Class of: 1970
Brick: yes

I transferred to Stetson in 1967 because it had an ROTC program and I wanted a commission and career in the U.S. Army. My father and grandfather were career Army officers. I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the infantry in May 1970 and was deferred to attend the Cornell graduate school of business and public administration from which I graduated in 1972. In August 1972 I went on active duty and attended the infantry officers basic course at Fort Benning, Georgia. After airborne school, I was assigned in April 1973 to the 2d Battalion 2d Infantry at Fort Lewis, Washington. It is amazing how timing works. By January 1973, the infantry assignments guy told me they were only sending West Point lieutenants to Viet Nam so they could “get experience being shot at” and my class needed to go to Fort Lewis, Washington, in the beautiful Pacific Northwest to rebuild the 9th Infantry Division. So, I never went to or served in Viet Nam. I did get shot at six times while I was in the army-each time was in a training exercise and each time was an accident-and fortunately, each time it missed!

There followed a twenty-year career in the Army. After Fort Lewis, Washington, I was sent to Benning for the Infantry Officers Advanced Course, then to recruiting in Atlanta, then to the 1st Battalion 46th Infantry near Nurnberg, Germany. While at Benning, I met and married Deborah Padgett who has been my bride and buddy for 36 years. We have two sons, Jeff and Mike, two daughters in law, Jenn and Katie, and a new granddaughter Maya.

In 1983 we attended the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, followed by three more years there conducting war game simulations and how to fight studies. An assignment on the staff and faculty of the Armed Forces Staff College in Norfolk, Virginia in 1987, gave us a great opportunity to train some of our finest Army, Navy, Marine, and Air Force leaders and to develop a passion for sailing. Although I had avoided an assignment to Washington, DC, for almost 20 years, my number came up and we spent our final two years in the army at the Personnel Command until I retired from active duty in 1992 as a lieutenant colonel. It was a great experience-got to command a light infantry company, a mechanized infantry company, and a recruiting company-got to be the operations officer and executive officer of an infantry battalion-got to work on war games and studies that affected how we fought the Gulf wars—got to help train some of four stars serving today. Debbie and I spent the next twenty years until we retired in 2012 living and working in the northern Virginia area. I planned and conducted operational tests of computer information systems (personnel, transportation, training, and medical) for the army and the Department of Defense and retired as the chief of the Medical Information Technology Division of the Army Evaluation Center.

In my last job, we got to help design, develop, and deploy medical information systems that support the health care of over 9 million soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines-active, reserve, and retired-and their families. Debbie and I are retired and living near the beach in Melbourne, Florida. Jeff and Jenn live in Richmond, VA. Jeff is a patent examiner with the US Patent Office. Jenn designs jewelry and is our granddaughters Maya’s Mom. Mike and Katie live in Seattle where Mike is an analyst for T Mobile and Katie is a police officer in Bellevue. We were blessed…and probably very, very fortunate…that the US Army needed infantry lieutenants to rebuild the 9th Infantry Division at Fort Lewis in 1973 and not in Viet Nam when time came for orders. Or this story might have been terribly, terribly different…My salute and heartfelt thanks go out to all those who fought in Viet Nam.