PRESIDENTS MESSAGE

President's Message From Jim Bondi
Greetings from Texas! We are truly excited about the 2010 Reunion and want each of our members, veterans and family members of all the units associated with this great Association to mark your calendars for a fantastic and exciting reunion scheduled for 30 September to 3 October 2010. The reunion will be held at the Brookshire Suites Hotel located on the Inner Harbor of the fair city of Baltimore, Maryland. The website to our hotel can be found at www.harbormagic.com/brookshire. The Brookshire Suites is a beautiful hotel located 4 blocks from the Camden Yard Baseball Stadium along with many other sight-seeing activities and events. Some of the special events planned as part of this years reunion include a water taxi trip around the harbor, a guided tour of Fort McHenry National Park. Additionally the walk to the harbor and the Baltimore Aquarium is just a few minutes away from the hotel. The Brook-shire Suites management have graciously (with a little arm twisting from our able Treasurer Joe Donovan) accommodated our request for a price of $109 per room. All rooms are suites.with a separate sitting room and bedroom! The Hotel will also be the site of our Saturday evening Banquet and meetings. So plan on joining us for this special Reunion event with great seafood, plenty of history and the beautiful sites of Baltimore.
As this years President, I am really looking forward to the activities being planned and the reunion location. A special thanks goes out to our Board Members located on the East Coast for their willingness to step up and do the heavy lifting on coordinating the details of the reunion. With my new job and all the recent excitement (not a good type) here at Fort Hood, I am not able to spend a lot of time traveling to Baltimore to work out all of the details.
On the topic of the recent tragic event at Fort Hood, I am planning to provide some insights into what happened and how the Fort and our fantastic military, civilian and family members are recovering and ensuring no repeat ever occurs on a military installation. I hope we can have a dialog about this at our reunion. Last fall I took a job with the Army as a Director on the Garrison Staff of Fort Hood.
I look forward to seeing everyone in Sept/Oct 2010. Be sure to mark your calendars, dust off the suitcase and dig out photos or other memorabilia to share. And, as always, please remember to keep our military service members in your prayers as so many of them are deployed overseas in Iraq and Afghanistan as well as other locations around the world.
ORAL HISTORIES OUT FOR REVIEW AND WEB BASED OPPORTUNITY FOR YOURS!
The Oral Histories taken at the 2008 reunion are out for review with those members. Please review them and send/email back with corrections additions so they can be included in our 17th Signal Battalion history. For those of you with email access but unable to attend a future reunion, please check out the Association Web Page for the oral history form. As Monroe Manning our Historian writes .Please feel free to use this form to share something of those times we all have in common and yet unique perhaps to your individual unit or assignment or experience. In my story, I was fortunate to serve under the late, former battalion commander, BG Emmett Rey-nolds, a real gentleman, who stood tall when some of his officers received their devastating\RIF news from DA or when I received an assignment to the German Training Assistance Group (GTAG-Signal) which was the start up of new German Signal Units. I know you have great stories to tell. So share with us!!