You never know...

I was in my final phase of training this week when one of our briefers seemed familiar to me. I wasn't sure until I saw his introduction slide to his brief but then I knew. I'd bumped into "Grease." I've never met Grease before but I feel like I knew him pretty well. As a matter of fact, he's the reason I started this blog.

When I originally received my orders for this assignment, I had an insatiable appetite for information and sat in front of my computer at home trying to find out anything and everything about this place. One of the sites I came across was a blog called thelandlockedsailor.blogspot.com written by "Grease." Now, here he was standing there in person. After his brief we talked for a bit and I introduced myself and told him how helpful his blog had been for my preparation (his latest blog entry tells this same story). The take away from all this for me is two-fold: 1) You never know the impact you'll have on someone else, and 2) There are a bunch of us in this thing together. I hope to keep both of those lessons in mind during this tour and beyond.

Speaking of training, I passed my test yesterday (yep, no kidding, there was a written test) and now I'm certified to head off to the Army and do good. I hope to be moving to my unit this weekend and begin putting into practice the training I've received to date.

One final note. Our class had the benefit of a visit by a general during our training. While the specifics aren't important (and he was speaking with us casually) I can say there are a lot of good things being done over here by everyday soldiers that aren't making headlines back in the States. The general mentioned a couple by name and they were stories that on first hearing sound like thriller fiction. However, they are representative of the work average American soldiers do when presented with extraordinary circumstances. I hope to live up to their standard.

Cheers, Pearl