Because so many people ask and it's actually a pretty cool story . . .

Susan asked me to start a nonprofit for people with MST in the summer of 2008. I said sure, and began researching and pulling people and paperwork together. But by the fall I still did not have a name for what we were trying to do. My background and interests are in marketing, and I wanted a name that was positive, memorable and evoked a strong mental image. I didn't want anything generic, or anything that sounded too military, because it would scare away the people with MST.

In September I was networking like crazy to try and get people to help out, and I attended the Washington State VA board meeting over in Retsil, WA. From my home in Seattle I had to take two busses and two ferries to make it to the nine am meeting, and once the meeting got out I was dreading the even more complicated trip on the way back.

A gentleman who served on the board offered to give me a ride back to Seattle, and I accepted. He worked at the federal VA Medical Center and had some important job, and we got to know each other pretty well on the car and ferry ride back.

Of course I talked to him about the charity, because that's really all I talk about, and I told him how we wanted to get our veterans everything they need in order to make it safely home. A lot of us with MST aren't able to do the simple things we need to do, such as hold down jobs or sign up for counseling, and we wanted the nonprofit to help set these people up with all the emotional, financial, medical and other care so they could have a complete and total recovery.

"Ah, he said. "You want to be these people's parachute packers."

"Parachute packers?" I said. "What are those?"

He explained that in the military there are those whose duty it is to pack the parachutes of pilots and others who wear parachutes when they go up in planes. Parachutes have to be folded perfectly, with every string and fold in place, otherwise they won't deploy properly, and so all these people place their lives in the hands of the men and women who pack their parachutes. If they have to jump or bail out of a plane, their ability to get home safely comes down to that one individual. So, those people who "pack your parachute" have become synonymous with those who we rely on in times of trouble.

I had never heard of this term before but this little voice in me said ah ha, here's your name. So I went home and Googled it and found that:

a.) The name did not exist anywhere else as a business, and

b.) There was a motivation speaker out there named Charlie Plumb who talked about packing parachutes. He was a retired Captain who graduated from the Naval Academy who spent several years as a POW in a communist prison camp and one of his chief stories is about the people in your lives who pack your parachute.

All of this was enough to convince me that that analogy was perfect for what we are trying to do for our hardest working and most noble veterans.