While serving in the Persian Gulf in 1980 aboard the USS San Bernadino (LST -1189) during the Iranian Hostage Crisis, a Marine who had received a ‘bad’ letter from home obtained the weapon from the sentry guarding the armory positioned near the flight deck and our gear and committed suicide with an M-16. A few years earlier and while still in high school in the copper-mining community of Morenci, Arizona; a friend and Vietnam veteran who worked with my father, had gone to work one night and committed suicide.

Gregory Thomas Stewart is a US Navy veteran and director of The Stewart Foundation he founded as a non-profit organization dedicated to providing food, clothing, hygiene, and other necessities for the food insecure and underserved community in Phoenix and Tempe.

In 2009 while living and working in Buckeye, Arizona, Greg began taking those experiencing homelessness to the local grocery store to buy them food. He continued to provide those services in the community even after moving to Phoenix in 2011.

Stanley was an educator, a motorcyclist, a father, an uncle, woodworker, and my appointed big brother. I lost my Uncle Stan in Tucson to cancer on Jan. 29th. He was 68. He was also my big brother growing up in downtown Phoenix during the 60's. In the summer 2003, Stan crashed (stroke?) while riding to a computer science conference in Albuquerque. At the time of his crash, Stan was a Computer Sciences instructor at NMSU Alamogordo campus. He would continue to teach until the TBI he suffered forced his retirement in 2005 as a College Assistant Professor.