Happy Easter

Holidays are always a bit strange when you are away on deployment.  Spending Easter on  a National Guard base in Indiana has a melancholy feel to it altogether.  The day started out as just another training day.  A portion of the staff gathered together in our Tactical Operations Center to complete the last day of a three day Command Post Exercise.  This was designed to test the staff's ability to run an operations center, respond to simulated events and coordinate, plan and work together.  Because quite a few members of the team were involved in other training events, we threw together a ragtag team to man the operations center and guide us through the exercise.  I equated it to the movie "The Sandlot" where a diverse group of kids come together on the ball field and continuously find themselves in one kind of trouble or another.  That was our team.  But by the end of the second day we had members of some of the other teams coming over to look at our setup and to observe how we operated.  The Colonels in charge of our training came by with one of them mentioning "I hear this is what right looks like." 

So this morning we closed it the exercise out this morning with a concept of operations brief and an after action brief.  Once again, we had people coming by to look in on what we were doing.  The general consensus was that our team "got it" and that we were ahead of the other eleven PRTs that were going through the same exercise.  It just reaffirms that I am truly blessed to be given such a talented group of professionals that care about what they are doing and take pride in doing it well. 

Although this exercise is a great start it means absolutely nothing if we do not continue to improve and take what we learn here over to Afghanistan.   That is where we need to be at our best.  We have the right team and I have no doubt that we will raise the bar even more as we get closer to deployment.

After we completed the exercise a few of us went to the All Ranks Club to have an impromptu Easter meal.  Since I had given up beef and pork for Lent I had some Easter ham, pie ala mode and great conversation with a few impressive Americans.  Now I am sitting on a borrowed computer while my computer gets torn apart by a couple of the guys trying to figure out why it quit working the other day.  At this point I am afraid to look as the computer is in many pieces and may never come back together. 

So as this "holiday" winds down a feeling of melancholy permeates the mood.  No time to go to church, yet the meaning of the day is not lost.  We are not at home with family, and yet we are surrounded by this new family...this ragtag group that has shown it can come together, care about each other, work as one and get the job done just a little better than everyone else.