Spc. Christian Sutton and his team of nearly two dozen other young soldiers have signed up nearly 6,000 troops as potential bone marrow donors since March 2022.
The effort by members of the Army‘s rank and file fills a critical void amid a nationwide shortage of donors and has become one of the most significant grassroots health care initiatives in the service’s recent history.
In early January, Sutton — commonly referred to as “Bone Marrow Guy” on social media — was in the airport on his way to meet with Command Sgt. Major JoAnn Naumann, the senior enlisted leader for Army Special Operations Command.
Read Next: As the Marine Corps Says Goodbye to Decades-Old Jet, Its Maintainers Hit the Fleet for the Last Time
Meeting key Army leaders to lobby for expanding his team’s bone marrow registry to new units has effectively become Suttton’s full-time job in the service, one he created for himself.
His team, mostly young soldiers and all recruited through the Army forum on Reddit, have tried to make bone marrow donations — a relatively obscure practice in the medical community — commonplace in the Army.
“I’m very happy with where the program has gone,” Sutton, a 1st Armored Division soldier based out of Fort Bliss, Texas, told Military.com. “My mother died from Hodgkin lymphoma when I was four. She had to get a bone marrow donation, but couldn’t find a donor toward the end.”
The program is dubbed “Operation Ring the Bell,” a cover-all…
