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Danny Carnley grew up with military around him. His biological father, Melvin Carnley, served in the U.S. Army and Marine reserves, stationed in Germany and Korea, while his stepdad served during World War II as a third class petty officer.

“When I was 6 or 7, my uncle went into the Navy and I fell in love with their uniforms,” Carnley said.

With the draft looming, he enlisted in the Navy in 1967, at the age of 17. A year later, Carnley’s parents got his draft notice while he was in basic training.

“I went to school in Weatherford, and transferred to Peaster in the ninth grade, but I never really liked school anyway,” he said.

Carnley served on three ships — USS California, USS Shasta and USS Enterprise, from 1967 to 1977, and spent the next 14 years in the Army National Guard.

During his years with the Navy, Carnley also served in the Vietnam War, a memory he considers to be proud and painful.

“I’m a Vietnam vet and I’m proud of it, but the thing about Vietnam was that people from our own country didn’t respect us and it was a sad thing for military people,” he said. “If you didn’t have any family when you got back, then the heck with you. Because no one else was going to give you any support.”

His time in the Navy helped launch the military careers for his two own sons, Les and Royce.

“To hear my dad talking about the USS Enterprise... Star Trek was a very popular show when we were growing up, and I used to imagine that my dad was on that spaceship. It was the coolest thing in the world,” Les Carnley said. “I got my first real first-hand experience one weekend when I got to go and ride on the tanks and hang out with some of the guys. I was 15 or 16 at the time, and I was bought — hook, line and sinker.”

On Jan. 11, 1991, Les Carnley was dropped off at Army basic training by his father.

“I was very proud at that moment, but I was a little sad because I had been down that road,” Danny Carnley said.The exchange also signified a changing of the guard, as Les Carnley enlisted a few months before his dad put in his retirement papers.

Les Carnley put 15 years in, with stints in the Charlie Company as an M1 armor crewman. He also spent one year in Iraq, and the majority of his career time in the reserves.

“The cool thing about my dad and I’s relationship is that he understands his era and I understand mine, and it helps us meet in the middle about some stuff,” he said. “We’re able to share some stories, but we also get to learn from each other.”

Royce Carnley joined the U.S. Army at the age of 18, influenced by his father and other family members and friends.

“It just felt right and needed to happen,” he said.

Danny Carnley’s youngest son, Royce, is currently serving in Afghanistan with the U.S. Army.

“It’s no different than it was with Les,” Carnley said of his second son’s deployment. “I love them both, but I want him to come home.”

Both sons have children of their own, and Les Carnley addressed the possibility of continuing the Carnley military era.

“If this is something my kids decide to do, I’m going to tell them to do something that will give you an education on the outside,” he said. “I’ll always be proud to be in the Army.”

Danny Carnley said family, especially his children, were behind the decision of his military retirement.

“My daughter Marsy was born and that was the main reason I got out of the Navy,” he said. “I decided at that point that I wanted to be a father more than I wanted to stay in the Navy and it was one of the best choices I’ve ever made.”

Family in theMidst of Military

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Jean Conner Buford is somewhat of a pioneer when it comes to women serving in the military.Growing up in the small town of Haskell, near Abilene, it was just her and her sister, and a lack of male siblings prompted her to join the military.

“I didn’t have any brothers so I figured it was up to me to enlist,” she said.At the time, women had to be 21 to enlist without consent from a parent or guardian.Not yet of age when the United States joined World War II, Buford enrolled at Texas Tech. Upon graduation in 1944, at the age of 21, she joined the Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Services).Buford attended boot camp in the Bronx at Hunter College.Following that, she attended mail clerk school, making the move to Manhattan.“I worked at a fleet post office in the Victory-mail section,” she said.At a friend’s suggestion, Buford transferred to New Orleans, where she and her friend were seperated.“I was sent to the Armed Guard Naval

Repair base, where they had a post office as big as one in a small town,” she said. “All together, I was [in the service] for about 19 months.”During her time there, Buford also participated in the Singing Platoon, a group of women entertainers.“Everywhere we marched, we sang,” she said. “I was a singer all of my life until my son died.”Through her travels, she has several fond memories, including visits to Madison Square Garden in New York City and Canal Street in New Orleans.“My daddy was a World War I veteran,” Buford said. “Mine was quite the experience, and I’m glad that I did it.”Buford’s husband Forest Bradley Buford, who likewise grew up in Haskell, was also a military veteran.He served in the U.S. Army Air Corps 8th Air Force 306th Bomb Group during WWII and was discharged in 1946.“We had known each other since we were in the fifth grade,” she said. “I liked him all right, but at that time, you didn’t have enough money to go steady and date.“We had our simple fun.”

