 We know you have lots of questions about the impacts of COVID-19 to your situation. And the number one priority from our standpoint is the health and safety of the American people. To avoid the loss of potentially tens of thousands of lives, we must enact an immediate stay-at-home order for the state of Illinois. We need to take care of each other while we protect our fellow Americans. Nearly 3,000 Illinois National Guardsmen answered the call to aid fellow Illinoisans from March to July 2020. Peoria's 182nd Airlift Wing was one of several units called to state active duty and gave proof to the creed the National Guard is always ready, always there. The 182nd Airlift Wing returned to duty July 9th, 2020, after what's arguably become the most chaotic year in recent American history. It was a formidable step toward normality, paved by months of balancing the so-called new normal with military operations. It was four Herculean months that won't soon be forgotten. At that point we were right in the middle of the AAF returning, so you've been exposed to somebody who's a positive case. At that point, that was the 16th of March, so that was the day before everything shut down. I was still thinking, I'm not sure I'm buying all this stuff, and it wasn't until the tag told us we need to head home that things really got serious there. Then everybody heads home, so the staff and all of our support structure is in their basement or their kitchen table or dining room table where they're working from. I was saying it's like trying to navigate a battleship through the Panama Canal with a blindfold on. There for a long time it was pretty difficult. As the coronavirus spread and concerns rose, it became more and more apparent that the soldiers and airmen of the Illinois National Guard would again be called upon to assist their fellow Americans in navigating a national crisis. The 182nd Airlift Wing and its counterparts answered that call. It was chaos. The first probably six weeks of this operation, I would liken it to the first six weeks of having a child. Everything was different, nothing was normal, and my day would typically go from about 7 o'clock in the morning to about 11 o'clock at night, and something going on constantly. Every day something new. So every day we'd come in and say, hey, we need somebody to staff a certain position at the Joint Task Force or I need a team of medical folks and civil engineers and subject matter experts to go into these mothballed hospitals of the Chicago area and we're going to determine whether or not we can open these things up and put COVID patients in there. A lot of that, nothing normal. And so we're making stuff up as we went along. And so then the next one would come in and say, hey, we're going to turn the McCormick place into a hospital. I need 30 people to go up and set up beds and set up just the infrastructure that they're going to need up there. And so again, just another opportunity to do things that we never even thought of. And then prior to that, the state had activated the SERF-P. That mission evolved into the COVID testing. And then that really was where we had a lot of folks involved in that. Ultimately, I think our highest numbers we got to upwards almost 300 people off doing those kinds of things. We had the ops guys had done a lot of legwork to get us the ability to go fly out to Oregon to pick up some overpressure tents to put up there in the McCormick place. The ability to fly for state active duty, that was something that was new to us. And we were the only unit in the country to do that because we're the only ones that could crack them down at that time to do that. So that was pretty cool. Then as things moved on, then the floods hit. And so although we didn't have any activation at that point every day they're talking about, now we're going to need upwards of 600 or 700 people to go off and fight the flood. And I'm thinking, man, we just can't have much left. And then soon after that, then we hit the civil unrest. And so at that point we're looking to activate our security forces to go out and deal with riots that are going on. So I mean it was a crazy time. Everything kicked off and every day I'd wake up and it would be something drastically different. The U.S. military has been an all-volunteer force since the mid-1970s. Any Air National Guardsmen in uniform today is one of nearly 106,000 serving our nation in its most desperate times by choice. Sometimes that means dropping everything at a moment's notice and leaving behind schools, careers, and families for months at a time. So when we could see this coming early on in March, we put out a list and said, hey, we need a list of volunteers. We got the typical participation that we would expect. And they started looking for more, the state meaning, started looking for more. So I'd go back to the group commanders and they'd show more. And I'd say, are these volunteers or these volunteers? And they were still volunteers at that point. And people who had already volunteered to do one mission would volunteer to do another. It was truly amazing. I think it was the people that realized, hey, this is a pretty serious thing we're doing. I want to be part of it. And there was that sense of pride. I went up and saw some folks doing what they were doing and the attitudes were unbelievable. Everybody's professionalism was another thing that I was left with. I wouldn't say surprised with, but I was just so impressed with it. The other thing would be the staff here at the 182nd were to make all that happen, to activate those people and get them out the door. It doesn't just happen. I remember Easter Sunday. And that was the first day since it all started that we all got no kidding, got a no kidding day on. And so, and then that was several weeks, six, seven, eight weeks into the process. So that was a long run for a lot of people. And again, there was a lot of effort to get those people out the door seamlessly. We answered the call and we answered the next call. And then it got to the point where we and the staff were just joking. What are they going to be looking for next? And they would ask for something and we provided. Eventually, Illinois's COVID-19 crisis stabilized to the point where the National Guard began slowly transitioning out of the domestic operations mission and the 182nd Airlift Wing held its first drill weekend since March. I'd say it's been a success. We're taping this on a Sunday after a four-day drill. My intention was I wanted to find the pinch points that we couldn't see. Some of the things that we knew would be very difficult to do would be individual roll calls. We knew that was going to be a problem. We knew the clinic operation was going to be difficult. Certainly the chow hall was going to be different. So the FSS had worked up a plan for that with box lunches and separate delivery times so that we weren't amassing in the chow hall or in the hallway. And then drug testing. And we knew that those were going to be the ones that we weren't going to be able to do the old way. So that on top of the COVID operations kind of created a pretty big bump that we had to get over. And it went pretty well. I would say so far everything has been a success. But again, we're working all those, trying to make sure that we have all the procedure set up so that next drill, starting off with what we did with only having a limited number and only bringing people in that had to be here. And then the last part of that was ensuring that everybody had their mask. You know, as we're walking into the hallways, everybody's wearing their mask and they're doing a really good job with that. And I realize it's 100 degrees outside and putting a mask and breathing your own hot air back into your face is disgusting. I get it. But so is getting COVID. That's going to be the norm for a while, is wearing a mask. So if you can't ensure your six foot separation as I have right now, make sure you got a mask on. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, we must think anew and act anew. Abraham Lincoln, 1862. How will history's light shine on our chapter of this story? It's going to say that's when things changed. That's when the mask gatherings, the crowds of any type. You know, standing in line to go to the DFAC is an opportunity to see other people from other organizations and, you know, you'd be part of the team. And we're not doing that right now. So what this is doing is it's driving innovation. I think that's ultimately what it's going to do. It's going to define the time when things change pretty drastically. I think at the end of the day, at the end of the drill, we will have accomplished what we needed to do. It's just how we did it. We'll eventually get there. And to tell you the truth, what it looks like here in July, August is going to be drastically different. And I would imagine, you know, before we get the vaccination, there will be drastic differences every drill. As we learn, as we continue to educate our masses and we continue to learn how to do things better, it's going to look drastically different. You know, I have a list here on my desk of all the crazy things that happened in 2020. You know, you're talking about the COVID, you got the flood, you got the riots. There was a meteor that came within a couple hundred miles from the globe here. We had the Sahara sands that are coming across. We got a whole bunch of elephants that are dying for whatever reason. What else? Oh, the locusts. We got, you know, 2020 has been a disaster. So we'll see what else is up. What's in store for us? Murder hornets. Murder hornets. There you go. I forgot them. Yeah, I got to write that down. I got to write that down.