State of INFOCOM May 2015

Greetings Marines,
As I mention last year about my decision not to ever purchase anything “on sale” during the Memorial Day weekend.  I don’t begrudge those that do, I just feel it is something that I want do myself.  I feel it like it is saying, sorry you lost someone in your family defending the country, but you can save 30% on a new washer and dryer set.  That’s just not for me.

As few weeks ago my mom called me and said she was going to visit my older brother, who lives in Georgia for his birthday.  It is on the 24^th Of May.  Because I was off work on Monday my younger brother and I decided to surprise him and make the 8 hour drive.  My older is currently a sky diving instructor.  While he was in the Army he went to airborne school and then later started training for Special Forces.  He was selected for HALO training and he was one of the First classes to complete this training.  Back then the Army hadn’t established the HALO badge they currently use.  My Brother still keeps in touch with some of his old friends.  As a surprise one of his Friends who was then a Chief Warrant Officer submitted the paper work on his behalf and got his service record amended to include the HALO badge he had earned several years ago.  He presented my brother with a certificate and the badge when he came to skydive with my brother a few years back.

You may asked what all this has to do with Memorial Day, that Chief Warrant Officer last name was McGinnis.  He had a nephew that was serving in Iraq in 2008.  Private First Class Ross A. McGinnis. PFC McGinnis was awarded the Medal of Honor on June 5^th 2008.  He was a 50 Cal gunner on patrol when an insurgent throw a fragmentation grenade into the gunners hatch.  PFC McGinnis yelled “grenade” and instead of PFC McGinnis jumping to safety he decided to protect his crew and throw himself on the grenade.  His actions saved his four crew mates. I didn’t know the rest of this story until this weekend.  Let us not forget, it is Memorial Day not national barbeque day.

In closing here’s the pingdom stats for April 2015.
Uptime: 100%
Outages: 0
Downtime: 15 Minutes
Response time: 469 ms

Mark “Slayer” Anderson
Major General, SFMC
COINFOCOM
Team Delta
infocom@sfi-sfmc.org