MSI Press Blog

Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication from the forthcoming memoir,  In with the East: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life  by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver Camp Julien: Barren Beauty and Blunt Reality When I arrived at Camp Julien, I was surprised at how barren it was. The surrounding mountains looked more than arid—they looked as if the “green” had been bombed out of them. It probably had. Facilities and Perspective The facilities, from what I could see, were pretty good—though everyone has their own comfort level with roughing it. Mine is fairly high. Life in Acton had been just barely on the grid. We grew our own food, milked our own cows, and butchered our own animals for meat. (I hated that part, so it’s pretty amazing that I ended up serving in the Army and then spent much of my civilian career working for the Army.) All the structures at Camp Julien were tents—large and small. The teachers worked in the same tent they slept in. They complained about it, but I couldn’t fully underst...

  Precerpt (excerpt prior to publication from the forthcoming memoir,  In with the East: A Mary Poppins Kind of Life  by Dr. Betty Lou Leaver Acton and Afghanistan are not far apart alphabetically, but in space—and in my life—they are about as distant as two places can be. I was already sixty years old when I first landed in Afghanistan. Most people assigned there were much younger. But I wasn’t going as a soldier or diplomat. I was going to Camp Julien, just outside Kabul, to better support the Af/Pak Hands program—a U.S. military initiative designed to train select service members in Afghan and Pakistani language, culture, and regional expertise for long-term assignments. I had been leading the language and culture training for the Hands stateside. Now, I needed to see the learning environment on the ground. I needed to understand what support they still needed once deployed. And I needed to understand it firsthand. So, off I went, accompanied by a National Guard majo...