Family’s Big Stake in Gulf : Home front: A Texas woman, 87, has at least 20 of her kin in war zone. And it’s chilling to think a whole generation of relatives is in danger.

MT. ENTERPRISE, Tex. —  As far back as Fannie Johnson can remember--and that’s all the way back to World War I--her family has dutifully heeded the nation’s call to arms.

“I was little, but I remember my relatives being in that war,” said Johnson, sitting erect in her favorite chair by the front window. Fighting in France during the war was Ernest Johnson, a fellow destined to be her first husband.

In every war since then, Johnson, 87, recalls with a bit of pride, at least one or two of her kinfolks have left this rural East Texas town (pop. 483) to man the battle lines.

In World War II, there was Lank Johnson, her husband’s brother, and during the Korean conflict cousin Ernest Cooper. While serving in the Vietnam War, her second cousin, Harvey Lee Graves--”that’s my cousin Vergie’s son”--contracted malaria, and her daughter Clara’s boy, Clarence Dansby, was taken as a prisoner of war.

And now family members are in the Persian Gulf. But this time it is not just one or two members.

At last count, Fannie Johnson, the matriarch of this tight-knit family, had more than 20 of her kin stretched out across the sands of Saudi Arabia, or aboard ship in the Persian Gulf. Others are waiting to be shipped over. This time, a whole generation is in jeopardy.

The thought has sent a chill through the family.

Among those at the front lines are Johnson’s grandsons, Pfc. Prentiss Neal of the 418th Infantry and Pfc. Lonnie Johnson of the 516th Infantry; cousins, like 1st Sgt. Arthur Graves; nieces and nephews, like Kelton Simon, Leveius Bryant and his first cousin, Vickie White. Other relatives are sprinkled throughout the Navy, Army and Marines--Ovid Sims Jr., Rodney Wilson, Frederick Pipkins, Roberto Starling, Andre and Steve Johnson, Ben Davis, Nathaniel Cozart, Randall Hawkins, Matthew Battles, to name a few.

Johnson, her nine children, her grandchildren, her brothers and sisters and their children and grandchildren, take a muted sense of pride from the family’s participation. But their overriding emotion is fear.

“I don’t feel too good about it,” Johnson said strongly. “I’m just thinking they might not get back.”

Many family members agree.

“You want to serve, but it’s frightening,” said Jennive Grubbs, Johnson’s daughter. “We don’t have that many men in our family. We could have a whole generation wiped out by this war.”

“I know we’re not the only family with people over there,” added daughter, Essie Johnson, who has one son, Lonnie, in Saudi Arabia and another, Russell, on standby in Germany. “But we’ve got so many over there--cousins, nephews, sons--it’s just a burden on you.”

Webster Lee Graves, whose oldest son served in Vietnam, has a son in Saudi Arabia who was scheduled to be mustered out of the Army this month after 20 years of service. He feels his family is paying a higher price than necessary.

“Why do they get so many out of one family when they have so many families that don’t have anybody over there?” asks Graves, who served at Bougainville during World War II.

The answer to that has to do both with the unusual nature of Fannie Johnson’s family and with the economic and cultural realities that have helped produce a military that is disproportionately black and lower-middle income.

In rural East Texas, where goats in the front yard and geese in the back yard are not uncommon, the Johnson-Bryant family tree stretches to Nacogdoches, Timpson, Garrison, Henderson, Tyler and down to Houston. The family’s bloodlines run in so many directions that Fannie Johnson’s children say they had to leave the area just to find somebody to marry.

“Every time you met somebody, they turned out to be your cousin,” said Pearlie Cooper, another of Johnson’s daughters. “That’s why we all moved to Houston, so we could get married.”

At a family reunion last May, more than 300 showed up. And that was without the Los Angeles contingent, which includes Fannie Johnson’s brother, his 10 children and grandchildren and great grandchildren, as well as dozens of children and grandchildren by a deceased sister. Family members say, however, that the number of relatives they have in the military is less a reflection of the family’s size than of the harsh choices their young people must make as they reach maturity.

For those with little or no money for college and few job opportunities, the military, as an Army recruiter in Longview likes to tell his prospects, “is a viable option.”

It is a choice that educators at Henderson High School, where most of the Johnson family attended, say is becoming more appealing as students examine a depressed economy.

“We’ve had a lot more kids talking military,” said Linda Gooding, one of the school’s counselors. “The kids whose parents have set aside the money for school, they’re going on to school. But the other kids, they figure they can get training and skills and a chance for college in the military. So they’re going in.”

Parents in the Johnson clan say they are glad that their children have the military option as they struggle to find a place in the world. But, they say, their children are on the front lines protecting America’s vital interests largely because their own personal interests--education and jobs--were not vital enough to America.

“I resent it,” Pearlie Cooper said. “But the kids have to do something. My sister (Essie Johnson) has eight children. She couldn’t send all those kids to college and they wanted to get an education.

“But those recruiters, they just swipe your children out of high school. They swiped my son. He joined before he even graduated, before he even marched. They painted this education picture and he didn’t feel I had the money I needed to send him. But I would have struggled for him to go. I was very upset. They didn’t even give him a chance to talk with his parents.”

“It’s like they prey on them,” Jennive Grubbs said. “They make it harder for them to go to college when most of the parents already don’t have money to send them to college. You’re trying to keep them in school and the military is trying to get them out.”

The lure of an education is what drew Sgt. Arthur Graves, stationed in Saudi Arabia, to the military 20 years ago. “He was going to school at Texas College in Tyler, Tex., and studying business, but he didn’t have money to finish college,” his mother, Vergie Graves, said. “So, he joined the Army.”

Now, the same thing is true for the family’s new generation.

Essie’s son, Russell, on standby in Germany, signed up in the 11th grade, and went into the Army a few days after he graduated. His brother, Lonnie, couldn’t find a job after graduation and joined the Army a year later.

“I encouraged him to join,” his mother said. “The college kids have more preference on the jobs in Nacogdoches, and Henderson didn’t have any jobs, except for the fast food places. If he had been a girl, he probably could have gotten a nursing job. But there wasn’t anything here for him.”

The same thing happened to his cousin, Leveius Bryant, from nearby Timpson.

“He just couldn’t find a job,” his mother, Ella Bryant, said. “He looked and looked and looked and he couldn’t find one. So he joined the service.” Lonnie and Leveius left for boot camp the same day. It was a similar story for Kelton Simon, Nathaniel Cozart and Michael McKissick and Prentiss Neal, all serving in the Persian Gulf. Most of them were recruited by the same sergeant, then in charge of the recruitment station in Longview, and now stationed in the gulf himself.

Now that their relatives are in the gulf, the family tries to put its best foot forward. Ella Bryant, a yellow ribbon pinned to her blouse, worries about her son, Leveius, but tries to be as brave as her son appears to be in his letters home.

“He says that this is his job,” she said slowly, as if trying to convince herself. “He says he’s been trained to do this and he’s trying to do the best he can.”

Vergie Graves said it is a little easier this time than it was when her oldest son was serving in Vietnam. “But I guess that’s because they haven’t really started fighting yet,” she said. “All you can now do is hope and pray.”

And wait. That’s what Fannie Johnson does in the quiet of her small home here. She does not have a telephone. So, she waits for her daughter next door to bring word about her grandsons. She waits for word from Leveius’ mother or Arthur’s mother.

“That’s all I can do,” she said, “wait for somebody to come tell me the children are OK.”