WASHINGTON (Army News Service, April 27, 2016) -- He volunteers almost every weekday morning for one of the largest volunteer organizations in America.
Retired Sgt. Maj. Ray Moran, 86, is no longer getting paid for helping the Army recruit new Soldiers. But that doesn't keep him from arriving at the Army Reserve Center every morning at 6:30 a.m. and working until lunch.
"I do it for God and country," Moran said.
It doesn't matter that April has been proclaimed National Volunteer Month -- it's just business as usual for Moran.
He is the longest-serving Army recruiter by a long shot.
In 1970, when Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard told a select group of recruiting officials that the draft would end and that the Army would become an All-Volunteer force under Project VOLAR, Moran was sitting there in the conference room.
He was the training sergeant major for the U.S. Army Recruiting Command and just after that conference he became sergeant major for the 1st Recruiting Brigade at Fort Meade, Maryland. There he began the VOLAR, or Volunteer Army experiment, prior to the draft actually ending in 1973.
Moran had joined the Army in 1948. He retired his uniform in 1978, but soon afterward took a position as a civilian employee recruiting for the Army Reserve. He has been doing that ever since.
In 2012, he was asked to retire from federal service. Moran said he would do it on one condition. "They said 'what's the condition?""
"See the phone?' They said yes. 'It stays.' 'See the office.' They said yes. I said 'It stays.' 'See me -- I'll be here tomorrow at 6:30, I'll stay until lunch and then I'll go home and have lunch with Barbara."' (His wife since 1953.)
"That's what I've been doing ever since," Moran said.
Along with volunteering weekday mornings, he will often go to weekend drill assemblies of the Army Reserve's 200th MP Command.
"I'm there for every formation," he said.
Moran calls himself the "Old Soldier" and insists that his friends and colleagues call him that as well, although his energy level and enthusiasm for the Army is anything but old.
Moran said he stopped counting how many recruits he enlisted over the years, but figures it has to be well over a thousand.
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