Soldier receives surprise welcome
By WILL MANLY
Just back from Iraq, Army Reserve Spc. Kristen Dinkel got a homecoming surprise Tuesday.
She pulled up to Plainville Grade School and saw kids everywhere.
Wearing red, white and blue. Waving streamers. Cheering for her. The fifth-grade band playing patriotic music.
"I did not expect that at all. They surprised me," Dinkel said. "I got out of my car, and I saw all of these little kids screaming, and I didn't know what to think."
Dinkel's mother works at the school. And Dana Friend, who was Dinkel's second-grade teacher, still teaches at the elementary school. So while Dinkel was deployed to Mosul, Iraq, she exchanged a handful of letters with some of the kids at the school.
"She had pen-palled with the second-graders and the fifth-graders," Friend said. "We had collected Halloween candy and made Christmas ornaments."
And when Dinkel returned last week from her deployment, the kids wanted to see her.
"It was really fun," Friend said.
While deployed to the northern Iraqi city of Mosul, Dinkel was an Army medic. She worked on a ground ambulance, treating and transferring casualties to medical facilities. Hearing from the children back home helped her remember who she was fighting for, Dinkel said.
"It was a very big motivator, just to know that people care," she said. "Some of the letters were really funny, too. I knew some of the kids, too. It was very motivating to have letters from kids back home."
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