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Korea Personal Accomplishment

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While I was stationed in Kunsan Airbase, Korea, I was fortunate to have the opportunity to be involved in many new experiences. I was in a foreign country I had never been to and I was also working a job that was entirely different from my previous one. Out of all the fresh experiences I had in South Korea though, one stands out from the others. It was stressful, it was challenging, but it was my most significant personal accomplishment while stationed there. It was the time I organized a POW/MIA 5K. Every year military personnel on Kunsan AB choose to honor the memory of prisoners of war and those missing in action, both past and present, by holding several events in the month of September. The events are held to pay tribute and recognize …show more content…

However, when I initially volunteered, I had no idea the work that was involved in organizing an event for a base nor how much time I would need to spend on the logistics. We started having meetings in early June and the POW/MIA events would take place in September. A group of about ten of us would hold a meeting every week in order to come together, share ideas, and update the status of our individual event to the head organizer of all the events, Sergeant Struckel. It was in those meetings that I was made aware of how many different organizations had to be involved in putting something together for an entire base. Portions of the planning process that I thought would be clear and simple ended up being more complicated than expected. The first part was to plan how I wanted the day of the event would go. I decided that the 5K would be advertised as an optional ruck march where members could carry a minimum weight of 30lbs with them across the finish or run. Then after the 5K, we would gather around a bonfire for a Watch Fire event and the base chaplain would say a few words about the significance of a Watch Fire and relate it back to POW and MIA. From there, we would gift all the participants and volunteers a poker chip of our own design and then tear down and clean up. It turned out that all of that was easier explained than organized. For example, we had to hold the 5K on the base installation but our base was very small. There were no

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