Veterans Day.

For some it is a day of pride. It is a day to keep in mind those we have lost and those who came home after serving in war.

Veterans Day is a day to give thanks to military personnel from generations past, present and future. Veterans Day is today, Nov. 11.

Already this week, Whidbey Island has been busy with various veterans observances at churches, schools and offices which continue today.

In recognition of the Veterans Day holiday, the Whidbey News-Times searched out the service stories of some of our veterans. They are but a glimpse of the lives of the men and women who serve our Armed Forces.

Today, if not everyday, be sure to give them and the others who fill their ranks the thanks they deserve. Today is their day — Happy Veterans Day.

NAVY: BETTY

& GLENN TEWS

Enlisting in the Navy in 1950 was Betty Tews’ way of guaranteeing her future and an education.

Tews grew up in Norfolk, Va. Her father was Navy and had 16 years of service by the time he died as a 45-year-old warrant officer.

“My grandparents raised me so they couldn’t afford to send me to college, but I knew I could get my way paid with the GI Bill,” Tews said.

She went to work as a waitress shortly after graduating high school in 1947, but she soon realized the jobs she could get wouldn’t pay.

“I went to work for an optometrist who was willing to pay me $2 an hour,” she said. “That was really good pay for then.”

Tews enlisted in the Navy in November of 1950. She remembers the two months spent at boot camp in Chicago as some of the coldest she’s lived through.

“It was unbelievably cold,” she said.

As a woman recruit, she became a member of the Navy WAVES, which stands for Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service. The program was created in 1942 and saw a huge boost during World War II and the Korean War.

Tews underwent teleman training which made her skilled in teletype, repairing teletype, sending messages and decoding messages from all around the world.

She was sent to A School and given top secret clearance — its privileges are something she keeps hush-hush to this day.

“I can’t tell you about a lot of what I was doing,” she said.

Following training she was sent to Corpus Christi Naval Air Station in Texas where she worked in the communications room.

Tews knew the duty she and her fellow female recruits of the time had: fill jobs that freed men to head out into the field. WAVES typically performed clerical work such as storekeeping and stenography, but they also became air traffic controllers, mechanics, and truck drivers, and performed many other jobs.

Despite being proud of her service, Tews is often reluctant to let people know she is a veteran. She can still remember the mixed welcome she received each time she returned home in uniform.

“Years ago, women saw other women in service and had terrible names for us,” Tews said. “They said we were there for only one reason and that was to satisfy the men.”

It was in Texas that Betty met her first husband, Marvin Willey, a Navy aircraft mechanic fresh from training.

The newlyweds transferred to Barber’s Point, Hawaii, where Betty became pregnant with her first child, a son named Lindsey.

Tews served a little over two years as a teleman, working her way up to a third class, before leaving the military.

“I had to, they wouldn’t let pregnant women stay in in those days,” she said.

Tews focused on family for a while after leaving the service, but she and Willey parted ways.

Betty met her current husband, Glenn Tews, in 1974 while both were working civil service jobs at Naval Station San Diego.

Glenn Tews is also a veteran with a five-and-a-half year Navy career, retiring as a petty officer third class. He was a photographer during the Korean War. His job was to take pictures that would help the ships calibrate their radar sightings for the guns.

When they met, Betty was the cost clerk and he a line supervisor in a machine shop on base.

As she had intended, Betty used her GI Bill earnings to attend college. She graduated from National University San Diego in 1977 with a degree in business administration, in which she also holds a master’s.

Because of her aptitude for business management, Tews continued to be selected for advanced training throughout her 28-year civil service career that saw her with jobs such as budget analyst, computer analyst and management analyst. She even designed the financial program that is the base for the one the military continues to use today.

“I think I did a lot of good,” she said.

The Tews have lived on Whidbey since 1989.

ARMY: Troy Hodges

As he stands behind the bar at the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Oak Harbor, most people coming through wouldn’t guess that 22-year-old Troy Hodges has a common past with his customers. Unless they asked, they might not think that this slender man who wears his hair in a pony tail and often has a good amount of facial scruff is a former military man.

“They give me crap but then as soon as I pull out my dog tags they quiet down,” he said. “Vets always give respect for another vet.”

Hodges is a part of a booming generation of veterans.

“Because of Iraq you can’t walk around without meeting a vet,” he said. “Everyone is wearing a combat service badge these days.”

Hodges is still debating with how much pride he should have in wearing that badge, but knows that his and others’ service is a necessity.

“It has to be done,” he said. “And we all have our different stories because no two wars can ever be compared.”

Hodges grew up at various Navy bases around the country. His mother, Marie Troha, has close to 18 years in the Navy and is currently a corpsman at the Oak Harbor Naval Hospital. His grandfather was Army, sister is Air Force and step-dad is Navy.

Hodges attended Oak Harbor Schools and admits school was never his thing.

“My sister was good at it, not me,” he said.

He was a kid with eclectic tastes, kept to himself, preferred music and drama, and was a fan of Dungeons and Dragons. But when he chose the military to follow family members’ footsteps, it gave him a path he didn’t otherwise see.

“The Army was the best way to go, it gave me direction,” Hodges said. “I found something I was good at.”

He earned his GED after enlisting in the Army in 2003. Four friends from Oak Harbor enlisted along with him. At boot camp at Fort Sill, Okla., Hodges entered field artillery.

He knew going in he was destined to go to Iraq and be thrown into war. He was deployed to Iraq on Feb. 11 — his birthday.

