 You know I have loved history since I was very small my dad was a college professor who taught the history of the Army and the Navy and of America and I was always fascinated with you know what makes people do what they do and the long-lasting impacts of that for generations to come. This is the largest joint training event that we've had ever on the African continent and we have partners from at least seven different nations that are executing this in a COVID environment and it's truly interoperable and the partnerships that we will develop here and continue to grow in the future will will help us down the line and the history of that is important for us to remember and utilize and look back on both for lessons learned and for operating together in the future. I mean many of these nations that we're working with here today the Tunisians, the Moroccans, the Dutch, our British partners and several of the others that I left out. We fought alongside in the Great War and World War II. Just about anything we do in life, anything that happens has historical value. It's all a matter of who it matters to in the future or in the present just take the cultural significance of something. You know what does what does this event or action mean to a certain community? An event for example in the Iraq War where the British army was moving into Basra and a historian was able to tell the commander that hey when British forces get into Basra there's going to be a cemetery there from from World War I that they're going to want to do honors for. It's that type of thing that you might not know immediately that it's going to affect someone in the future but historians have different reasons for looking at different events whether it's sociocultural or political or historical or psychological or whatever it might be those events can all be viewed differently depending on what lens you're looking through it at. Well it's historic in nature as I said the interoperability with our international partners, the massive effort and logistics that it took to bring all these nations together to make an event like this happen so we can learn in the future both how to make it better and remember the our partners on our left and right and use that historical data for okay this might have worked in the past and we want to replicate it or we don't want to replicate it so we understand the culture of our partner nations the lessons learned of that so we can learn you know what went right and what went wrong I'm just really glad that to have the opportunity to support the joint office in in documenting the history of this event both through oral interviews and through document collection I think that it's something that we're going to move forward on in the future and continue to try to embed historians and fulfill this mission in this role this event is truly historic on the continent of Africa the multiple partners that have gathered together the interoperability the fact that we planned this and executed this during a COVID environment safely the fact that it's covering such a large area is is really historical in itself the lessons learned from this will benefit us the next time we try this in the future nothing the US military does really hasn't been done before in history so we're going to be in the the same environment in the future and and what we can reap from history from that will will benefit us I'm just really glad to have the opportunity to be here and fulfill the role as a as a historian for the joint office I integrate with the the CTAS staff and I think that it fulfills the mission that the the joint office has and I think in the future we'll look forward to embedding more historians on more exercises and more operations I always wanted to become a marine the world's finest fighting force and the esprit de corps and leading young men and women there's no finer organization in the world to to do that and then being an officer of marines