The last time I saw Melanie Sanders Meier in person was in 2009 when we were both deployed to Camp Adder, Iraq. She was a Lieutenant Colonel in the Kansas Army National Guard and was working as an Inspector General on the sprawling air base in southern Iraq.
This morning we had coffee together in Trastavere, Rome, where she has been a college student since 2015. She messaged me on Facebook on yesterday to say she lived in Rome. It turned out to be not far from where I was staying.
I knew that after she returned from Iraq (her second deployment) she ran for the Kansas state legislature where she served until 2014. She then left politics and deployed again, this time to the staff of K4, the peacekeeping force in Kosovo. She was assigned to be second assistant to the commander who was Italian. In fact, all of the twenty people working in her section were Italian except her. She loved working with the Italian command staff.
At the end of the deployment, she found that she could use the GI Bill benefits she earned from post-9/11 deployments to go to college in Trastevere. With the housing benefit from the GI Bill and low tuition, she was able to live comfortably in Rome. Next month she will finally complete the communication degree she has been working on since 2015 at the American University in Rome, and in no rush to finish.
It will be a bachelors degree which she can add to another bachelors degree and two masters degrees. Melanie attended the Command and General Staff College and completed a masters degree in Strategic Studies at the US Army War College in 2015. She worked on the courses at night in Kosovo.
She may stay in Rome. Melanie has considered Tunisia among possible places to live; she has never lived in Africa. We talked about Spain as a place many American and British expats live. America is not on the list of places where she wants to live.
Melanie plans to travel Europe after graduation. It's what college kids do.......
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