December - St. Augustine Catholic
December - St. Augustine Catholic
December - St. Augustine Catholic
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c o v e r s t o r y<br />
f there’s no place like home<br />
for the holidays, no one<br />
would know that better than<br />
our U.S. troops who have<br />
been forward deployed or<br />
have served overseas. This<br />
Christmas, another year<br />
when service members<br />
will spend the holiday<br />
in harms way, one local family is<br />
preparing to celebrate a Christmas<br />
that was almost spent apart.<br />
<strong>St</strong>anding out front of Naval<br />
Hospital Jacksonville, Capt.<br />
Kathleen Michel holds a<br />
picture taken during her<br />
Individual Augmentee (IA)<br />
deployment to Camp Arifjan<br />
in Kuwait where she spent<br />
six months as head nurse.<br />
Nurse and Navy Capt. Kathleen Michel, 44, the<br />
mother of four children: Parker, 10, Griffin, 8, and<br />
6-year-old twins, Ethan and Seth, found her own ways<br />
to cope with the uncertainty of a six-month military<br />
deployment.<br />
“[The military] initially told me it would be for six<br />
months, then it was one year, then eight months, then<br />
back to six,” Kathleen remembers back home at Naval<br />
Hospital Jacksonville. Having missed Easter, her 16th<br />
wedding anniversary, and her twins’ sixth birthday, she<br />
can’t imagine what it would have been like to be gone<br />
for Christmas as well. “I think that would be really<br />
hard,” she says.<br />
Originally from Ohio, Kathleen completed her<br />
college undergraduate and graduate nursing degrees<br />
at Ohio <strong>St</strong>ate University. She joined the Navy for<br />
the choice of duty stations near the water and the<br />
opportunity for adventure. Earlier this year, she<br />
received an assignment of “adventure” as she was<br />
called for Individual Augmentee (IA) duty to serve at<br />
the Expeditionary Medical Facility Kuwait, the only<br />
coalition forces military hospital in the small country,<br />
located just south of Iraq.<br />
Camp Arifjan was Kathleen’s first tour in the Middle<br />
East and the new assignment took some adjustment.<br />
“When we first got there it was cold – in the 50s and<br />
60s. It quickly got hot and was 120 to 130 degrees<br />
when we left,” Kathleen explains. “It was windy and<br />
sandy – like walking into a hairdryer with sand blowing<br />
out of it.”<br />
<strong>St</strong>. <strong>Augustine</strong> <strong>Catholic</strong> <strong>December</strong> 2007 19
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