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Last year I traveled to the Middle East to visit with troops in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

My father was a military attache, so I've been traveling all my life.

I was very fortunate to grow up with parents who love to travel, so I traveled from a young age. My dad's a heart surgeon and goes to conferences all over the world. By the time I was seven, I traveled outside the country for the first time. We went to Paris. The next year, we went to London, and then Brussels.

Well, I've been to Iraq twice now. I was in Baghdad in June and then north of Baghdad in November.

Over the years, I've spent time in Saudi Arabia, the Bekaa Valley, Afghanistan, Jordan, and Kenya, among other vacation hotspots.

My father was a Foreign Service officer, a diplomat and an Arabist who spent virtually all his career in the Near East, as it was called in the State Department. So I spent most of my childhood among the Israelis and the Arabs of Palestine, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

I always traveled. I left Cameroon when I was 11 years old. I lived in the USA, in Switzerland.

You know, we travelled a lot when I was a kid because my father was wherever the work was.

My dad's Israeli. He was born in Baghdad to Iraqi Jews. Then, at age two, his parents wanted to move to their homeland and he grew up in Israel. I've been there twice, once as a baby and once when I was 15.

I served two tours in Iraq, in the Marine Corps.