Houston Iraq vet heads to Afghanistan as an aid worker

A return to harm’s way
Houston Iraq vet heads to Afghanistan as an aid worker
By LINDSAY WISE
Copyright 2009 Houston Chronicle
April 19, 2009, 9:21AM

Elizabeth Vallette still remembers the faces of the Iraqi men staring down the barrel of her gun.

It was a Friday evening in 2004 and the Army captain from Spring was riding in an armored convoy south of Baghdad, an area considered friendly to U.S. troops.

“You drive by a mosque pointing your rifles at them, and the men, they were not happy,” Valette said. “Just silent. Just watching. Just, like, expressionless. And you can only imagine what’s going through their heads.”

The question nagged Vallette after she returned home to the Houston area at the end of her yearlong deployment. For all the time she’d spent in Iraq, she realized she knew little about Iraqis, except that they were suffering.

Vallette finished her six-year stint with the Army in April 2005 and dedicated herself to a new mission: to help victims of the conflict she’d left behind.

In between graduate business classes at the University of Houston, she volunteered with refugee resettlement organizations and launched a local chapter of The List Project, a non-profit founded in 2007 with the belief that the U.S. government has a “clear and urgent moral obligation” to help Iraqis endangered by their work with Americans. Now the 31-year-old former soldier is headed back in harm’s way, this time as a humanitarian aid worker in Afghanistan.

“It’s hard to come back and just settle down and watch it on the news — for me at least,” she said.

Vallette will draw on her experience as a logistics officer to work in Kabul with the Peace Dividend Trust, a Canadian foundation that supports economic recovery in post-conflict countries by facilitating the international community’s purchase of local goods and services.
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