The Adventure Begins...

My love of adventure was nurtured from a very young age.  Every summer we would take family vacations to new places.  My parents supported and encouraged my desire to be an exchange student and I spent my sophomore year of high school in Madrid, Spain.  By the end of High School I had no doubt that joining the Air Force was the right move for me.

When I married Mike at age 25, I had been to 47 states and 9 countries.  (To date, North Dakota and Hawaii still elude me.)  By the time I was pregnant with Jason ten years ago, Mike and I had decided it was the right time to trade in our military life (7 years for me and 12 for him) and we moved back to Michigan to “settle down” as civilians.

I had a fantastic job with Williams International for nine years before deciding to leave for an opportunity with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) in the summer of 2009.  While the adventurous side of me still existed, it has sat in the corner buried under day to day family life.  When USACE asked me to deploy to Afghanistan, that adventurous side leapt out screaming “Let’s Go!”  Mike’s response was exactly as I expected, encouraging, supportive and a touch jealous.  (His adventurous side is stewing in the corner.)

Being away from the kids will be hard but thousands of Soldiers do it every day.  My best friend and Air Force roommate still frequently deploys with the Air Force and her children are independent, self confident and well adjusted.  While it may be hard for Jason and Samantha to not be in a military community with peers that can relate, we are fortunate to have an amazing group of neighbors and friends to support them.

We told the kids over lunch at Red Robin.  They were both super excited and full of questions.  Sam’s eyes did well up with tears for a few minutes when they learned I would be gone for six months. Eventually their excitement resumed when I told them we would be able to communicate with video chat.

While I will miss spending Christmas here, leaving now will hopefully allow me to return home before school lets out.

I will be at Kandahar Airfield (KAF) which is located 15 miles from Kandahar City, the second largest city in Afghanistan, with a population of about 450,000.  Since a small American Marine contingent first landed there in late November 2001, KAF has expanded into a small city housing over 30,000 multinational troops and support contractors (that is about the same population as Garden City, MI).  From my Google research I learned that the base is about 10 square miles (Livonia is 36 square miles and Garden City is 6 square miles.)