Nikki Haley felt at home with the SC National Guard in Asheville, NC, last week.

The ex-Lexington politician, SC governor and United Nations ambassador is married to a Guardsman.

Maj. Michael Haley is an operations officer with the SC National Guard who served in Afghanistan during his wife’s 6 years as governor.

“I was once technically his commander-in-chief,” she joked at the SC National Guard Association’s annual banquet, “but he never acknowledged it.”

Haley praised the Guard’s actions in the 2015 floods and the battering of Hurricane Matthew in 2016 during her time as governor.

After the Sept. 11. 2001, terrorist attacks, half of the personnel in Iraq were National Guardsmen, she said.

“Not bad for ‘weekend warriors,’” she said.

Haley has signed with the Washington Speakers Bureau for a reported $200,000 per speech, according to CNBC, as well as the use of a private plane.

That speaking fee puts her in the range of what former presidents, Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama charge.

Haley said she did not charge to speak at the National Guard convention.

Haley, who may be a presidential candidate in 2024, and her Indian-American family lived in a “black and white world” in Bamberg in the 1970s.

“My father wore a turban and my mother a sari,” she said. “We were different.”

Yet her father was able to teach at Voorhees College, her mother to open a business, and Haley to become a governor and ambassador.

That’s the country that even America’s critics at the UN would privately tell her they admired, she said.