Use Our Diversity Better
By Lieutenant Commander Ted Johnson, U.S. Navy
Within a week of the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, the U.S. Navy, Coast Guard, and Marine Corps were making significant contributions to the humanitarian-assistance and disaster-relief efforts titled Operation Unified Response. Among the services’ most important assets were the Haitian-American Sailors, Coast Guardsmen, and Marines who served as operators and translators. Aside from the valuable duties they carried out, an intangible element of the goodwill ambassadorship was the service members’ shared ethnicity with those they were helping.
