About 25 residents of the Menlo Park Veterans Memorial Home were seated around the central recreation area of the facility. It was just before lunch and I’d volunteered to join a group of them on a trip to see the Nutcracker.
According to the US Department of Defense (DOD), there are currently over 1.3 million men and women on active military duty and more than 450,000 of those are stationed overseas. Many of these service members are assigned to perform training exercises and other duties at bases where they are pretty safe. These troops are ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice to wherever in the world they are needed. Some troops have been deployed to conflict zones like Iraq or Syria and others to potential hotspots like Niger or Somalia.