President's Corner

Hi everybody,

I hope everyone is staying safe and I know this has not been easy on many folks. Deborah and I have been doing just fine and now the weather has gotten better, we have been busy doing things outside and enjoying the fresh air.

I would like each of you to go take a look at the; CONSTITUTION OF THE 44TH ENGINEER BATTALION section under "MORE". There are some proposed changes to the constitution that have been indicated with an * (asterisk) and underlined. We can make more proposed changes but they have to be included in the Summer Newsletter for us to deliberate and vote on at the business meeting. This is very important to the future of the association and its wellbeing. So please give me your thoughts and or ideas on it.

Sorry that some of my President’s Corner is a repeat of the winter letter but since the shut-in I really don’t have much singular updates to pass on, but I will expand on our reunion in the Newsletter section, so please take time to read it.

Ron Powell has been working on our September reunion, and this is no small task. Ron has informed me that Saint Charles has a lot of Lewis & Clark Corps of Discovery history, and he is going to make it our theme. I think this is going to be a great reunion and hopefully we can have this covid-19 behind us. So let’s get our reservations made because getting the hotel and caterer lined out with only a vague idea on the number of attendees, is hard to do. Then there is the road excursion we have on Thursday, getting transportation, setting up sites, lunch, and a ton of other little things we as a group get to take for granted. At the banquet we usually have a speaker or entertainer for the association. There is so much more than this but I think you get the idea, so let’s all help Ron out as much as we can. A big thing is to let him know if you are going and how many in your party. Just doing this helps tremendously. You can email him at ron@rwpowell.com . For you folks that are trying to budget the reunion in, I would say if you held back $150.00 per person not including room this should be enough or very close to it, at least this is somewhere to start and hopefully it will be far less than that. We try hard to keep cost down. I will update our website and send out emails as further details are known. Otherwise there should be full specifics and itinerary in the Summer Newsletter. I am asking you all to be patient as this takes time and Ron has his own business to run…it will all work out. Hope to see you all in St Charles, MO, September 16th – 19th 2020.

In case you didn’t know we now have a Facebook page “44th Engineers Battalion Association” along with our Website “44th-engineers.com”. The Facebook page was established for our membership to stay in contact with each other and to easily share items of interest. Also hopefully it will guide others to our association so we may gain membership and lets all stay proactive in the membership drive. It is a closed site for us but is very easy to join. Our website use is to disseminate information to our membership more readily and to also give perspective members a point of contact and to provide material about us. Please use both of these freely they belong to you.

Sincerely,

Rex Hurd

President

44th Engineers Battalion Association

rhurd55@yahoo.com

Welcome to Visitors from the Association's President

I hope you will find this website entertaining as well as informative. Make sure you view all the pages and hopefully you will find something to appreciate.

A special note to those who are alumni of the 44th but are not members of the association. I understand that many of you were attached to the 2nd Infantry Division and I understand your connection to that unit. What you may not know is that the 44th has a rich and glorious history that is second to none and you can be proud to have served with it regardless of when that was. The Korean War veterans that started this association wanted to preserve the traditions, and with the more recent history of the deployment to Iraq has just added to this storied past. What the 44th did in Iraq was arguably no less valiant than when it landed in Inchon with Gen. Douglas MacArthur and its involvement at the Chosin Reservoir. Please understand that the landing in Inchon & the Chosin Reservoir is as much part of our shared history as what was done in Iraq and it is up to us, those that served with the 44th to keep the memories of it alive and to pass them on to the future generations for as long as we can. You can read more on our History page within this website.

A personal note: I was too young to have served with the 44th during the Korean War and too old to have been deployed to Iraq, but as an alumni of the 44th I feel that the soldiers that were there in these campaigns (and others) were my brothers. I feel this way about all that have served with it regardless of when or where. For the 44th always did what it was ordered to do and did it with its own distinctive style.