When Jean Buford went off to Lubbock for college, Brad went to San Antonio. The couple wouldn’t see each other for another seven years.“When we got back, he asked me on a date,” she said. “It took me three years to catch him and I finally convinced him to go to college.”Brad Buford attended Texas A&M and acquired an engineering degree. During his career, he was instrumental in engineering streets, pools and other facilities for Horseshoe Bend.He died in 2008 due to health problems. The couple had been married for 40 years.After being a stay-at-home mom, Jean Buford put her elementary education degree to work, filling in as a subsitute music teacher on occassion and working at the Weatherford Public Library.These days, she stays busy with First Baptist Church and members of the community.“I visit three rest homes every Monday, I sing at the Senior Center and I make calls to people that are house-bound every Wednesday,” she said.

A Pioneer of Women in the Military

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Judge Curtis JenkinsCounty Court at Law 2

After graduating from The University ofTexas School of Law in 1994, Judge Jenkins

started his career as a prosecutor in theParker County Attorney’s Offi ce, trying

cases in the historic courthouse,where he now presides over County Court

at Law No. 2

Thank you for serving

our country and protecting

our freedom!Pd. Pol. Ad by Judge Curtis Jenkins Campaign.

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Weatherford’s Joyce Jackson calls her time in the Navy one of her greatest blessings.Though she enlisted a little later than some, at the age of 41, it didn’t diminish her experience.“I still laugh when I think about how it all came about,” Jackson said of her initial interest in joining.Jackson was working at Northeast National Bank in North Richland Hills. Her son, in the Army, was stationed in Alaska, while her oldest daughter worked in Colorado and her younger daughter was a senior in high school.After a particularly stressful day at work in March of 1980, Jackson had had enough.“I threw some papers on my desk and jokingly said, ‘I’m going to run away and join the Army. It has to be more fun than this,’” she said.To her surprise, Jackson’s co-worker told her about a friend who had joined the Navy

and loved it.During a break at work, Jackson called the friend, who informed her about the Advanced Pay Grade system, which accepts older people based on their civilian occupations.“I had always wanted to fly, so I first called the Air Force but they didn’t have the same program and I was considered too old to fly,” Jackson said. “I called a Navy recruiter and he agreed to send me some information.”Jackson went home to talk to her husband and son, who was a little surprised when Jackson asked him about joining the Navy.“He said ‘I don’t care if that’s what you want to do,” she said. “Of course, he immediately began calling me ‘Squid.’”One month before her 42nd birthday and the cut-off age to join the armed forces, Jackson went to Grand Prairie to take the enlistment exam. With no opening in the banking-related field, Jackson spoke with a Reserve Intelligence Program officer after finding out she had scored high enough to be involved in Intelligence.Jackson’s first training was a two-week stint at APG school at NAS Dallas. It took her three years of training before she qualified as an intelligence specialist.“Joining the military is like learning a different language,” she said. “I often felt as if there was a tape running in my head, always a little behind in conversation because I had to think through what the acronyms meant.”During Jackson’s second year in the Navy, she was sent to training in San Diego, Calif., as an enlisted intelligence assistant, where she saw her first ship.“I had grown up in Oklahoma, about as far away from an ocean and ships as you can get,” she said. “The EIA course was one of the hardest I ever took.”In 1985, Jackson embarked on her first voyage out of the country, getting two

weeks of duty in Munich, Germany.“I know it must be true that God watches over fools and children, because he certainly watched over me,” she said. “It was quite an adventure, but I loved every minute of it and managed to go back to Germany three more times during my Navy career.”That career also took her to Korea twice.During the Desert Shield/Desert Storm operation, Jackson’s unit was activated, and she spent close to eight months on active duty in Hawaii.Being a little older than some of her fellow Navy people, Jackson said it was a challenge rooming with teenagers.“My service pales in comparison to other veterans, but living in a barracks with about 350 teenagers was not easy for an older person,” she said. “The teenagers played their boom boxes so loud it would nearly bounce you out of bed.”At one point, Jackson received a “care package” from her husband containing soothing Hawaiian music on tape.“I set the tape player at the head of my bed and played those tapes to drown out the other noise and lull me to sleep. To this day, I still get sleepy when I hear Hawaiian music.”

