April 2, 2008

A Librarian at War

I found Shelby Monroe while researching a different topic, but I have to mention her here, and what she's doing. Miss Shelby, as she is known, is a librarian embedded with a division in Iraq. (Yes, you read that right.) She decided it was important to tell the daily stories of the soldiers in Iraq, and show pictures of the regular citizens, so she quit her library job and shipped out. Miss Shelby blogs about her experiences, and shares her photos, over at "101 Days with the 101st Airborne" and "Heads Down, Spirits Up!" (subtitled The Adventures of a Restless Librarian in Iraq).

What she's doing takes a huge amount of guts. HUGE. If you've read this for a while, you know I have a military background; IMHO it's one thing for a prepared (or semi-, as the case has been) soldier to go into a battlefield, but it's quite another to quit your quiet life far away from that chaos and willingly put yourself into it, then share the day-to-day realities of that chaos. I'm in awe.

Miss Shelby, thank you.

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