On this Veteran’s Day 2010, we take some time off to reflect on our military heritage and those who have served their country. In my famly, military service has been a duty, but not a calling. Nevertheless, a number of us have served, some voluntarily, and some when asked.

Distant records are sketchy, but I do know that some of my ancestors, Huguenot refugees who came from France in the 17th century to seek freedom from religious persecution, settled in New Jersey, then fled to Canada to escape the troubles once more during the American Revolution, so saw no military service. Two generations later, the Larues, my great-great grandparents Samual and Jane, returned to the States, sometime in the mid-19th century, and raised my great-grandfather, Criness Larue, who saw service in the Union Army in the Civil War and was wounded.

One of my other great-great grandfathers, Dennis Tanner, saw military service in the 5th New York heavy artillery, and did not survive the experience, falling at the battle of Harpers Ferry. His daughter, Lucy, married Criness Larue in 1879, his first, her second. Lucy and Criness’ daughter, Lettie, was my paternal grandmother.

On my mother’s side of the family, the Pietz and Reis families emigrated from Prussia in the 1870s to escape the rampant militarism and universal conscription practiced by the newly-independent German Empire following the Franco-Prussian War. They settled in northern Minnesota, where my maternal grandmother Ella was courted by one William Strube, who did not meet approval by great-grandmother Pietz (Reis). Laura Pietz pressured her daughter to marry a more well-to-do Norwegian farmer. William, unlucky in love, enlisted in the Army during World War I. On his return after the war, he married the now-widowed Ella, whose first husband, Grant, my biological grandfather, had perished in the 1918 influenza epidemic.  William adopted Ella’s three children and, together, William and Ella had two more children, both of whom served in World War II.

Both my parents grew up fatherless, as my mother Hilda’s stepfather William succumbed to a kidney ailment in 1924, and my paternal grandparents had divorced in 1926. My father, Don, attended Dunwoody Institute (now Dunwoody College of Technology), earning a boiler license, electrician’s license, and becoming a member of the Refrigeration Service Engineer’s Society. In 1943, shortly after I was born, he was drafted into the U.S. Navy and soon found himself in a Construction Battalion in a forward supply base in the Phillippines, where he maintained the cold-storage refrigeration equipment for the duration of the war. Other than a few air raids on the field, he did not see combat.

Don’s youngest brother, Harry, served in the U.S. Army in England. Hilda’s siblings, William Strube’s natural children, brother Norman and sister Agnes, both served in the U.S. Army, Agnes as a nurse in France after the Normady invasion. Norman married Josephine, an Army nurse from Chicago. Aunt Jo recently took an honor flight to Washington, DC, with other World War II veterans, to visit the war memorial.  She was interviewed about her war experiences for a public television special about the trip.

The Korean “Police Action” was between generations in our family. But, I was of draft age soon after the Berlin Wall was built. That and the threat of Castro’s Communist regime in Cuba escalated the Cold War and the struggle against the advance of Communism. When President Johnson and Secretary of Defense McNamara sent regular troops into South Vietnam, I was conscripted. I had just graduated from college, and was working for Univac Defense Sytems Division when my educational deferment expired. The draft board refused to grant an occupational deferment, especially since I was due to soon be deployed to Europe to install a Fleet Operations Control Center and draft-age men were already fleeing the country to avoid the draft.

I spent two years in the U.S. Army, the last year as a Physical Sciences Reseach Assistant, actually working as a Radio Frequency Interference Analyst, regulating radio spectrum usage at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico. This was primarily an electrical engineering job, for which the Army had no training programs, but assigned personnel qualified by civilian training or experience. The assignment came just in time to rescind orders that would have sent me to the jungles of ‘Nam. An alert personnel clerk at Fort Gordon, Georgia culled many college graduates from the infantry ranks and placed them in such jobs.

The Vietnam War dragged on for another five years, during which it was best not to mention having served, nor for a long time after the unpopular war was over. I went back to the military-industrial complex and continued my career as a Cold War mercenary for another 30 years.  I was involved in developing major naval combat systems, both tactical and strategic, and occasionally went to sea as a civilian technical consultant, a non-combatant, necessary to the crafting of complex systems, but reviled as a war profiteer, even though many of my uniformed collegues earned as much or more.  The difference being that, as a civilian, I would not be required to stand in harm’s way should the occasion arise, though I did once, during the Viet Nam conflict, carry identification to be used in the event of capture by opposing forces.  My status as a veteran did not stand in good stead in the company of active duty personnel, nor in the community at large.  This much we have lost in pursuing unpopular wars.  Only in Native American society today are warriors, past and present, revered, respected, and honored.

In due time, the next generation after me grew to manhood in relatively peaceful times. The oldest boy, stepson Matt Bock, joined the Army Reserve between his junior and senior years in high school and, after a year of deciding he wasn’t ready for college, went active duty. He was in Germany as a communications specialist when the Berlin Wall, erected a generation before, fell, and remained there through the First Gulf War, then called Desert Storm, that evicted Iraqi forces from the disputed independent state of Kuwait.

Matt’s brother, Mark, secured an ROTC scholarship to enable him to attend private university, and, after graduation, accepted a 4-year commission in the U.S. Army Tank Corps, spending most of his tour of duty in Colorado, with a brief deployment to Saudi Arabia during the uneasy peace between Desert Storm and Enduring Freedom, the ill-conceived Iraqi regime change that has, along with the drawn-out Afghani campaign, the longest war in American history.

So far, these 21st-century conflicts have endured without conscription, placing an awful burden on the diminished volunteer services, but leaving the next generation of our family, the fifth since fleeing Prussian conscription in the 19th century, and sixth since the casualty of the War Between the States, with a choice. Of the two girls and one boy currently of military age, and two more boys in high school, none have indicated a desire to serve.

We are proud to have served, and proud of those who served before us and who now serve in the defense of their country and common ideals. But, mindful of the sacrifices of those who did not return and those who, shattered in mind and body, cannot be made whole, we would rather that none of our future descendents need make the choice to go to war nor have that choice made for them.