Family Business

Military service is a family affair for many. Some Guardsmen serve alongside siblings and relatives, a few with their parents

It isn't unusual to see a long lineage of the same occupation in a family. In feet, it seems an expected element of human nature to continue such a tradition, generation after generation.

For families in the National Guard, this is especially cue.

Tech. Sgt. Lawrence Luby, of the Vermont Air National Guard's 158th Fighter Wing has 22 years of military service, 18 in the Guard.

Sergeant Luby's father served in the Marine Corps and encouraged him to join the Air Force as he was growing up because of his interests in new technology.

"He knew that was something I was interested in, so when I graduated high school he started suggesting it," Sergeant Luby says. "Plus, I always kind of wanted to be in the service. All my family has always been in or always served at one time or another.

And he wanted his son to be a part of it as well.

"I told him, 'If you can find out what you want to do and get the practical training when you're in high school, you'll be heads and shoulders above the others when you go to college because you'll have actually done the job,'" he says.

His son, Tech Sgt. Donald Luby, now 25 and also a member of the 158th, was interested in computers. So he brought him to the shop to give him an idea of what he could do in the Guard.

The younger Luby decided to join when he was a high school senior, he says, because the base had an opening in the career field he wanted to go in-multimedia-and because he would earn college money.

The younger Luby says his father never pushed the Guard on him but suggested it as an additional option to check out.

"He said, 'if you don't like it, no big deal. But they might have something in your career field.' It was a 'let's just see kind of deal,'" he says.

But the tradition wasn't lost on him.

Though his father took a break from military service while he was young, in middle and high school he watched his dad put the uniform on and start going to drills every month.

Nowadays, they attend most drills together and look forward to the stories they'll be able to tell their children and grandchildren about fighting in the war on terror together.

Retired Chief Venant Officer 2 John Listman, a historian and co-author of National Guard: An illustrated History of America's Citizen Soldiers, says that generations of a family in the Guard has always been a custom of the militia.

One reason, he says, was back in the 1920s and 1930s and earlier, fathers and sons and uncles and cousins all joined the same unit because in those days there was no public transit.

"If you wanted to be in the militia, you had to join the one in the community," he says. "It was possible, if you lived in a larger city, to catch a streetcar to a unit across town, but those who lived in rural, farm town communities might only have one unit in the whole county, if that."

It also gave the men in the community a chance to relax away from home, away from the farm and talk about the goings on in the rest of the county, state, world.

"For many years of the Guard's existence, it was a social organization as much as a military organization," Mr. Listman says. "That was part of its draw up until the 1930s."

Maj. Gen. William E. Ingram Jr., North Carolina adjutant general, shares a unique situation with his father, Maj. Gen. William E. Ingram.

General Ingram Jr.'s father was North Carolina's 34th adjutant general, and he is now the 39th. As far as he knows, there hasn't been any other father and son to both serve as adjutant general for the same state.

The elder General Ingram graduated from The Citadel in South Carolina in 1943 and immediately joined the Army. He served as an infantry commander in Europe during World War II.

When he returned home to Elizabeth City, N.C., in 1947, he received authorization from the adjutant general to start a unit there, General Ingram Jr. says.

"He put an advertisement in the newspaper and held the first muster and people showed up. Almost everyone was a World War Il veteran," he recalls. "It was almost like choosing people for a baseball team. They took the experience they'd gotten during the war to determine who got what positions."

His father moved up quickly through the ranks and commanded at every level before being appointed adjutant general in May 1977, and served until November 1983. He also served as NGAUS president from 1982 to 1984.

General Ingram Jr. was bom in 1948, just a year after his father started the unit. The Guard has always been a huge part of his life.

He recalls getting his quarter allowance every week by getting his Ether's boots polished and ready for Monday night drill. He even breathed the military during playtime.

"Some people would play cowboys and Indians. We'd always play Army," he says.

Service to the nation was certainly a femily tradition. He had an unde who served as a Naval aviator in World War II and a cousin who followed his father's footsteps by becoming a career Navy officer.

"Most of our family friends and many of the people I interacted with growing up were people that were in the National Guard," he adds. "So it was a natural thing for me to join."

General Ingram Jr. joined the Guard as an enlisted soldier in 1970 after he graduated from college. From there he went on to study at the state officer candidate school, where he received his commission in 1972. He served overseas in Bosnia in 1997, in Kosovo in 1999 and was appointed adjutant general in July 2001.

His father died in 1988, just a couple years after he was promoted to major.

