Pentagon Nuances in Kodiak

It's a small, small world sometimes.

As a member of Rotary, I attended the Kodiak noon Rotary meeting on Tuesday. Our guest speaker was Lt. General Atkins. Atkins wears many hats, and the purpose of his visit was to meet supporting USCG personnel at ISC Kodiak. In his speech, he expanded upon the roles among his other hats, including his role in the Joint National Training.

My ears perked up. My company had been trying to find more intelligence on the proposed Pacific Alaska Range Complex (PARC), an $80M proposed joint training range. Despite the high level colleagues dedicated to this, whose jobs are to be sleuthes-- in a sense, we had come up dry on details.

Until little ol me attends a Rotary meeting on a Rock in Alaska. He took questions, and I posed one (of course! Do you think I would miss this opportunity?). In particular, he had spoken of the attributes of the Battle Area Complex and Combined Arms Collective Training Facility (BAX/CACTF) at Donnelly Training Area (DTA) and how cool it is that the Army has this amazing training center to reinforce what troops learn at the National Training Center (NTC). I posed my questions in complete acronym-ese (I worked on the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the BAX CATCF at DTA). The looks on his entourages' faces were priceless.

Afterwards, one of the majors asked how I knew about all those nuances, and I informed them that I worked for US Army Environmental Command and G3 (the Training Support Division of the Army's sector within the Pentagon) before PCSing to Kodiak as a proud Coast Guard wife. Again, blinks. Priceless.