129 Years of Family Serving Family: Fernando Millan, HQ
One in a series honoring the Exchange’s 129 years of family serving family
Who he is: Fernando Millan, Investigations Manager, Loss Prevention, Exchange HQ
Years with the Exchange: 21 years
Military connections: Millan’s brother and nephew both served in the Marine Corps.
What brought him to the Exchange: “I was working in loss prevention at Mervin’s [a local retailer]. A buddy of mine had a wife in the Air Force, and he had worked for the Exchange in Germany. He knew the LP manager at Nellis AFB and asked if they were looking to hire. She said she needed some temp help, and that’s how I got started. I never thought it was going to be a career!”
What he did next: A district manager saw potential in Millan and offered him a full-time LP manager position at March ARB. After a promotion, he PCS’d back to Nellis in 2007, where he worked until he moved to HQ. He worked for several years in the safety branch of LP before starting his position as LP investigations manager in 2024.
Going where the troops go: Millan deployed to Afghanistan from March 2011 to June 2012. “In 2011, the mission was really busy in Afghanistan, Kuwait and Iraq. I was asked to deploy as an LP manager and said sure. I flew to Kuwait and had to wait about a week, trying to get a flight into Afghanistan, but it was hard because there was so much going on there. I spent about two months in Kandahar waiting for my orders to come through to go to Camp Leatherneck. I was there for about six months. That was an experience. The Marines there ran the Exchange out of a tent for the first four months I was there until they moved into a building.”
Millan spent another six months in Kabul. “I worked with a lot of local nationals. Really good people there. They’d bring us a lot of local food.
“Deploying was an experience I’ll never forget. Everyone sticks together, especially within the Exchange family. Everyone’s always helping each other out and looking out for each other. I still keep in touch with the ones I met there. We became more of a family because we didn’t have any other family nearby, and that grew into a special bond. It was a great experience. I’d do it again.”
Memorable moments: “One of my proudest moments was when I was working in safety as an analyst, and I was asked to build a report. I had never used Power BI [a data analysis platform] before, but I created a program that everyone uses now. VPs are always asking for the information that you get from my report.”
Family Serving Family: “The best part of being at the Exchange is the people I work with. Especially now, working at HQ, I get to meet a lot of people in a way you don’t in the field. There’s only about 20 of us in LP HQ, and we all have bonded and grown to have friendships. We’ve built a really good rapport as colleagues. That’s what keeps me at the Exchange. We look out for each other. We do a lot of collaboration. Even working remotely, we see each other almost every day on Teams, so we’re close.
“It’s a wonderful feeling working for the Exchange. I never thought I’d have 20-plus years with the company. It’s gone by so fast.”
