Northrop Grumman employee volunteers in Salt Lake City assemble 5,540 USO Care Packages. Photo courtesy of Northrop Grumman
These packages will be handed out, thanks to the volunteer efforts of Northrop Grumman Corporation (NYSE:NOC). The deployment care packages will be given to troops shipping out from Ft. Riley, Kan., Ft. Bragg, N.C., the Naval Air Station, Norfolk, Va., and at the USO Centers in Jacksonville, Fla. and Baltimore/Washington International Thurgood Marshall Airport. More than 150 employees of the Electronic Systems sector's Navigation Systems Division in Salt Lake City and their family members volunteered to stuff 5,540 deployment care packages in less than four hours. The activity turned the company cafeteria into a high-energy assembly line making a different kind of equipment for servicemen and women. The care packages were filled with personal items such as sunscreen, packaged body wipes, jerky, playing cards, prepaid international phone cards, disposable razors and chewing gum. In addition to the in-kind support, Northrop Grumman provided a $15,000 contribution to the USO to help defray the cost of the care packages. The USO is a private, nonprofit organization whose mission is to provide morale, welfare and recreation-type services to the nation's men and women in uniform. The USO currently operates more than 145 centers worldwide, including 10 mobile canteens located in the continental United States and overseas.