The League and the Marine Corps Systems Command co-sponsor three Marine Military Expos each year, rotating among Camp Lejeune, Camp Pendleton in California, and Quantico in Virginia. Unlike many trade shows, these events are intended to allow battle-tested Marines tell the people who make their gear what works, what doesn't, what could be improved and what needs to be developed.

[After the jump, read more of Bill's report from Marine Expo - South.]

Update: Have you received your T-shirt and would like to add it to our map? You can find the Our T-shirt World Map at this address: Hammock.com/tshirt.

This year, our annual tradition of giving friends a Hammock T-shirt is going global. For the past 16 years, we've shared an annual edition T-shirt with lots of people we work with throughout the year. They're often packaged in fun, creative ways. As we began to consider a new T-shirt (to go along with a new website and some new spin on our logo and graphics), we decided to make our T-shirt sharing a little more interactive.

So this year, there's a little string attached to our T-shirt sharing. We're asking the recipients to email or upload (or send us a snapshot via snail mail) a photo of themselves wearing the T-shirt, wherever they happen to be. With those photos, we will create a world map that shows how our T-shirts pop up around the world.

More importantly, we want this year's T-shirt to help encourage another type of global connection. Since we're all about sharing stories here at Hammock, we decided to use our T-shirt tradition to support some children who are ready to tell their own. For every five photos added to the map, we're donating one laptop to the educational efforts of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation in developing countries. (Up to 20 laptops!)