This is a guest post by Eric Gage. Eric is in the South Dakota Air Force Reserve. He has served in numerous counties all over the world.

Hello Wisconsin! Our big blue bus rolls out of Rochester MN, and heads west into cheese country. Wisconsin turned out to be a great place: lots of trees going thru the fall colors and wide rolling hills of corn. The city of Lacrosse WI is a cool little city right on the water that’s well kept and clean. Upon arriving at the location of our next event at the city library, we were greeted by two news cameras and a few local reporters. We entered the library and found our way to the meeting room. By the way, this library was a sweet place as far as libraries go. We had a good group to listen to our presentation with lots of local media.

We gave are little talk and I told my story about the last trip overseas to this lovely smelly, dusty, former Soviet state called Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyzstan, being a former part of the USSR, is a mostly poor country. While I was there, the region went through a big drought, which then caused a big locust problem. What the drought didn’t destroy, the bugs did. This destroyed most of the country’s crops as well as grazing land for livestock. With no food, it got even harder for the locals who worked on the base – they sole things from the base to help try and feed their families. This, no matter how sad, caused a lot of extra work for us to deal with. This extra work meant we brought more US Service personnel away to the base and away from their families. Places like this, where people who are hard off, are prime to be recruited by extremist groups, the kind who don’t like the US too much.

With this, and other stories from my fellow bus mates, I think we really got our message through to the people who attended our event.

After a nice talk with a few people from my hometown who now live in Lacrosse, we got back on the bus and made a amazingly fast trip to the store to get things for lunch. With some skillful driving from our rock star bus driver Bill, we made it back on the road, headed east through the land of cheese to our next stop: Madison WI.

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