Every November, there is a holiday that everyone looks forward to: for the food, the family, or the vacation.
Also during that month, there is a holiday that is overlooked, a holiday that many of us reserve only one minute for. That holiday is Veterans Day.
This year, DPHS celebrated Veterans Day by having a group of our younger in-service members and our older out-of-service members come into the community room to speak about their experiences in the military.
The eight members talked about food and fun in the barracks, while others told tales of misfortune and painful memories. One common theme among all of the veterans was how they felt about their experience in their branch. Not a single one of them had regretted their decision, and many said that they would do it again.
Len Litscher, the father of athletic secretary Mrs. Guyette and a retired dairy farmer, said that the military impacted him for the better.
“They’ll make a man out of you anyway,” Litscher said. “You learn respect and discipline. I’ll never regret what I did for our country. I’d do it again in a heartbeat.”
The youngest recruit there was Alex Remitz, who graduated from Bay Port in 2024. He said that one of the benefits of joining the military so young is that he began his basic training only two weeks after graduating.
He had spent most of his junior and senior year considering the military, which made his decision to join so early.
James Mueller, the Army recruiter for De Pere High School, worked in rocket artillery and has gone on tour in Afghanistan. He offered some advice to future recruits and said his main regret is not having joined the infantry right away.
“The benefits, along with the experience it has given me, I’d do it again in a heartbeat,” Miller said.
One of our most experienced veterans, Paul Egholm, served from 1975 to 1981 and stayed in the Naval reserves. He decided to join the Navy because he knew that a higher education wasn’t for him. He hadn’t been the best at school, and knew there was a place for him serving the country.
“The military kind of gave me that avenue to succeed,” he said.
After he left the Navy, he decided to pursue his lifelong goal: firefighting.