“That was the worst birthday ever,” he said.

Daily duties in Iraq for Hodges and the other members of his unit were conducting traffic control points, raids, civil affairs and other combat related missions. The group alternated duties: cold platoon ran grunt infantry and hot platoon was in charge of the artillery. At times Hodges was assigned to escort his commanding officers, tagging along to perform tasks they requested.

There isn’t a day that is not still vivid in his mind. Some stand out more than others. April 29, 2004 is one of them. That day a car bomb killed eight members of his unit, two of which were with him at basic.

“I remember seeing a flash, hearing a boom and then seeing a big red cloud where they were,” he said. “One of them was a medic, a big guy but a gentle giant. He was a great guy.”

The day he left Iraq and touched down in Germany came with a welcome sight.

“We hadn’t seen rain in eight months, but that day it poured,” he said. “A friend of mine and I sat out there for what must have been three hours.”

A realization occurred.

“I felt guilty because I had come home and I knew people who were never coming home,” he said.

Hodges arrived on American soil June 5, 2005. Hodges met his wife, Sable, shortly after he returned from Iraq in June of 2005. They were married July 5, 2006, and have a five-month-old son named Xander.

Hodges knows his time in Iraq changed him, but is still figuring out how.

“I don’t know if it humbled me,” he said. “I’m still angry and upset because I lost a lot of friends and remember a lot of things I don’t want to.”

He found out a friend from basic in his first rotation in Iraq was killed two months ago. He still relives his days of war.

“I wake up thinking about things,” he said.

Hodges doesn’t like to share his experiences, but understands it is necessary.

“When you don’t talk it ends up eating you up,” he said.

Despite everything, he’d likely do it again.

“I miss it in a way, because at least there was always a task to do,” he said. “War is an unpleasant necessity but I’m not going to let it eat me up.”

This week, Hodges visited the Seventh Day Adventist church to share with others what it means to him to be a veteran

“Before I enlisted Veterans Day was just another day off, I didn’t care about it much or take into consideration what it meant,” he said. “This year is different.”

MARINE CORPS:

DENNIS SCHREINER

Don’t let patriotism be a flash in the pan.

That’s the hope of Oak Harbor resident Dennis Schreiner.

“After 9/11 and the war started everyone was flying flags all over, but where’d all that go now?” he asked.

The Veterans Day holiday brings back a lot of memories for Schreiner. It opens up a whole line of conversation with him and other veterans.

Sit down with Denny Schreiner and, if you’re lucky, you’ll get an earful about his career in the military. But catch him most days and he’s too humble to tell.

Schreiner grew up in western Nebraska. After graduating high school in 1954 he worked the oil fields for a few years before deciding being a Marine was the life for him.

He enlisted in 1956 and went to Marine Corps Recruit Depot San Diego for training. He admits boot camp wasn’t easy, but he knew one day it’d be over.

He studied anti-aircraft artillery in boot camp, after which he was shipped off to the Marine base at 29 Palms, Calif., where he served with a gun battalion for two years with special duty overseas.

As a sergeant he was sent to be a security guard at the U.S. Embassy in Crete for almost three years.

After stints back at 29 Palms and schooling in Memphis he was sent to Santa Ana, Calif., as a helicopter mechanic. It was just the beginning of a lengthy career with Marine helicopters that had him working with multiple generations of craft.

Schreiner became a crew chief, overseeing a whole squadron of helicopters.

In 1966 he received orders for Vietnam.

“We knew it was going to happen and had been gearing up for it for a while,” Schriener said. “They’d had Marine helicopters in Vietnam since 1961.”

He was 30 years old when he arrived in Vietnam for his first tour of 13 months.

Every day meant overseeing the maintenance of his squadron’s helicopters and flying missions to support ground troops inside the I-Corps, the gunfire heavy sector of the country.

“Everyone was getting shot at,” he recalled. “There wasn’t a day when there wasn’t close calls. But the good days were when they brought someone back after a crash.”

Shreiner returned to the U.S. in 1967 to serve as an instructor at Santa Ana. In 1971 he returned overseas, but this time he flew missions from a ship just off Okinawa.

“It wasn’t like the first time when we had missions going all day, every day,” he said.

It’s probably for the best. His second tour saw him leaving a wife, Dorothy, back on the home front. The couple also had two daughters.

“She was a great woman, a great Marine wife,” Schreiner said of the love of his life, his wife for 44 years who died last year.

Schreiner said his unit lost surprisingly few people during that first tour of duty. But they aren’t few enough when remembering his days in Vietnam. Schreiner is a tall, strong man. He wears his Marine pride on his sleeve, right next to his heavy heart.

“You learn a lot and get a different outlook after you’ve been to war,” he said.

In 1972 the Marine received orders for Whidbey where he joined the Marine training detachment. He retired in 1978 as a master sergeant.

Schreiner is a member of the Vietnam Helicopter Association, a group for gunners and crew from the first widely-televised war. He remains active with the group that claims 5,000 members and holds reunions every two years. It is his link to friends, both past and present.

“The first time I went I hadn’t seen any of those guys for 30 years and they were only 18 or 19 at the time,” he said. “It was pretty emotional I tell you.”

Schreiner has been a resident of Oak Harbor for 35 years. He is the president of the Fleet Reserve Association of which he’s been a member for 25 years.

“Like others I have a sense of pride in having served my country,” he said. “It’s something I’d do again if asked.”