Friday, April 2, 2010

PFC Goodale Earns His Wings


Christopher had his U.S. Army AIT graduation ceremony on Wednesday of this week at Fort Eustis, Virginia. He was the Distinguished Honor Grad from his unit, meaning that he graduated at the top of his class. This was a 28-week training course that started immediately after his Basic Training graduation last September. He is now qualified to maintain and repair the avionics and weapons systems on Apache helicopters.

This first picture was after the ceremony, and as you can see, he has earned his first set of wings. No doubt Christopher will want to go on and earn more wings throughout his career!

Michelle and I were able to go back for the graduation (thank you AA miles!!!), and we were really glad that we had the chance to go back there and experience this with him. It was way fun to be there. We also had a chance to visit one of Michelle's former missionary companions, do a little bit of exploring of Virginia, and have a wonderful anniversary dinner while back there (albeit five days late). I'll do a separate posting on that later.

Christopher is now back home, and getting reactivated in his local Idaho National Guard unit. He still will have three more months of additional training in the (hopefully) near future, and he'll likely be enrolling for school at BSU soon, while continuing his Guard service.

Of course, before Christopher left for his Army training, he was always working on cars for friends/family/neighbors. Oh great... now he'll be working on their attack helicopters, too! :-)

There are 16 pictures that I took at the graduation ceremony; to see them all, please click here for Flickr, or here for Facebook.


Video of Christopher getting his wings.

1 comment:

Adam McClard said...

Chris, let me say that your Dad must be the most proud guy I know. I also appreciate your interest and effort into taking this large step. Remember that with great power comes great responsibility. And the only control over power one can have is knowledge.