Cookie Avvampato's guest appearances

Cookie Avvampato

Veterans History Project

Gary Sinise

Chuck Hagel

Peter Young

Paul Alexander

Roger Dean

Rhonda Cornum

Julia M. Grabner Haskell

Marion Anna Steinhilber

Arthur Guerrero

James Dorris

Donald Patrick Finn

Norman Ikari

Max Cleland

Bertran Wallace

Larry Schwab

OwlTail

Three months after Cookie Avvampato, a professional nurse with two late-teen children, joined the Air Force Reserves, she was called into active duty to serve in Desert Storm as a backfill medical specialist in Kuwait. Having grown up a self-described military brat, with her father an Air Force enlisted man she had little trouble adapting to life in the military. Some fourteen years later, she volunteered to go to Iraq to serve in that conflict. Daily life in the two wars was a study in contrasts; her medical facility in Kuwait had many amenities, with little sense of danger, while conditions as her base in Balad, Iraq, were very confining and dominated by the Big Voice, a public address announcer who warned of incoming mortar attacks usually after they had started.