George Tunstill

I am the only child and was adopted by my father who was a Army staff sergeant and my mother who was Korean. I was an Army brat for a while and I lived in Colorado and South Carolina for a while until my dad retired from the Army. I grew up and went to school in Huntsville, Alabama graduating with the Lee High School Class of 1979 and was involved with my church youth group at Northside Baptist Church. I enlisted in the United States Army barely a month after graduating from high school. I entered the Army through Fort Jackson, South Carolina, taking my basic training and advanced individual training (AIT) in my military occupational speciality (MOS) at Fort Gordon, Georgia. After finishing my military training and receiving my crossed semaphore and torch Signal Corps insignia, my first duty station was in Heidelberg in what was then West Germany. I was in Heidelberg for 2 years and a month. My next duty station was at the Pentagon. In case you're wondering, no, I did not worked in the section of the Pentagon that was destroyed in the terrorist attacks of 9/11. I worked in the north side of the Pentagon which is known as the River Entrance side of the Pentagon. It was while I was stationed at the Pentagon that I met and married my wife who was a member of the United States Navy. I left the Army and became a civilian in July of 1984. It was in January of 1985 that we had to leave the East Coast and travel clear across the country to San Diego, California because my wife had to report to ship board duty in San Diego. While in San Diego I decided to try and get my college degree. It was something I wanted to do while I was in the Army but never had the time to do because of my job. While I was attending college, my wife became pregnant with our only child. It was then I decided that I had to put off chasing after my dream of getting my degree and start working because we had a child on the way. I started working for federal government with the United States Navy as a civilian at a naval air station in the San Diego area. I left San Diego in the spring of 1989 and moved back to the East Coast and the Washington, DC area where I worked with the Defense Mapping Agency (DMA) which later changed it's name to the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (NIMA) but is now known as the the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA). Hey, what can I say. It's the government for you. I worked for DMA for 7 months before I changed jobs once again and came back to the Army but this time as a civilian working for the U.S. Army Materiel Command where I worked for them for almost 20 years. For right now I live in the tiny village of Germantown, New York, which is about an hour drive south of the state capital of Albany. I am married and have a 23 year old son who is currently on extended break from college. Hopefully he will go back to college soon so he can work on getting his BS degree in aeronautical science. He eventually wants to become a airplane pilot. All three of us are active members of a local squadron of the Civil Air Patrol.