When Americans want something, they look to Congress. When uniformed officers want government to act, they, too, often look to the 535 elected lawmakers on Capitol Hill. It’s not a one-way street. Members of the Senate and House of Representatives know that current, former, and retired officers take citizenship seriously, stay informed, and vote. “I know the military community in my district is serious about its participation in the American system,” says Rep. Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.), a nonveteran who has a naval base in his district. “I value them and listen to their opinions.” * Yes, lawmakers care about military people. But how many on Capitol Hill can relate to members of the armed forces from personal experience? *  In the era of an all-volunteer force, when most Americans have never worn a military uniform, most senators and representatives haven’t either. Only about one in a hundred Americans currently serves in the active or reserve component forces, and the nation’s legislators might even have slightly less military experience than the American population at large. There are nine World War II veterans in Congress, five in the Senate, and four in the House of Representatives. Veterans of the Korean War could be the most underrepresented in Congress. * Many Americans are familiar with the record of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who resisted his captors as a POW in North Vietnam. But the public rarely hears much about those congressional representatives who have served. Here, MOAA takes a look at the personal experiences of some of those lawmakers who have worn the uniform of the U.S. armed forces. Almost any of the veteran legislators could relate to these words from Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.): “Everyone I’ve ever met who was drafted or chose to wear the uniform, almost to a person, got more out of it than they gave. It was the highlight of my life to represent my country as a military lawyer.”

Sen. Daniel K. Inouye (D-Hawaii)

Born Sept. 7, 1924
Combat: Served in the U.S. Army’s 442nd Regimental Combat Team from 1943 to 1947; awarded the Medal of Honor for heroic action
Congress: First elected to the Senate in 1962; now serving his eighth consecutive term

Inouye was among the Japanese-Americans who fought with the 442nd Regimental Combat Team in Europe. As a second lieutenant near San Terenzo, Italy, on April 21, 1945, Inouye led his platoon through automatic weapon and small-arms fire to capture an artillery post and crawled ahead up a treacherous slope to attack German machine-gun positions. Inouye continued to fight after being wounded, leading an attack that killed 25 enemy soldiers.

He vividly recollects his combat experiences. “I remember the first German I killed,” Inouye says, reliving a patrol in Italy. “I was a good shot. I went on patrol. I saw this German. I said, ‘He’s mine.’ I adjusted my sight and compensated for windage. It was one shot. That was it. I had just killed a human being, and all the fellows were saying, ‘That was terrific!’ I confess to being rather pleased but feel bad, now, that I was. That’s what happens when you go to war.”

Inouye trained in Mississippi, went overseas “as a buck sergeant,” he says, and received a direct commission on his 20th birthday, Sept. 7, 1944. Some of the Japanese-Americans with him had volunteered for the Army from behind the barbed wire of U.S. internment camps where they were held as enemy aliens. Inouye says the U.S. decision to intern Japanese-Americans, made by President Franklin D. Roosevelt just after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, is never far from his mind.

His sharpest memory, he says, is of the hunger that war can inflict. When his team landed in Naples, Italy, after sailing from the United States, Inouye met displaced Italians who were willing to work in exchange for being given the Americans’ garbage. “Once you’ve seen what war can do,” Inouye says, “you know that one of the best ways to prevent war is to be prepared for one.”

Sen. Daniel K. Akaka (D-Hawaii)

Born Sept. 11, 1924
Combat: Served in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, including service on Saipan and Tinian from 1943 to 1947
Congress: First elected to the House of Representatives in 1976; later appointed to the Senate, winning re-election

Most veterans value their military experience, of course, but many look back at memories that are, well, less than dramatic. For Capitol Hill lawmakers, as for most who served, military life was often dull, droll, and mundane. “I was drafted,” says Akaka.

Like many young Americans during World War II, Akaka was rushed into uniform. “In 1944 I was sent to the 13th Replacement Depot outside Schofield Barracks in Hawaii,” Akaka says. “The military on Oahu did not have sufficient facilities for the huge influx of draftees, so we lived in pup tents. For me as a young man it was a humbling experience, one that helped build my character: You get up very early in the morning and walk 25 miles. That sort of discipline prepared me for life.”

Akaka, an enlisted soldier in the Corps of Engineers, “boarded a troopship that would take us to Eniwetok atoll in the Pacific.” He says he lived in “rows of cots stacked six high” while the troopship zigzagged to evade Japanese submarines. Akaka didn’t know he was going to Eniwetok until he got there. Afterward, his engineer unit moved on to Guam and finally Saipan.

