His hands are greasy from handling oil-stained metal. Yellow light bleeds into the isometric structure of the warehouse. The low, dull melody of tools upon tools is almost a wash of white noise. He works with engines, wrenches and moves boxes, but within him resides an idea to save the lives of his fellow Marines.
Marine Corps Cpl. Matthew A. Long, a motor transport mechanic with Motor Transport Company, 3rd Maintenance Battalion, at Marine Corps Base Camp Smedley D. Butler, was recently selected as one of the winners of the 2016 Logistics Innovation Challenge.
The challenge seeks to improve the Marine Corps by seeking innovative ideas from the force, a Marine Corps announcement said. Seventeen winning projects were selected from the more than 300 entries submitted by Marines, sailors and civilians from across the Marine Corps. Winners will be teamed with sponsoring government-affiliated laboratories to prototype, experiment and implement their ideas.
Empowering Marines, Saving Lives
Long designed a tear proof package to sit behind a Small Arms Protective Insert -- the ceramic body armor Marines wear under their “flak” jackets. It will be filled with a clotting agent as well as a pain-killing agent. When the packet is pierced it will administer the quick clotting agent and the pain killer, thus stopping the bleeding and numbing the pain, treating the body for shock immediately.
“The whole point of this is immediate first aid,” Long said.
Long, from Moultrie, Georgia, is part of a long line of Marines dating back to the Civil War. Every generation of his family from that point on had at least one person in the armed forces.
“I want to continue on that legacy; it is an incredible motivation just to sit there and think about my entire family and I am continuing that legacy. That is a fire if I’ve ever heard of one,” Long said.
Empowering Marines like Long and hundreds of others like him really allows the corps to branch out and experiment, said Lt. Col. Dane Salm, the 3rd Maintenance Battalion commander.
The logistics innovation challenge is part of a larger push for innovation across the Defense Department.
“I know their ideas are fantastic and it is going to transform logistics by leaps and bounds,” Salm said. Marines today have knowledge that can to change the future of the Marine Corps and the way it operates, he added.
“I was always taught to go into things with an open mind because you can always learn something new,” Long said. “As soon as I got into the fleet I realized that motor transport isn’t that bad, and it was really eye-opening and very humbling how much all these Marines knew.”