Mail Voodoo

Mail. Getting and sending it is one of those inalienable rights we have as soldiers, and one of the things I definitely took for granted before I got deployed. I'm not a big mail guy, but there's nothing like getting a letter in the mail when you're stuck somewhere not even the people who send junk mail can find you!

Mail is a strange beast out here. The Army runs its own post office branches ("APO" in the address where the city normally goes means "Army Post Office"), and soldiers go through mail handling courses to be certified to collect, distribute, and account for mail. We pick it up out of the same office that does all of our administrative stuff (the Headquarters Company), and they will take your small stuff to the post office. The big stuff has to go directly to the post office or FedEx - yes, FedEx has offices here! Mail under 13 ounces going to US domestic addresses is also free - kind of a shocker, but I'm not complaining.

I started this post right after I got 7 letters and postcards from my nieces, Ashley and Kaitlin, and my sister-in-law, Tonya. I'm sure Tonya accumulated a couple things before sending them out, but mail tends to accumulate through the delivery chain anyway, so by the time it gets here, if you mailed it within a week of something else, it may have caught up to it by virtue of the first one being delayed. The girls didn't write so much as prepare works of art for me - Kate did her impression of an Army Base, and Ash went the abstract route and gave me a cornucopia of mixed colors. I know it's cheesy for me to like mail like that, and I could have gotten a scan of each masterpiece through email, but would it really have been the same?

(Nice work, girls!!)