Luke In Operation Iraqi Freedom

Our nephew, Luke Harris, is in the Air Force and is serving in Iraq. He's been there 3 months so far and hates it. It's averaging 115-117 degrees Fahrenheit, the dust is so irritating and he misses home and family. He finally sent some photos home and I wanted to scrapbook his Iraq experience. I added a few additional photos from the Internet. Military scrapbooks are probably their most popular right now since the War has been going on for awhile. More and more men and women have military experiences. Whether Navy, Army, Air Force or Marine, it helps the serviceman and his family to work out their service and document their experiences with scrapbooks. There are the usual portrait photos but there are so many other things you can scrap about. I used Luke's photos about those horrible camel spiders, the sandstorm and the pitiful little office where they can spend time on the telephone. Then there are photos of their buddies and co-workers. I would love to have photos of the silly things they do to stave off boredom. For instance, Luke inherited a bicycle with no brakes and he has told us about his cycling back and forth in the compound and their attempts at small stunts. I have gone almost completely to digital scrapbooking and I was looking forward to making some digital layouts based on his photos from Iraq. I usually like to base my colors on what's in photos. Soldiers fatigues and the colors of the desert were what I was looking at and I didn't want to change his original photos by changing the colors so I would stick with the original photo colors. So here are my digital scrapbook pages of our soldier, or Airman.

Luke wrote a very heartfelt, moving letter about his feelings on being in Iraq and his feelings about his fellow servicemen. I wanted to include that on this page.






I used this swirling black paper and the oranges to pick up the theme of a sandstorm.