Local family's military service expands from Civil War to present

By Tony Stein
Correspondent

On Veterans Day, as it does every day, an American flag flies in front of Carl Dozier's house in Chesapeake's Great Bridge. In a window by the door hangs a red, white and blue banner with the star that says a family member is in the military.

That banner honors Sgt. Jonathan Kilian Dozier, Carl's son. He's a sniper team leader serving in Iraq. That makes him the latest generation in a family military legacy with its roots in the Civil War. And it is a legacy with a pair of odd twists.

One is a coincidence of timing. Exactly 65 years ago today, Carl's father, Wilbur "Red" Dozier, was a Coast Guardsman aboard a troop ship that was torpedoed and sunk off the coast of North Africa. But the true oddity of that legacy is that Carl's maternal grandfather, Kilian Lang, served as an artilleryman in the German army during the First World War.

That doesn't make Carl uncomfortable. Nor does the fact that he had cousins in the German army during World War II. He sees it as an expression of the same sense of duty to family and country that he, his father and his son have felt.

"In their own view," he says, "my cousins were doing what a German should be doing - defending hearth and kin."

Carl Dozier served 28 years as an Army officer, primarily as a member of the National Guard. He retired in 1999 as a lieutenant colonel.

His paternal great-grandfather, Joseph Henry Dozier, had a son, Thomas Lenwood Dozier, who enlisted as a private in Company A of the 17th North Carolina Regiment on April 23, 1861. That was just a few days after the Civil War began.

Captured at the surrender of Fort Hatteras in August 1861, he was sent to a federal prisoner-of-war camp in Boston. Early in February 1862, he was part of an exchange of Union and Confederate prisoners. Then he went back into another North Carolina regiment only to be captured again in December 1863. After the war, he moved to what is now the Battlewoods Meadow section of Chesapeake and raised 12 children. He died in 1921 and is buried in Chesapeake Memorial Gardens.

Then the military history moves across the ocean to Rottingen, Germany where Kilian Lang was born in 1898. As he recites that lineage, Carl chuckles and says, "OK, what's a German doing with an Irish name like Kilian?" Here's the story:

"Rottingen is in a part of Bavaria where a lot of Irish people settled early on. Somewhere around 900 A.D., an Irish priest named Kilian criticized a misbehaving bishop and was beheaded. A church in the town was named St. Kilian's, and the Lang family lived across the street from the church. That's why the boy got the name."

Kilian's father was the town baker, but his son became a metal smith. He enlisted in the German army in 1917.

"When I was a child," Carl says, "he told me about fighting the American 1st Division in France. But he got a shrapnel wound in the back and was evacuated to Germany."

In 1923, Kilian Lang emigrated to Chicago. That's where he worked for a sheet metal firm until he retired in 1966. He and Carl's grandmother, Theresa Babler, later moved to Chesapeake. Like Thomas Dozier, Kilian is buried in Chesapeake Memorial Gardens.

Carl's father, Wilbur, was born in 1922 on the family farm in what is now the Hickory section. He graduated from Great Bridge High in 1940 and enlisted in the Coast Guard in August 1941.

On Dec. 7, 1941, the day of the attack on Pearl Harbor, he was on guard duty on the New York waterfront. Carl smiles as he remembers one of his father's reactions to news of the attack.

"He said that when he got off shift and heard the news, he wondered to himself, 'Pearl Harbor? Where's Pearl Harbor?' "

It wasn't long before Wilbur Dozier got a harsh lesson in war and distant geography. On Nov. 6, 1942, he was a coxswain on a landing craft putting troops ashore in the invasion of North Africa. Under fire for the next four days, his unit unloaded vehicles and supplies and evacuated wounded troops.

On the night of Nov. 11, he was below decks on the transport ship Joseph Hewes when a German U-Boat struck.

"He told me he felt the ship shudder," Carl says. "The ship settled by the bow and the captain tried to ground it, but the forward section was already under water. So Dad helped get the wounded over the side. While he was doing that, he hurt his back and the injury became a permanent disability. The captain and 100 seamen and soldiers went down with the ship.

"He's not well now," Carl says, "and he has never talked about it a lot. Like the other men of his generation, he saw his service as a duty. He did that duty and came home."

Carl Dozier, born in Norfolk in 1946, started his own military service as an ROTC graduate of Eastern Kentucky University in 1971. A 2nd lieutenant, he was assigned to the field artillery. When he wasn't called to active duty, he joined the 111th Field Artillery of the Virginia National Guard. On the civilian side, he became a history and government teacher at Great Bridge High.

But he volunteered to serve in the Middle East during Operation Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1990 and 1991. He also served active duty tours in Germany and Iceland. He retired from the Chesapeake school system earlier this year.

His son, Jonathan Kilian Dozier, first joined the Army in 1997. Then he went to college and re-enlisted in 2005., he has written his father about his concern that politics have made the mission in Iraq "blurred and ill-defined." But he also said: "I am a loyal American soldier. I believe in things larger than myself and making sacrifices for the greater good."

Like any parent, Dozier thinks constantly of his son's exposure in a combat zone.

"I check him out by computer three or four times a day," Dozier says. "He's a well-trained good soldier, and I try not to worry."

In a summary he's written of his family's four generations of service, Dozier proudly points out that his daughter and son-in-law, Jennifer and Jamey Rider, are both Chesapeake police officers.

"Service to one's country," the summary concludes, "is the highest calling of citizenship."