Ex-troops try on Terps uniforms

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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.