Saipan, a Mariana Islands base for the B-29 Superfortress bombers that raided Japan, was more comfortable for Akaka than Schofield. “We had tents but they were very comfortable ... six men to a tent.” Akaka says he heard talk “over the grapevine” that an atomic bomb would be used against Japan, “although we never knew when or where.” Other veterans say they did not know about the atomic bomb until after the first was dropped on Hiroshima Aug. 6, 1945.
 
Akaka returned to Hawaii in December 1945, “elated that the war was over.” He still has the letters his father and mother wrote to him, and he believes military experience was good for him. “Without question, being a young person, having that kind of discipline is good for you. As both a soldier and a senator, my hope always was to make things better.” Akaka adds, “I hope we can continue doing that.”

Rep. Ralph M. Hall (R-Texas)

Born May 3, 1923
Combat: Served in the U.S. Navy as a lieutenant aircraft carrier pilot from 1942 to 1945
Congress: First elected to the House of Representatives in 1980 and re-elected to each succeeding Congress

Hall joined the Navy in December 1942, earning his gold wings at Pensacola, Fla. Sent to Hawaii as a fighter pilot, he served in 1945 aboard escort carriers such as the USS Corregidor (CVE-58). He flew F-6F Hellcats and F-4U Corsairs on combat air patrol and escorted torpedo bombers on antisubmarine missions.

“I never saw a Japanese plane,” Hall says about his service. “They’d all been shot out of the sky by then.”

Even with no Zeros to worry about, Hall says, carrier operations were dangerous. After his last night landing at sea, the deck was yawing and pitching so much that climbing from the cockpit he could see straight over the side of the darkened ship to the abyss below.

Hall says he lost good friends in training and shipboard accidents. One of his best friends, Harvey Dallas Peterson, was killed in a formation flying accident over Pensacola. “Those guys were like brothers to me,” Hall says. He says his closeness with comrades of 60 years ago still makes him emotional today.

Hall points out that before long, veterans of America’s current operations in Iraq and Afghanistan will join those few World War II veterans left in Congress. He says the military still teaches teamwork, loyalty, and integrity, just as it did so well during his Navy days. “The best lesson was the value of self-discipline,” Hall says. “The Navy raised my sights from working as a laborer to a career as a professional officer.”

Rep. Sam Johnson (R-Texas)

Born Oct. 11, 1930
Combat: Served in the U.S. Air Force for 29 years, flying combat missions in both the Korean and Vietnam wars.
Congress: First elected to the House of Representatives in 1991

Johnson piloted F-86 Sabres in Korea, flew with the Thunderbirds flight demonstration team, and was shot down over North Vietnam April 16, 1966. Johnson was a POW for six years and 10 months (2,515 days). “There were times when we didn’t think we would get out of there,” he says. After coming home from that war, Johnson says, “We all decided that we ought to quit griping about government and get involved in it.”

To Johnson, Korea offered the chance to fly what he considered the most beautiful of airplanes, the F-86 Sabre. “Every young man wanted to pilot the F-86,” Johnson says. He flew 62 combat missions in the F-86, shot down one enemy MiG-15 fighter, and was credited with one probable kill and one damaged.

In the Vietnam War, Johnson flew F-4s. While flying his 25th combat mission in 1966, he was shot down over North Vietnam. Half of his nearly seven years as a POW was spent in solitary confinement. Fellow POW Capt. James Mulligan, USN-Ret., recalled the day Johnson was allowed to return to a joint cell. He walked into the room with the two other detained American officers, “stood at attention with tears in his eyes, and said simply, ‘Lieutenant Colonel Sam Johnson reporting for duty, sir’ ... after he had not talked to or directly been with an American for three full years.” Johnson recounts the details of his POW experience in his autobiography, Captive Warriors (Texas A&M University Press, 1992).

To Johnson, military service was “an important part” of everything that makes him a congressman today.

Rep. Wayne Gilchrest (R-Md.)

Born April 15, 1946
Combat: Served in the U.S. Marine Corps; joined in 1964 and saw action in Vietnam.
Congress: First elected to the House in 1991

Gilchrest knows both the pride of service and the pain of actual combat. Gilchrest was a Marine rifleman in South Vietnam, and in a May 1967 offensive called Union, he found himself crawling through the jungle blackness at 3 a.m. Gilchrest and two buddies were tracking down enemy snipers preventing his unit from evacuating Marine wounded when they came across a squad of North Vietnamese soldiers crouched in a depression.

