It's not easy being green!

But I'm sure glad you are.

This is Dale's oldest younger bro, Jessie. He is currently stationed in Qatar. Here are some excerpts from one of his recent emails:

"If you have not heard yet, The Air force is deploying
me again. I am headed to Qatar in January for six
months. We used to go for just four months, but
changed our tour lengths to six months. After each
deployment I should have twelve months at home. They
changed how they deploy my career field for the mean
time. Susannah and the kids are going to go to Texas
with her family while I am gone. We will then come
back to good old Pope AFB for the mean time."

"I decided to send you pictures of some things that I am doing over here. We did an addition to a building, and our customer wanted a window in the wall that is like a ticket booth, and this is what we built them. I made most of the trim my self out of rough cut mahogany. That is what they give us over here. One of or senior NCO's told us that we made the rest of the building look like bad."


Can you spot Jessie in this photo from his last deployment to Afghanastan? Here's what he said back then, in an email titled, "A voice from the dust of the Stan, "Church here is pretty good. We have about ten to twenty five on attendance every week. It just depends on the operations that are going on at the time. We have sacrament meeting that last about a half an hour. And then we have combined priesthood/relief society meeting for a half an hour. That is held in the after noon. We then have Sunday school that is a hour long in the evening that day. Then during the week we have a movie/FHE night on Wednesdays, and game night on Saturdays. I am not able to go to the activities during the week though, because I work on the night shift. The work that we are doing right now is not too bad. Me and another guy are tying up some rebar to go into some concrete footers for some radar towers. It is decent work. We are waiting for some yellow paint to come in so we can finish painting the lines on the runway. That is what we are really supposed to be doing. But every thing is pretty good. I am going to attach some pictures of me over here. Well I am going to go eat some less than desirable chow.

Our brother-in-law, Jon, is stationed in Hawaii right now, poor guy. These pictures remain my all time favorite military photos. Double Green points for you for saving a turtle, Jon!


Okay, so I scanned it a little crooked. Sorry. I could go back and fix it in Photoshop or rescan, but I'm way too lazy. So as the story goes, a poor helpless, 3 foot 140 lb, female green sea turtle got lost on the beach and wandered 450 feet away from the ocean. Jon and his colleauges (Jon is center in above photo and the guy cut in half on the left side in the second) hauled it back to sea. My favorite Jon quote: "Her front flipper got loose and smacked me in the face. Everybody got a pretty good kick out of seeing that."

Thanks, US Navy, for serving our country and rescuing local wildlife. Thank you, Jon, for taking a flipper in the face for the team.

Thank You, Armed forces, for wearing green and keeping us free!