Because of her age, Jackson had several memorable experiences while serving in the Navy, including being recognized as the oldest sailor at the Fleet Intelligence Center in Hawaii, where she had the opportunity to cut the Navy’s birthday cake along with the center’s youngest sailor.Jackson made Chief in 1991, the oldest sailor every initiated into the rank of Chief at the Naval Air Station in Key West, Fla.In 1995, she was chosen as a member of the Tactical Analysis Team for Barbados. Shortly after that, a family issue would bring Jackson back home.“I spent five months active duty in Key West and five months in Barbados before learning that my husband was facing bypass surgery, so I requested a release from active duty and came back to Fort Worth in April of 1996,” she said.Jackson spent her last two years in the Navy attached to the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington, D.C.“On one two-week training course there, we toured every intelligence office in the area, and it was wonderful,” she said.Jackson would go on to apply for, and receive reserve transition benefits, retiring after 18 years of service.

Launching a Naval Career at theAge of 41

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Chuck Katlic is known all over Parker County for his contributions to the community, but most notably, for his service as a military veteran.

Now, almost 70 years later, Katlic recalls his time during the Battle of the Bulge, which took place from 1944 to 1945 and saw 19,000 American soldiers killed and more than 47,000 wounded, with 23,000 either captured or missing.

Below is Katlic’s hand-written memories of the time he describes as

violent and cold.

It all began at 0500 hours. I recalled being on watch 68 years ago, Dec. 16, 1944, in the Ardennes, one of 70,000 men in four and a half divisions, covering a 70-mile front. I looked out across the Siegfried line from my log fortified, snow-covered foxhole. The quiet was shattered by German artillery and mortars, as the enemy opened up on the 99th Division.

The Battle of the Bulge had begun.The weather was cloudy and cold and artillery landed in our area all day and night. Company F was awake and on the alert when it started, but thank God we have covered our foxholes with logs.

I believed that the logs were the only thing that saved me and my buddies from being ripped to shreds by shrapnel and wood shards from trees blasted to smithereens. Some men who were caught out of their foxholes were wounded or killed.

Artillery continued to hit our positions on Dec. 17 as German and American planes went at one another overhead. Eventually the German artillery ceased. The 2nd Battalion was surrounded by Germans and separated from their regiment. We received orders to withdraw and we did, leaving a covering force to an assembly point near Hunmgen, Belgium. No artillery fell Dec. 18 and the evidence of the past two days’ barrage was concealed under a blanket of new snow. The temperature dropped to near 5 degrees and circumstances grew dire as we were low on ammo and food. The Germans were closing in for the kill. We moved along a draw but the mortar rounds started landing in the draw so the company moved into the woods where we were temporarily held up for a few hours. The company was given orders to fix bayonets. Company F and the rest of the battalion moved toward Merrigan. At about 1500 hours, a German burp gun

opened up on our column and pinned us down. Heavy weapons were called for.

The Americans attacked in German positions and met stiff resistance. Our company commander was given command of the battalion. Lt. Goodner led the battalion through the draw to the town of Elsenborn, believed to be an Allied control. But the battalion fell under intense artillery and small arms fire. We were wet and cold and hungry and the 2nd Battalion was given up as lost in action.

Rumors of the battalion’s demise are premature. We reached the outskirts of Elsenborn and the men of Company F slept in a barn until about 1000 hours. Hot chow was served around noon; hot pancakes and syrup — a feast. It was our first hot meal in days.

The company moved to Elsenborn Ridge to take the high ground. We dug foxholes and set our defenses. Our meals would be cold C rations until our kitchen was set up in Elsenborn. We improved our positions and sent out patrols. On Christmas Day, we were served a cold turkey dinner.

