Service to My Country: Must Read Alaska Veteran Series for America 250 – Natalie Spaulding Interview

Okay, yeah.

Thank you, Todd.

Thank you for taking time to sit down and talk about this on the show.

I really appreciate it.

For anyone who doesn't know, I'm Natalie Spaulding.

I'm the Operations Communications Director for Mastery in Alaska.

I do a lot of the writing and I'm the acting editor.

And I wanted to start this series after getting an op-ed by Paul A. Bauer Jr. who was writing about his perspective on being thanked for his service as a veteran.

And he basically said that being thanked, people saying thank you for your service has become kind of perfunctory.

It's become just something people say without thinking deeper into that.

And it kind of comes off as insincere.

At times, even if the person is sincere, it can come off as insincere.

And I do think there is sort of that, oh, you see a veteran and it's like, oh, thank you for your service.

And some people don't even say it anymore.

But the people who do, you know, it can come off as just, I'm doing my, I'm just thinking it, checking it off the list and not really caring to look more

sincere.

or learn more from that veteran.

So one of the things he suggested was instead of just saying thank you for your service, to like ask questions.

Ask like, what branch did you serve in? What did you do? Where do you serve? What did your service teach you? And I think those are really great questions.

And there's something I'm interested in hearing answers from different veterans and hearing perspectives from the people who served our country, who chose to do that.

Because, you know, there's numerous lessons you learn by taking on that responsibility and duty to go and fight for your country.

So I started the series.

I asked, I'm asking veterans and also active duty service members to anyone in the military or who was in the military, what they did, how long did they serve, if anyone else in their family served, what branch they chose and why.

And then also some of the deeper questions that I want people to reflect on and share with us.

is what is the greatest challenge you faced during your service and how did you overcome it? What was the most significant lesson you learned during your service? And my favorite one is if you could say one thing to young Americans aged 18 to 25, what would you say? That those are just guiding questions that that I've offered and would like people to respond to.