Come on in, pull up a chair, and lets talk about life. This blog is for me to keep in touch with friends and relatives and talk about some of the things on my mind. Come and go as you like. I’ll try to keep posting pretty regularly, but sometimes it takes me a little longer than others. I’m going to try to keep adding at least one post a week, free-time dependent. Please feel free to post comments, I look forward to the discussions that may come.

I grew up in a small town in the middle of the country. I was lucky enough to be accepted into West Point following high school, and I’ve been in the Army since the late ’90s. I’m currently a graduate student at Kansas State University. I’m getting smarter so that I can have a greater impact when I get back into the regular Army. I’ve got at least ten more years until I retire, and we’ll see where life takes Sandy and I at that point.

I have a wonderful wife named Sandy. She’s part of the faculty here at K-State, but not in my department, not even in my college, so there’s no conflict of interest. We’ve got a couple dogs that I’m sure I’ll post about later (Cleo the Great Dane and Cooper the Boxer) and one cat (Tiger aka the Curmudgeon).

For those that don’t know me, I have deployed in the past and expect that I will deploy again sometime in the future. I’ve been to Afghanistan and I’ve been to Iraq. It wasn’t my job to interact with the local populace, so I can’t say too much about them, but I will say this. In Afghanistan in 2003, the people loved us and were very happy that we were there. Some of them even thought that the Americans had brought the rain because they’d been in a drought for the previous eight years (coincidentally that was while they were under the Taliban regime). In Iraq in 2005, some people loved us and some hated us and many were moderately indifferent and just trying to go about their daily lives. Some things may have changed since then, but that is what I got from the people of these respective countries while I was deployed.

I was directly involved with securing some of the election sites while we were in Iraq in 2005, and I saw some very happy people. They were very proud of their right to vote and were holding up their newly painted purple fingers like they were trophies. (The purple paint showed that they had voted in case they tried to return to an election site to vote again.) That was a pretty amazing time and I felt like I was involved with part of history. But I like the fact that my name isn’t going to be in any of the history books. It doesn’t deserve to be.

I’m not positive that we went to Iraq for the right reasons, but I don’t think it really matters now. We’ve shaped that country whether we should have or not. I say that it was “we” that did all this because it was our elected representatives and senators that chose to invade Iraq in 2003. Now we must clean up the mess we’ve made or it will cause further turmoil in that war-torn part of the world.