and they plan to keep at it for as long as there are American men and women in need of a warm reminder of home as they deal with the danger and loneliness of hard deployments.

There doesn’t have to be a local connection. Doing nothing is unacceptable, so Tuesday night will continue to mean women carrying baked goods to Fischer Circle and raising a glass to good company and a good cause — then putting the care packages together as people have put packages together for a long, long time.

For Aldona Dowski, there is a wonderful sense of seeing one generation following in the wartime tradition of another. She grew up in Germany and remembers soldiers in World War II sharing sweets with children. Now, she hears about Ports-mouth-baked cookies being pulled from GI pockets and shared with children in another war-torn place.

There are other groups who do this kind of thing. There just aren’t enough. There aren’t enough people who spend as much as two minutes every other day thinking about the wars and the people who are fighting them. The women in Carol Brown’s kitchen are willing to show others the way.

“Whether you support the war or not, we have so many families whose sacrifice is great, so many serving who will lose their lives or be forever changed by their experiences,” says Carol Wilcox. “For us to do nothing seems wrong.

“And thus we bake.”

bkerr@projo.com