It's been a pretty good couple weeks.  Shortly after my last post, we had a guest speaker come in to talk about officership, leadership, and the future of the Army.  BG H.R. McMaster was an excellent addition to the roster of guest speakers we've had so far, and I intend to (eventually) draft up a blog post about his comments.  In other news, I took my family out to the Fort Lewis area to look around and start to scope out some neighborhoods to try to find housing.  Of course, there's on-post housing, but I prefer to be off-post, and I think being closer to Olympia, Tacoma, or Seattle will make it easier for my wife to find a job. 

Today, we're wrapping up a two-day trip to the battlefield at Gettysburg.  In the Army we call this a 'staff ride' (I think because traditionally, an Army unit would gather up all the staff officers to go out to a battlefield and talk through the successes, failures, and lessons learned from a particular battle from the perspective of each of the staff elements).  Since there weren't any Judge Advocates on the battlefield here, we examined the battle and tried to draw general leadership lessons from the examples of many of the personalities who played a role.

I spent most of my time thinking about the significant difference in hardship that Soldiers of the past had to endure -- the physical endurance; significant personal courage; the hunger and thirst they faced; the lack of comforts that we enjoy every day.  Of course I know that our front-line Soldiers and Marines are tough, are tested daily by their environments and by a ruthless and intelligent enemy.  But the level of commitment - of both Soldiers and the populations that supported them! - shown during battles of the past is remarkable.  It's worth considering what price we've been willing to pay in the past for our principles and to think about whether we're living up to that commitment today.

Here are just a few photos from the trip.

A view from Devil's Den, from the Confederate perspective at the bottom of Little Round Top (hill on the right)

Again the Confederate view, this time of the top of Little Round Top, where Colonel Joshua Chamberlain and the 20th Maine successfully repelled a series of Confederate assaults, finally breaking the Confederate will here with a bayonet charge down the hill.  It was pretty sobering to think about what it would take to charge up (or down) that hill in the 100-degree heat of July.