When people ask me, "Why did you join the Army?" I find that the only response is, "Please pull up a chair, this is going to take a while."  Because there is no short answer for joining the military.  Every person has their own reasons.  For many, including myself, 9/11 was a big factor.  Others see it as a way to advance themselves, give themselves discipline, or gain financial stability.  As for me, it was a combination of all of those things.  But for the true reason that I joined the Army, I would ask you to direct that question not to me, but to my great-great-great-great Grandfather, Joseph Bratten.  It was he who shouldered a musket during the American Revolution to protect and defend the land that the family had only been in a hundred years or so.  I know little about him, save that he was a farmer.  But I would have loved to ask him what it was that made him decide to join with the seemingly-crazy rebels and risk the life that he had made for his family.

     Similarly, I would have asked his grandson why he marched off to war in 1812, in defense of a fledgling nation trying to find its feet.  The country was deeply divided over that conflict with Britain, with some in New England discussing secession.  The Constitution was not yet fifteen years old and already the country was rent by deep divisions.  When the British burnt Washington DC, many thought that the new experiment in democracy was over.  Yet through the perseverance of American Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines, the British were held at bay long enough for war weariness to take hold at home in England.  Through determination, the United States had held on against the nation which had just defeated Napoleon.

     Successive generations of Brattens would fight for their local militias in the Indian wars of the 1800s.  One marched off to Mexico in the 1840s, to seek glory against Santa Anna.  By the 1860s, my family was deeply settled in Ohio.  And it was with the volunteer regiments of Ohio that many of them fought and bled during the Civil War.  My great-great grandfather John Calvin Bratten enlisted in the 60th Ohio Volunteer Infantry Regiment and was captured at Harper's Ferry in 1862, the regiment having volunteered to defend the town.  Being an honorable man, he honored the conditions of his parole and did not take up arms against the Confederacy.  However, when he arrived home in Ohio, he used the skills that the Army had given him to train local defense forces.  He would later join the 11th Cavalry and campaign out West in the Indian Wars.

     Whenever the nation called, my family answered.  My great uncle was wounded in the arm in WWI, while taking aim at a German soldier.  They fired at the same time.  My great uncle came away with a wound but killed the German.  "I killed a mother's son," he later said.  His own son would die on Okinawa in WWII.  My grandfather, a doctor, was in his forties by the time the US entered WWII.  At that age, he was required to go for the draft.  Yet he went anyway, serving in North Africa and Italy.  His sons, my father and my uncle, also entered into the family tradition of wearing the uniform: my uncle, in the Army, in Korea, and my father in the Coast Guard.  My other grandfather, a more recent immigrant to this country, also enlisted in WWII, serving as an MP in Paris.  And then came me.  When I think about the long line of these self-sacrificial men, who gave up the comforts and delights of home and family so that I could live the life they enjoyed, I am humbled.  And it is one of the reasons for my own enlistment, to pay back to my family in some small way all that they did for me.  

     Looking back on my family history, I see the shared legacy of thousands and thousands of families whose lineages are entwined with that of the US military.  Families of unassuming, hard-working people, who quietly built this country from the very beginning, ignoring the nay-sayers who prophesied that the great experiment of democracy would fail.  At every obstacle and hardship they shouldered the responsibility and overcame it.  It is these same families that still provide the bedrock for the defense of America.  There are many soldiers who can, as I just have, trace their family history through the major wars of this country.  The legacy of family service is powerful in the Army, and is one of its greatest strengths.