Hello Team Wounded Warrior Project – thank you so much for checking up on what Tom & I have been up to!
For starters, to paint the picture for you, I’m typing away at the computer from my new home in Carlisle, PA (part of the reason you haven’t heard from us in awhile). I’ve also just completed Team WWP Event #3: the Colon Cancer Prevention 5k in Harrisburg, PA. I finished 3rd overall…NOTE ~ “excuses” to follow for not winning: I was behind a recently graduated college All-American & a 2004 Olympic Marathon Trials participant…we got to know each other a bit post race and they’ll be showing me around some of the local runs this summer.
Then, on 4 July, Team WWP (myself and my TransRockies Run partner, Dr. Mary Kreis) will be racing at the Afton Trail Run 25k. I’ve included a link to the race, just in case you’d like to see us in action (although, you’ll get another shot on 4 October at the Twin Cities 10 Miler).
Even better though ~ we’ll be at the Afton 4th of July Parade! It starts at noon – the we’ll be a part of the Vulcans fire truck float! So if you’re going to be around that weekend…please come and hang out with us & bring a few friends that like to carry cash!
The school I’m in right now is wrapped up with fairly large issues about how the Army is run. One of the themes for discussion is, well, whether continuous combat rotations in Iraq and Afghanistan is “breaking” the Army (and Marine Corps). My friends from college are on their third combat tours; my brother and his wife are in Iraq right now on their second.
The anecdotal evidence is striking: this past month, I’m very sad to say, the Army sustained more deaths from suicide than combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. The years of back and forth in two very different worlds are taking their toll, mentally, on the force.
The Army will always do what the Nation asks of it, without question. Soldiers, in their role as society’s guardians, truly are expendable. The hard fact is that the good of the many outweighs the needs of the few. This is something that we’ve chosen as a country and something that I believe in whole-heartedly. The challenge, though, is that we live in an era of a professional, all-volunteer force, in which the option to draft more soldiers does not exist. We must take care of the ones we have, as best we can.