JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — A United States Army Lieutenant General made a special trip to Jacksonville to encourage young men and women to consider a military career.
Lieutenant General Ted Martin is a Duval County native and a 1979 graduate of Fletcher High School. He currently serves as the commanding general for the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center and Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. In 1983, he was commissioned as an armor officer at the United States Military Academy in West Point.
"You hear a lot in America about what is happening to the youth of today. Well, I see the youth of today. We brought 100,000 soldiers into the Army last year in the active guard reserve. They took that step and went through that transformation of 10 weeks of basic combat training and they came out a different person on the other end," LTG Ted Martin told First Coast News.
Even though Jacksonville is a Navy town, the lieutenant general says more than 1,800 young men and women enlisted in the Army from Jacksonville last year.
"We actually put more young men and women in the Army out of Jacksonville than the Navy did," LTG Martin added.
Some of those young men and women are now helicopter mechanics, radiologists, and firefighters in the military.
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