We stayed there for awhile and I celebrated my 21st birthday Jan. 8, 1945 in a foxhole on the Elsenborn Ridge.

It was the coldest day of my life. The 99th Division held the northern shoulder, preventing the Germans from expanding the bulge. We spent the month of January defending the north shoulder and despite many attempts, the Germans could not break through and eventually withdrew to a defensive position.

Wet, cold weather met us as we climbed from our foxholes at 1 a.m. Jan. 31, 1945, to answer the long-awaited call to attack. Our company left the area at 0300 hours and started moving toward our objective. Snow was waist deep and rain had made a slushy surface on top

of that, delaying our departure. By 0600 hours, we had advanced only about 700 yards.

No enemy resistance was initially met. The Company F commander led the way and with covering fire from light machine guns and 60 mm mortars, we moved forward into enemy installations. We were moving due north through the enemy’s outpost when light resistance met us. Swinging the company due east, we drove the Germans from our objective and into the dense woods. That’s where we were held up by intense automatic and sniper fire, which inflicted heavy casualties on our infantry and medics. The company was pinned down in four feet of snow for the remainder of the night.

Artillery was called in to eliminate the enemy fire and shells landed within 50 yards of our position. We spent a miserable night laying in the snow, wet, cold, hungry, sleepy and tired. Eight of our men were killed and many who were wounded did not make it through the night. Myself and my brothers in arms regrouped and advanced back to the lines where we had been Dec. 16.

The next day, we began to push the Germans back to the Rhine River and into Germany. It was the end of the Battle of the Bulge. In those six weeks, Americans suffered 90,000 casualties, including 19,000 killed in action. It was the largest land battle ever fought by the U.S. Army.

Chuck Katlic passed away this summer at the age of 91. He will be greatly missed by many.

Veteran Recalls Battle

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Larry Rhoads had his military path already marked as a teenager.

In 1964 at the age of 17, Rhoads, who had moved to Parker County in the second grade, persuaded his parents to sign him off to join

the Navy.

“My dad was in the Navy and served in World War II, and they had the prettiest uniforms,” he said. “Those Navy dress blues looked good.”

The Poolville resident, born in Fort Worth, attended boot camp in San Diego. But a few months later, his military career would be over, due to a physical condition he had since birth.

“We had these duty belts that we wore, which were very tight, and when I put mine on, it would burn,” he said. “I had horrible cramps as a kid if I ran a long ways, but I never thought it was anything real serious.”

Troubled by nerves and other irritants, Rhoads found out through a random physical that he had an intestinal condition that restricted some of his movement and could cause debilitating pain at any point.

“Two months after boot camp, they sent me to the mainland and said I would need to have surgery or return home,” he said.

Terrified of the surgery and not knowing if the results would completely heal him for active duty, Rhoads received an honorable discharge.

“I was 17 years old and I was scared to death of major surgery,” he said. “They gave me an honorable discharge and said I was physically unable to do it.”

With a dad, son and grandson all serving in the military, Rhoads’ journey and what could have been still plagues him to this day.“It really bothers me, even now, because I wasn’t able to do what I wanted to do,” he said. “My heart was in a good spot, but my body just couldn’t follow.”

After his discharge, Rhoads went to work for Southern Airways, in Mineral Wells, as a certified aircraft mechanic. He suffered a ruptured disc in his back, and has been legally disabled since 1993.

Though his work and military careers may be over, Rhoads still contributes his time to the community and to his country, serving as a past commander of the American Legion, where he has been a member for 16 years, and

as the current guardian and past commander of the Men’s Auxiliary of the VFW, when he had membership for six years.

An avid motorcycle rider, Rhoads uses his hobby as a way to contribute to others as well, participating annually in motorcycle toy runs to support children around the holidays, as well as helping out with Veteran’s Day Out in Granbury.

He has also helped the Poolville community, campaigning for a new POW-MIA flag to be flown in the center of town.

“I’m still a veteran, and I’m proud of what little time I spent in the military, but it still bothers me,” Rhoads said. “I love my country and I would do anything in the world for it.”

A Veteran’s JourneyCut Short

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