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You are so right--great stuff! Here's a sample:

http://parentsofdeployed.homestead.com/Pictures25.html

Trading Her Pom-Poms For An M-16

Former Huntington cheerleader an MP in Kuwait

By Peter Gannon

If the honor existed in the Huntington High School yearbook, "least likely to win a foreign military marksmanship award," Tara Kelly would have been a good candidate. Of course if she'd been voted in, she just might have gone out and earned it a couple of years earlier.

In 1998, Kelly was your typical teenager almost too typical, like out of a movie. She was a senior co-captain of the Devils' cheerleading squad, the Colleen of the Huntington St. Patrick's Day Parade, just an outgoing girl with dreams of going to college and becoming a schoolteacher. But something happened to her that year. As she stirred up the crowd and led the cheers from the sideline of the football field complete with pom-poms, skirt and navy-blue sweater a strange looking contraption made up of wood beams and netting stood ominously in the background.

Project Adventure, as it's called, would change Kelly's life forever. Used by the school's physical education department, a lot of preparation and work goes into the training before a student actually gets on the big structure, which is something like an obstacle course, and looks more suited for military basic training than gym class. It is intended to build self-esteem and trust, but just the sight of it says that a whole lot of courage and physical ability goes into its mastery. In her senior year, the cheerleader won an award for doing just that.

Around that time, said her mother, Kelly first started talking about signing up with the Army.

"As her mother, I was very against it," said Susan Morandi, adding that because Kelly was just 17 years old at graduation, she would have been required to sign the consent forms. "But I realized that as soon as she turned 18 she would do it on her ownshe was already talking to recruiters that came to the school."

Morandi had already been through some of this before, when she used to hang up on recruiters who called her home looking for her son Patrick, now 25, when he was a student at Huntington. But this time it was different. Kelly was serious, and she viewed the Army as an opportunity to earn money for college and help her reach her goals. As a single mother Kelly's father lives in Medford Morandi figured she needed the help.

Kelly joined the military just three months after her graduation in September of 1998. She signed on with the Army's 340th Military Police out of Jamaica, Queens, and committed herself to 6-1/2 years of reserve duty which called for one weekend a month of training in addition to two weeks every June. And just as quickly, she jumped right into her civilian life as well. Kelly secured a full-time job at the Geico Insurance Company, and at night began attending classes at Farmingdale University and Nassau Community College. But as her mother said, that part of her life just keeps getting interrupted.

Kelly was first called into service during the NATO peacekeeping mission in Kosovo, where she served from March to November of 2001. She had a life-changing experience while there, said her mother, seeing first-hand the reality of a poverty-ridden country, and for the first time seeing a culture different from her own.

"She came back with a different attitude," said Morandi. "About orphans, about culture, about a lot of things. It was really quite an experience for her."

At the same time as her outlook was changing, however, Kelly kept on proving that there was little that she couldn't do. At just 4 feet 11 inches, more than one person told her that she was too small to handle an Army issue M16 machine gun the wrong thing to tell her, said her mother. Kelly responded by becoming something of a sharpshooter, even earning a German military marksmanship award while participating in a contest at a neighboring camp.

But something else happened during her deployment in Kosovo that would change not only her life, but that of every other American citizen as well. In her sixth month away from home, the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon sent a shockwave across the world. Many soldiers in her unit are firemen and police officers from Queens and surrounding areas, so the impact of the events in New York hit especially hard in the 340th.

That's why, says Morandi from her experiences in Kosovo and from what happened at home while she was away her daughter is especially proud to be where she is today, serving the United States Army in the Middle East.

"Tara is gung-ho about what she's doing," said her mother. "She's very patriotic, and she hates to see injustice. She hates Saddam Hussein. She's really sees the importance in what she's doing."

Kelly's unit is currently protecting an important weapons depot for coalition forces. She writes home when she can, and on occasion gets to call home to speak with her family. As of Tuesday, Morandi hadn't spoken to her in over a week, but her cell phone is always on just in case her daughter gets a moment to call.

"She's just your typical Huntington girl," said Morandi. "We're all very proud of herwe're very proud of all of them."

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