One of the best billboards I’ve ever seen as I’ve walked through the Pentagon is the one that shows the open ocean with a fleet of US warships heading out to the horizon, with the simple wording, “Life, Liberty….and the Pursuit of all who threaten it.” It just makes one want to sign up for the Navy right then and there! As I mentioned in last month’s message, I am proud of my dad and my uncles who served in the Navy during WWII (in case you missed the message—Uncle Roy will be laying the wreath at the WWII Memorial in Washington DC on Pearl Harbor Day 2010, since he is one of the few remaining survivors).
I’ve heard about the Navy’s tradition of deployment cruise books. Interestingly enough, that is the only consistent tradition in the Military for documenting and distributing a record of service to all the participants. As we’ve worked with the National Guard, Army Reserve, Army and Air Force, we have first needed to explain the significance of documenting a Command, and then explain why RMS is the premium choice to provide full support. But with Navy, hey, we just have to skip to the second part! So it’s absolutely high-time that Remember My Service introduces itself to the Navy, and we’ve done that by bringing on a West Coast representative (eventually we’ll go East Coast too!)—Elayne Harmer is in San Francisco, right in the middle of our west coastline. She is a Stanford graduate, and if you promise not to hold it against her, I’ll also tell you that she is an attorney, and a very nice one at that. She is thrilled to dive in! The reason we have been slow to focus on Navy is very simply that we’re just a bit land-locked here in Salt Lake City, Utah, so our connections from project to project didn’t naturally take us out to sea.