National Guard Archives

Last year, I hiked in the Bataan Memorial Death March and considered it one of the top 10 events of my life, a day where those old fashioned words comradeship and camaraderie rang true.

This year's march takes place Sunday, March 21, at the Army's White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, and individuals can still register for $65 and teams for $275 until Match 14.

After that, the price of entry goes up to $130 for individuals and $550 for teams until March 17, when registration closes.

I'm doing the march again this year with my Marine buddy from The Original Las Vegas in New Mexico, Vince Howell, along with Paul McCloskey, editor of Government Health IT, who is flying in for the event from his home in Chicago.

Please join us.

I think I could write a monthly feature on lost or stolen government laptops. The Naval Hospital Pensacola in Florida reported the latest stray on Tuesday.

The hospital said the laptop went missing from its pharmacy department and contained a database of names, Social Security numbers and dates of birth on 38,000 patients who used the pharmacy in the past year. The hospital said the information does not contain any personal health information.

The laptop has been missing since Aug. 18, has a damaged exterior and may have ended up in the junk pile, the hospital said, adding it believes any "malicious intent" in the disappearance of the laptop is unlikely.

Because the hospital cannot account for the laptop, it is sending letters to each person whose information was on the computer. The letter will include information on steps the patients can take to protect their identities. Anyone who believes their personal information was comprised can check out this FAQ.

Last month, the National Guard Bureau reported a laptop containing personal information on 131,000 guardsmen was stolen from one of its contractors.

Whose turn will it be next month?

Laptops containing personnel information from departments like Veterans Affairs and Education keep going on unauthorized walks. Now it's the National Guard Bureau's turn, which alerted soldiers on Wednesday of a stolen laptop.

Ray Noller, a spokesman for the bureau, the Pentagon outfit that oversees the Army and Air Force national guards, told me that an Army contractor had a laptop containing personal information on 131,000 soldiers stolen on July 27.

Noller said information on the stolen laptop contained personal information on soldiers enrolled in the Army National Guard Bonus and Incentives Program. The data includes names, Social Security numbers, incentive payment amounts and payment dates.

The fact the contractor had stored this information on a personal laptop indicated that "security protocols were not followed," Noller said, but he declined to identify the contractor or where the laptop was stolen.

Noller said the National Guard Bureau has set up a Web site that will offer credit protection for soldiers concerned they have been compromised by the theft.

I don't know about anyone else, but to ensure my laptop is not stolen, I hide it if I am away from the house for an extended period of time -- and I never, ever leave it in the car.

This means that sometimes my laptop and I go shopping. I was coming back from a trip to White Sands Missile Range last month and stopped to buy cat food, with my laptop case perched on the top of a grocery cart which contained 25 cases of cat food.

I went to check out and got the inevitable question from the cashier: "You must have a lot of cats?" followed by, "Were you checking your e-mail while shopping?"

Better wise guy questions than a lost laptop.

As far as I can determine the reason the taxpayers - that's you and I - have to fund $165 million in bonuses for employees of AIG Financial Products is they came up with the ideas a few years back to create trillions of dollars worth of arcane and cockamamie financial products known as credit default swaps.

The value of those swapstanked after the housing market fell into the cellar and we taxpayers bailed out AIG to the tune of $180 billion or so. We taxpayers need to provide bonuses to AIG Financial whizz kids - creating 73 millionaires in the process - because only they have the skills to "unwind" their own mistakes, or we'll be sending even more bailout bucks to the leafy rich streets of Connecticut, where inventing financial instruments that no one could understand was a growth industry until last year.

So let's compare the bonuses showered on folks who work in air conditioned offices and live in bay-windowed mansions in Fairfield, Conn., with combat medics and corpsmen who risk their lives to save others at a base pay that ranges from just more than $2,000 to just less than $3,000 and who were honored at the Armed Forces YMCA "Angles of the Battlefield" ceremony this month:

-- Army Staff Sgt. Christopher Walters, a medic who pulled three comrades out of a burning Bradley Fighting Vehicle hit by an improvised explosive device in April 2008.

-- Navy Hospitalman 2 Michael Ryals, who was wounded while on patrol in Iraq in October 2006, but despite his wounds cared first for his wounded buddies.

-- Army National Guard Staff Sgt. Matthew Lavoie, who was also wounded in an IED attack, and the recipient of enough medals to provide brass door knockers on an entire street in Fairfield.

Maybe the AIG "Masters of the Universe" would like to share their bonuses with these docs.

President Obama has nominated W. Scott Gould, currently vice president for public sector strategy at IBM Global Business Services, as the next deputy secretary of Veterans Affairs.

VA Secretary Eric K. Shinseki said that Gould, a naval reservist called to active duty in support of operations in Afghanistan, "possesses a unique and wide-ranging set of skills in information technologies, acquisition, budget, human resources and leading the modernization of large, complex organizations."

Unlike his predecessor, James Peake, it sure looks like Shinseki really understands that IT is key to the VA fulfilling the department's mission to care for vets.

Obama also nominated Tammy Duckworth, director of the Illinois Veterans Affairs Department, to be the assistant secretary of public and intergovernmental affairs at VA. Duckworth, an Army National Guard helicopter pilot who lost both legs while flying a combat mission in Iraq in 2004, will direct VA's public affairs, internal communications and intergovernmental relations. She also will oversee programs for homeless Veterans, consumer affairs and special rehabilitative events.

Like Obama, Duckworth has Hawaii and Illinois connections: She has a bachelor's degree from the University of Hawaii and served in the Illinois National Guard.

At first it may seem bizarre why the state of Kentucky would ask National Guard units based in the Sunshine State of Florida for help in dealing with the aftermath of last week's ice storm, described by Kentucky Gov. Steve Beshear as the worst natural disaster in that state's history.

But as the Florida Guard public affairs officer, Air Force Lt. Col. Ron Tittle, explained to me, it makes a lot of sense why Kentucky asked his state for help. It's because the Florida Guard has in its inventory some Regional Emergency Response Network (RERN) vehicles packed with communications gear that will help fill in the gaps in Kentucky's communications systems, which were knocked out by storm.

Tittle said the Florida Guard has dispatched six of RERNs to Kentucky along with 24 operators from the Air Guard's 290th Combat Communications Support Squadron at MacDill Air Force base in Florida and three Army National Guard maintenance personnel.

Mike Garvey, executive vice president of Applied Global Technology, which built the RERN system, which is also used in Pennsylvania and Minnesota. He said each vehicle has a dual Ku/Ka band satellite terminal, which provides data connectivity for up to 500 users on classified and unclassified Defense networks and land mobile radio systems to support state and local emergency responders.

Little sent along fact sheets, which show that the RERNs also come equipped with Wi-Fi access points and voice over IP phones. In other words, everything needed to provide communications as Kentucky recovers from the ice storm.