Schedule of Events

Today - December 6th - Charlottesville (Carrie in Pohang, South Korea in the midst of her finals for her last semester of law school at Handong International Law School)

December 18th - Emily, my sister, arrives home from Cairo after 6 months of missions work.

December 21st - 1Lt Phil McDowell, one of the best men in my wedding, arrives home from Balad, Iraq, Camp Anaconda for Christmas and my wedding.

December 27th - I drive to Chicago with Kevin Finnegan and Brian Gunn, two of my groomsmen, stopping in Louisville on the way to visit with my Granddad, Granny, and Uncle Joe.

December 3oth - Carrie and I are married. Check out our wedding website at www.bencarrie2006.com.

We spend our first few nights at the Hotel Monaco in Downtown Chicago, a gift from her sister Katie Vojta.

We drive back to Charlottesville on January 2nd, stopping overnight in Lexington, Kentucky. Get home to Charlottesville on the 3rd. On the 4th, the Air Force packs all our stuff up in a crate.

January 5, 2007 - Carrie and I fly out of Charlottesville Airport to Guam.

January 7, 2007 - 1:15 a.m. - Carrie and I fly into the international airport on Guam.

For the first 2-4 weeks, we stay in the Guam Marriott on the lagoon, until we find a place to live.

February 20 - we start JASOC or JAG School at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama. Two months of that. Carrie will be with me.

Somewhere in here, we go to DC for a few days, so I can get sworn into the United States Court of Appeals for Armed Services and tour the JAX Headquarters in the Pentagon.

April 20 - we finish up and we head back to Guam, our home!

Further Thoughts

So I have gotten to find out a lot more about Guam since I set up the blog and left it sitting here for a few weeks and I am even more excited about the opportunity go over there.

First, I will be in Guam as an Air Force JAG for from 2 to 3 years. I've talked with my sponsoring officer over there, Captain Jennifer Sanchez with the Andersen Air Force Base (my new base) Legal Office and she has told a ton of things about my new place. First if all, she's told me a lot of what I will probably be doing for the first year or so on the job. It looks like I will be the Chief of Civil Law for the next year and that means I will be doing a variety of things that I'm not going to list here. But I'm excited about doing it!

Secondly, I intend to make this a blog that harasses my law school classmates and buddies who are now working intense law firm jobs anywhere from DC to Manhattan to LA to Palo Alto. Think of this as the antithesis to The Anonymous Lawyer, a blog about a stereotypical firm lawyer. Here I'll tell you about the extended honeymoon that is Carrie and my life on Guam, our scuba diving adventures to see Japanese fighter planes shot down 60 years ago, our hopefully extensive exploration of Micronesia, our flying Air Force planes around the Pacific Rim and Hickam AFB on Hawaii.

Thirdly, I just finished reading an excellent book entitled Goodbye Darkness: A Memoir of the Pacific War by William Manchester. It was a powerful book, and I highly recommend it. One section was about our capture of Guam in the summer of 1944. We suffered over 7,000 casualties in two weeks including between 2,000 and 3,000 dead. I just found it amazing that we lost that many people in a time when our entire population as a nation totaled around 130 million, and yet losing 3,000 men in Iraq in 3 years of warfare is considered heavy casualties. It's a very different world. I do not mean to minimize or trivialize the deaths of our young men and women in Iraq at all, merely to point out the difference in perspective.

Fourthly, my parents have friends who started a church on Guam about 14 years ago and is now a thriving church. I spoke with Taylor Stewart, the man who founded the church and I plan on trying it out when I get there. He says it's a tremendous church.