On Veterans Day, this former Tri-City health care leader says Navy made his life better
USE.jpg "The U.S. Navy destroyer USS Ingraham (DD-694) following her delivery from the Federal Shipbuilding & Dry Dock Co., in New York Harbor on March 9, 1944.")
Each year through the media I attempt to celebrate Veteran’s Day. I send out a long-ago Great Lakes Naval Training Center boot camp photo of myself with a couple of boot camp buddies and include an image of the destroyer war ship I served on for three years in the late 1950s: the USS Ingraham DD 694.
In sending out my Navy article, I do so not because I felt it my duty to join up, but more so because at that time I had no other place to go.
After having completed high school in Colorado in 1956, I enrolled in a college but I quickly ran out of money. My options of supporting myself and for education and future opportunities quickly became bleak, so I joined my country’s service in a time of world peace.
But as my boot camp time went by, I quickly became proud of my service, and more importantly, proud of myself. The Navy trained me on how to work as a team with others and gave me many classroom courses.
Because I was good in high school algebra, I was selected for electronics technician training. With this training I later became the ship’s top technician in charge of keeping the radar and communications equipment in top operation, and on occasion, the sonar and the big-gun firing control systems.
My service training and team-working experience planted in me a direction in life at a time when I had no other opportunities: I graduated from an electrical engineering college, married and raised a family, and became a high school science teacher, and helped families obtain health care and housing services.
In my yearly sending out to the media my Navy peace- time service, I realize that my bravery was in no way called upon to be tested, and that in no way was my life ever in peril as it was for those veterans who were in combat. To them and to their families I have a great respect and who I think about often.
Since my discharge, I have encouraged those women and men who yearn to better themselves, but, who, like me, have no other place to go, to join a military service. Doing so will make you proud.