Professional Opportunities

 

I've been incredibly blessed. This assignment has been a dream come true. I work at United States European Command (EUCOM) as a Regional Program Manager overseeing the command's Military-to-Military engagements for the country's of Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Bulgaria, and Romania. I work closely with the Office of Defense Cooperation at each U.S. embassy, the State Partnership Program at the National Guard Bureau and the service components (Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps) within EUCOM. As part of my duties, I travel occasionally. ;) Over the past year, I traveled to Belgrade, Serbia; Warsaw, Poland; Bucharest, Romania and Tallin, Estonia. Here I am in my hotel room in Warsaw, Poland.

 



 During my down time in Warsaw, I traveled around the town and saw the Ghetto Heroes Monument. This monument was dedicated to the uprising against the German occupation in 1943.

The most memorable thing I saw in Warsaw was the Warsaw Uprising Memorial. The Warsaw Uprising was a major World War II operation by the Polish resistance Home Army to liberate Warsaw from Nazi Germany. The rebellion was timed to coincide with the Soviet Union's Red Army approaching the eastern suburbs of the city and the retreat of German forces. However, the Soviet advance stopped short, enabling the Germans to regroup and demolish the city while defeating the Polish resistance, which fought for 63 days with little outside support. The Uprising was the largest single military effort taken by any European resistance movement of World War II.

 The memorial shows the grit and determination of the Poles to retake their city and beautifully captures their heroic fight.

 Tallin, Estonia is an unforgettable city with a difficult past, filled with an unusual mix of Estonians, Russians, Finns, Swedes and tourists from around the world. 

As unremarkable as a rock can be, this one is special. As the Soviet Union was collapsing in August 1991, the Estonians wanted to ensure the Soviets wouldn't come back. They placed these giant boulders on all of the roads leading to their parliament building. On 20 August, 1991, they declared their independence and finally broke away from the Soviet Union, but left the boulders in place near the roads as a reminder of their newly gained freedom.

It was from this building Nicolae Ceausescu addressed the Romanian people in December 1989. After the speech, he fled from the roof in a helicopter. He was shortly brought back to Bucharest, tried and shot. The end of communism in Romania. I remember seeing all this in the news. So fun seeing it in person.

Because of my experience on the staff ride I participated in earlier in the year, I was asked by the command to lead a staff ride for the ROTC cadets that served at EUCOM over the summer. Another dream assignment. We went to the WWI battlefields of the Meuse-Argonne and Verdun, France. Here we are assembled in front of the Montfaucon American Monument General Pershing erected in France to commemorate the American contribution to the Allied victory!