Gilchrest threw a grenade — his last one — then stayed behind to cover the escape of his fellow Marines. “I should have taken off when my buddies did,” he says. He went down hard, an AK-47 round through his chest. He lay wounded, alone in the darkness, until the Marines counterattacked and drove off the enemy. The whole fight lasted less than 10 minutes.

Gilchrest remembers: “Combat was heart-wrenching. We were all young guys; it was terrible to see your friends die in your arms.” What might have been a brutalizing experience for his comrades was tempered by the example of his company commander, a Captain Pratt. Gilchrest credits his CO with reminding the Marines why they were in Vietnam. “He made us understand that you can’t win a war by mistreating the populace,” says Gilchrest. Although combat frequently immersed the men in chaos and butchery, Pratt told them to “never mistreat anyone. His leadership infused the whole unit, from lieutenants to NCOs down to the privates.” The men came out of the experience with their dignity and self-respect intact.

Gilchrest says that soldier’s perspective of 40 years ago, augmented by logic and good sense, is what serves him well in Congress. “Service experience becomes part of your being. It’s an invisible part of you, but it’s the frame of reference for all that comes after. I can’t imagine myself without that experience ... it wouldn’t be me.” What he learned from Pratt and his fellow Marines sticks with him: “If your actions in the service were professional, if you exercised good leadership yourself, then all you do from that point on is done the same way.”

Rep. G.K. Butterfield (D-N.C.)

Born April 27, 1947
Combat: Served in the U.S. Army from 1968 to 1970
Congress: First elected to the House in 2004

Though Gilchrest’s experience during the Vietnam era is dramatic, Butterfield’s might be more typical of military life for many Americans in uniform. “I didn’t do much,” says Butterfield. “My service is hardly worth commenting on.”

Drafted in June 1968 “just days after Bobby Kennedy was killed,” Butterfield left a small, rural black community to enter “a world of pluralism,” he says, but he went no farther than Fort Bragg, N.C. “They found out I could type,” says Butterfield. “The colonel needed a company clerk real bad.” After a year of typing and filing, Butterfield was transferred to Fort Bragg’s 12th Support Brigade to be a fireman — “but not the kind you think.”

“It wasn’t about putting out fires,” says the congressman. “It meant keeping the building warm, working with coal heating. I had four barracks that I had to keep warm. I would shovel the coal in, and I would go to sleep. I would wake up later and dispose of the ashes. I did stints like this for 24 hours and then was off for 48 hours.” It was the best job he ever had, says Butterfield, who was discharged as a specialist 4 in 1970.

And is it relevant today? “Military experience is a tremendous asset in life,” says Butterfield. “I did not appreciate it at the time. I was upset that I had been drafted while in college. Being in the Army taught me the importance of defending the country and showed me that we have many dedicated officers and noncommissioned officers. It showed me different kinds of Americans that I hadn’t seen before.”

Rep. Heather Wilson (R-N.M.)

Born Dec. 30, 1960
Combat: Served in the U.S. Air Force from 1978 to 1989
Congress: First elected to the House in 1998

No one in Congress exemplifies the manifold changes experienced by the military in the last half-century better than Wilson. The 1982 Air Force Academy distinguished graduate (in only the third class that included female cadets) served seven years on active duty, starting with graduate study at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. Her duty assignments included four years in intelligence and arms negotiations staff positions with the Third Air Force and the U.S. mission to NATO in Brussels, Belgium. While stationed in England, Wilson worked on everything from importing chickens for Air Force dining halls to the deployment of nuclear-tipped cruise missiles to the continent. One of her most vivid memories at Third Air Force was supporting in 1986 the U.S. strike against Mu’ammar Gadhafi’s Libyan regime, in retaliation for bombing attacks on American personnel in Europe. “I remember watching the tankers recover at Mildenhall and hoping all the crews had made it back,” Wilson says.

Wilson completed her service as a captain after work on the “Conventional Armed Forces in Europe” treaty negotiations between NATO and the Soviets. She was proud to have followed her grandfather and father — both fliers — into the Air Force. “The family attitude they embodied was that everyone has to pitch in; when it’s time, you do your duty,” she says.
 
Wilson today is the highly regarded chairman of the House Technical and Tactical Intelligence Subcommittee, but when asked, she is quick to cite one of her most rewarding congressional duties. “I have the honor now of nominating future cadets to the service academies,” she says.
 

Robert F. Dorr is the author of Chopper: A History of American Military Helicopter Operations from WWII to the War on Terror (Berkley Publishing Group, 2005). Thomas D. Jones is the author of Sky Walking: An Astronaut’s Memoir (Collins, 2006).