Ex-troops try on Terps uniforms

The families of Christian Hill and Jon Gruber embrace a proud tradition of uniforms.

First, there are the Army green and Navy blue of military service — a family tradition that dates to the American Revolution. Then, there are the jerseys and pads of a football tradition that reaches back to the 1920s.

Hill plays linebacker for the University of Maryland’s Terrapins. He also is an Army reservist who served one year in Iraq and Kuwait with the 352nd Airborne.

Gruber is a fullback for Maryland. He is a former Marine sergeant who spent four years building portable runways in the Arizona desert.

Football and military uniforms. God and country. Fields of glory and gore.

For Hill, it is a calling.

“I try to follow in the footsteps of my forefathers,” Hill said. “That’s always been my dream since I was little and hearing the different stories.”

Those were stories of his great-grandfather, Col. Neil Harding, who played quarterback at West Point against the famed Four Horsemen of Notre Dame and later commanded the “Bloody Hundredth” Bombardment Group in World War II.

Grandfather Donald Wynne graduated from the Naval Academy and later worked on Polaris submarines and the Apollo lunar missions. The family traces its military history to an Army surgeon in the late 1800s, to an officer in the Civil War and to, family lore says, an ancestor who served in the Revolutionary War.

Gruber heard some of the same kinds of war tales from a grandfather and an uncle who served in the Navy during World War II.

Gruber, 26, and Hill, 21, know that football is not a life-and-death matter. They compete with teammates and against opponents who are younger — by as much as eight years, in Gruber’s case — and less experienced and who buy into a coach’s locker-room speech that football is war.

Hill knows what war looks like. Bullets flying about him in Baghdad was war. Iraqi children happy to take food thrown from a military convoy was war. Riding home in the rear of a plane with three dead comrades killed en route to the airport was war.

Perhaps a game seems all-important to players and coaches when they hear the roar of 50,000 fans in Byrd Stadium. But when the national anthem is played, Hill and Gruber find themselves at attention, thankful not just for the chance to play this game but for the good fortune of being an American.

“Being in Iraq made me think about how grateful and thankful I am to be here in the United States,” Hill said. “A lot of Americans take this for granted. I went from Kuwait to Iraq on Easter Sunday in 2003. There was a small village of mud huts and gardens. We had a 52-vehicle convoy and threw out [meals] to eat, and they were giving us their dinars.

“They were the happiest kids I’ve ever seen.”

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