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CROATIA - Some people can easily recall childhood memories of playing with Tonka trucks or GI Joes, for Spc. Chance Vredenburg his experience with carpentry starts at childhood, when he was as young as 8 years old.
“I remember I was about eight, helping my dad help tighten leg bolts into support beams to build our barn,” said Vredenburg, a native of Watertown, Minn.
Vredenburg and around 30 other members of his unit, the Minnesota National Guard’s 851st Vertical Engineer Company, have volunteered to spend their annual training working with soldiers from the Croatian Army to fix a community center damaged by flooding last year. The Office of Defense Cooperation and U.S. European Command sponsored the Humanitarian Civic Assistance project, allowing the renovations to happen free of charge to the village.
The project doesn’t come easy; all of the soldiers involved in the project are working 12-15 hour days to try and ensure the project gets done on time.
“I am use to working 10 hours a day, 50 hours a week,” said Vrendenburg. “It’s a lot more mentally taxing for someone that doesn’t do it to keep trying to push forward.”
The hard work and higher temperatures isn’t anything new to this Minnesota native who is also an Iraq veteran. He deployed to Iraq as a combat engineer in 2007 and helped build Morale, Recreation and Welfare buildings and other establishments on forward operating bases around the area. Vrendenburg is accustomed to having to work with allied forces who know little to no English.
“I worked with locals in Iraq,” said Vrendenburg “It’s similar here, you have a positive attitude, be patient and polite and eventually you understand each other and the job gets done.”
Vredenburg and many of the other Soldiers in his unit enjoy working on things that help positively impact the lives of people.
“It did feel good to make something that nice for the guys that had to stay there for a longer period of time,” said Vrendenburg. “The community center is more so because it is a bigger range of people who get to enjoy the space.”
Vredenburg and the rest of his unit are expected to be done with the project and return to Minnesota around mid-July.
| Date Taken: | 07.01.2015 |
| Date Posted: | 07.20.2015 17:43 |
| Story ID: | 170602 |
| Location: | HR |
| Hometown: | WATERTOWN, MN, US |
| Web Views: | 23 |
| Downloads: | 0 |
This work, Soldier Stories: Spc. Chance Vredenburg, by MSgt Lynette Hoke, identified by DVIDS, must comply with the restrictions shown on https://www.dvidshub.net/about/copyright.
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