General Ingram Jr. says he believes families serving in the Guard together makes for stronger, more cohesive units. The company he commanded had four combinations of fathers and sons, nephews and uncles and several brodiers, he says.

"It's hometown America, grassroots America," he says. "It's family tradition and yes, I think it makes [the National Guard] stronger. There're some bonds there."

National Guard Education Foundation Director Jason Hall says the reason so many generations of family members serve in the Guard lies in the Guard's history.

"In the Civil War and prior, the companies formed in each individual town and city," he says. ""&u were either related to a lot of them or you were friends with a lot of them."

Then and now, the armories Guard members train at with their units are in the communities they live in.

Some families serving in the past have met with tragedy, such as the five Sullivan brothers of Witerloo, Iowa, who during World Vfac II were all killed when a Japanese torpedo sunk their ship. But Mr. Hall says military families serving together are important.

"Brothers serving together keeps a sense of family in the Guard unit. Of course there's always the off chance that you might lose your brother or sister in a combat situation, but I think the benefits outweigh the negatives," he says.

One Guard family is tripling up on service in Iraq right now. Chris Cartwright, his older brother John Cartwright Jr., and their father John Cartwright, are serving in the Tennessee Army National Guard's 278th Regimental Combat Team and are deployed to Iraq in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom III.

The brothers don't worry about being in danger so much but their lamer is a litde worried about his boys.

"It's a lot harder on me, being a first sergeant and a father, than it is on them," John said. "I haven't run into it yet, but it could be hard sending my boys out on a dangerous mission."

Families serving together, especially in a stressful or terrifying situation, can provide soldiers with a sense of home away from home, which can make the situation less harrowing.

Spc. Brandon Mason, of the Kansas Army Guard's 1st Battalion, 108th Aviation, joined the Guard last October at age 19, after four years of JROTC in high school and is the fourth generation in his family to enter the military.

His grandfather, Chief Master Sgt. R. Kenneth Land, of the Kansas Air Guard's 190th Refueling Wing, retired from the Guard in 1985. Specialist Mason's uncle, Master Sgt. Richard Land and his cousin, Staff Sgt. Dustin Land, serve together in the 184th Air Refueling Wing. And his younger brother, Jarrod Mason, 15, is participating in Army ROTC at his high school.

"I guess it's kind of in my blood. There was a lot of pressure when I was younger from my family and I just felt like it was something I had to do," Specialist Mason says. "They never said why it was important. They just said, 'You got to at least think about it.'"

His desire to be a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter pilot was another influence, though.

"I went on a Black Hawk flight one time and that pretty much did it for me," he says. He hopes to go to officer training candidate school and flight school within the next few years.

Specialist Mason's grandfather joined the Arkansas National Guard in 1952 and then transferred to the Kansas National Guard.

Sergeant Land says he was the ranking non-commissioned officer in the nation when he retired. He had 18 years and 10 months as a chief master sergeant. In all, he served 33 years and six months.

When his grandson, Dustin, joined the Guard, they had a picture made of the three generations of Lands in the Air Guard, and he is quite honored by the tradition that started with himself.

"Well, imitation is a century's form of flattery I guess," he says. "I'm proud of every one of them, and they must think a little bit about me to follow in my footsteps."

Following footsteps is certainly the case for retired Col. Michael D. Kelley of the Massachusetts Army National Guard's 102nd Fighter Wing and his son, 2nd Lt. Michael C. Kelley, 32, who serves in the same unit as main operations flight commander.

Colonel Kelley joined the Guard in 1963 and served as an aircraft maintenance officer. His son joined in 1997 as an enlisted soldier and was shortly thereafter commissioned as an aircraft maintenance officer, just like his father.

Colonel Kelley's father served in the Pennsylvania Guard before and during World War I, and he had a cousin who served as a lieutenant in the Navy during World War II.

The colonel says he tried to get his son to sign up before he started college for the tuition benefits offered to new recruits in Massachusetts. But the younger Kelley had different plans.

"You know how kids are after high school they have dieir own minds," Colonel Kelley says. "He wanted to do his own thing as kids do. He was interested in architecture and decided that's the career he wanted. After he got engaged, he decided he needed a more stable lifestyle. That's when he said, 'Hey, the Guard is good.'"

Lieutenant Kelley says he doesn't remember his father specifically mentioning family tradition. But it still made a difference to him.

"I was always very proud of the feet that his father had served. My mother's father served in the active Army during World War II," he says. "So I had my own sense of pride about going in because my family had always served."

Pfc. Dan Balda contributed to this story.

Copyright National Guard Association of the United States Sep 2005
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