In the McGhee family, military service is a way of life.
Robbie McGhee remembers well bouncing around the country—and his father bouncing around the world—as his father, Robert “Bobby” McGhee, served 20 years in the United States Marine Corps. Three uncles also served. Other family members either have served or are currently serving.
“It’s just something that’s always sort of been a part of our family—it was normal for us,” Robbie said. “I think a lot of it had to do with creating opportunity for yourself—that’s one reason, I think, they chose the service. Another is fighting to protect this country. That was part of our family.”
On this Veterans Day, such stories of family military service are always worth telling but rarely especially unique. The McGhees are a bit different, though. They’re members of a Native American tribe—the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, Alabama’s only federally recognized tribe—and are, in fact, one of the most recognizable names within that tribe.
Robbie’s father, Bobby, who passed away in 2019, was the grandson of Chief Calvin McGhee. He led the Creek nation that resided east of the Mississippi through much of the 1950s, 60s and 70s, and he was the catalyst for helping the Poarch Creeks obtain federal recognition in 1984. Robbie currently serves as the vice chairman of the Poarch Creeks’ Tribal Council and handles most of the tribe’s federal-level governmental affairs.
It seems a bit odd that military service would be so ingrained within a prominent Native American family. After all, the history of the United States’ treatment of tribes—often using the military to carry out unspeakable atrocities—is well documented. So, how do tribal members reconcile that history with their service and sacrifice?
“After speaking with many of them in my family, I think a lot of it has to do with the sovereign nation within the larger country,” Robbie McGhee said. “That larger country must be protected so that our sovereignty is protected as well. That’s a good portion of it.”
Robbie McGhee recently penned a lengthy piece for Stars and Stripes, the longtime news organization that covers the U.S. military. In it, he spoke about the astounding history of Native American service members and the remarkable level of service from so many.
In fact, Native Americans serve at five times the national average. Native Americans, McGhee points out, make up just 1.4 percent of the nation’s population but send the largest percentage of any ethnic group into service.
“Nearly 12,000 Native men registered to serve in World War I, years before Congress recognized Native Americans as citizens in 1924,” McGhee wrote in the “Stars and Stripes” piece. “In Vietnam, more than 42,000 Native Americans served, and about 90 percent of them volunteered. Across all of America’s history, at least 29 Native Americans have earned the nation’s highest award for valor, the Medal of Honor.”
McGhee’s father served two tours in Vietnam and was awarded the Purple Heart Medal for being wounded during combat. His grandfather, a Navy veteran, served in World War II and the Korean War. McGhee also wrote about the life and achievements of Creek tribal member and Alabama native David Moniac, the first Native American to graduate from West Point, in 1822.
For the general public, however, much of what is known about Native American military service is confined to “code talkers,” the Navajo members who were featured in the 2002 movie, “Windtalkers.” Those code talkers assisted U.S. forces in the Pacific theater during WWII by transmitting unbreakable codes in their native languages.
That movie, while unfortunately having the Native Americans take a backseat to a character played by Nicolas Cage, did help bring awareness to the military contributions of Native Americans, McGhee said.
In 2000, legislation was passed to award the Navajo code talkers with the Congressional Gold Medal—a project that McGhee worked on—and in 2008, Congress passed legislation to recognize the code talkers from all 16 Native American tribes in the U.S.—again, legislation that McGhee helped push.
In 2020, the Smithsonian Museum officially opened the National Native Americans Veterans Memorial on the grounds of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian. That memorial honors all Native American, Alaskan native and Hawaiian native service members and tells of their remarkable history.
Harvey Pratt, the designer of the memorial and a member of the Cheyenne and Arapaho tribes, and Marine Corps veteran, like Bobby McGhee, said his goal was for the memorial to be “a place for war mothers” to gather and comfort each other.
“I want this to become a special, sacred place for people to come, a place for them to be healed,” Pratt said. “This memorial is about warriors of the past, warriors of today and warriors of tomorrow.”
The Poarch Creeks are in the process of building their own memorial to honor the veterans and service members within the Alabama tribe. The circular memorial, which is still in the early stages, will be located beside the tribe’s health clinic in the central portion of the reservation.
“We want to bring more recognition to the service and sacrifice of our members,” Robbie McGhee said. “It’s a proud history.”
To illustrate that proud history of Native American service, McGhee points to perhaps the most famous illustration in American military history—the iconic raising of the flag at Iwo Jima. One of the six men to raise the flag was Ira Hayes, a Native American member of the Gila tribe in Arizona.
Hayes and his fellow Marines endured one of the deadliest battles of the war, with nearly 7,000 American casualties and around 20,000 Japanese casualties. Because of the iconic photo of the raising of the flag, Hayes and the five other Marines who raised it became national heroes—a standing that didn’t sit well with Hayes.
“We have to tell these stories and educate people on this history,” McGhee said. “It’s so important to keep this history alive and honor what these brave people did. The contributions (of Native Americans) have been overlooked for a long time, and often simply because people haven’t been told the history. We have to change that.”
