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“Some give some, and some give more. Some have no clue to what they’re really fighting for,” Kristin Pruett sang at her home piano in Boise, Idaho, recently. She tape-recorded her holiday tribute to the family of veterans she’d married into, and put it online with photos.



It was the latest stanza in the song that is the Pruett family.

You might compare their lives to an opera or perhaps to a country music tune filled with politics and patriotism. Their story even has its own beat: eight service members with 11 deployments. All from one family.

Meet the Pruetts: Leon, Tammy, Eric, Eren, Evan, Greg, Jeff, Emily and her husband, Everett.

“I never thought every single one of our children would serve,” said Leon, their 51-year-old father, now retired, who was a captain in the Idaho National Guard and an environmental safety and health manager at an agricultural products plant.

“The only one who hasn’t deployed is Mom,” the eldest son, Eric, 35, added.

I first met the family, all of whom served at one time with the Idaho National Guard, in 2004 while doing a television special for CNN.

At the time, four brothers (Eric, Evan, Greg and Jeff) were in Iraq. Leon and son Eren, 33, had just returned. Daughter Emily was finishing training.

“Schoolteachers and students started writing, and the boys wrote back from Iraq,” Tammy, their 55-year-old mother, said. “We even got a letter from a family who, during World War II, were in the same situation with several sons at war at the same time.”

Then, during a 2005 speech, President George W. Bush publicly thanked the family for its service. The praise came with a price, as some people criticized Tammy for supporting the increasingly unpopular war in Iraq.

“People sent hate letters saying we had ‘blood on our hands’ and we’re ‘war-mongers,’” Tammy said.

Her four sons made it home safely, and the family spread out across America. But then came Emily’s turn.

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She had served with her father in the National Guard, but decided to join the active-duty Army in 2006. “Dad begged me not to go and join active-duty Army,” Emily said. “But it was the best thing for me: I got out of debt, felt good about myself.”

“When Emily deployed, that was weird,” her brother Greg, 32, said. “There were none of us over there with her. The rest of us always had another family member there, we had another Pruett to rely on. She didn’t. But we all understand the volunteer mentality.”

Their parents volunteered in a different way when Emily deployed to Iraq. She had recently divorced and had a baby girl, so her parents stepped in to help with the child care.

“We’d just moved to Wyoming and hadn’t bought the home yet, and here we are, grandparents, raising the baby in a camp trailer,” Leon recalled.

At one point, Emily was nearly killed when a rocket-propelled grenade hit a guard tower she had just left, injuring another soldier inside. “She was shook up,” Leon said. “That was one of the scariest moments for me, to get that phone call, even though all of us have had close calls.”

“I usually talked to Dad, because he knew what I was going through,” Emily said. “It scared Mom.”

Instead of becoming a casualty, Emily met her future husband, Everett Curry, a sniper who had been wounded during a previous tour in Afghanistan.

“I always said I wouldn’t be with an Army guy,” Emily said. “I’ve changed. Everybody comes back different. But in our family, we understand what each other have gone through.”

Eren agreed. “Part of our lives was in Iraq,” he said. “The experience taught us a lot. But, yes, there’s bad stuff I don’t want to think about.”

But think about it they did when four of the Pruetts were called up again in 2010. Tammy recalled fretting that “it was only a matter of time” before she lost one of her children.

But two of the deployments – Eren’s and Greg’s – were canceled, and only Eric and Jeff, 28, went back to Iraq, where they were among the last American troops to leave in the final withdrawal.

“It would’ve been not as bad as going with your Dad,” joked Eren, who once deployed to Iraq with his father as commander. “But Eric and Jeff would’ve been my bosses, so maybe it would’ve been worse!”

This time, Eric was the commander of Jeff’s unit. “He didn’t like being bossed around,” Eric recalled. “He’s used to it, since I’m his brother, but I was probably harder on him than the rest.” (Jeff didn’t see it that way. “Eric treated me equal to all other soldiers,” he said.)

Jeff had a 3-month-old baby when the deployment began, and the family got a “Flat Daddy” life-size photo of him to keep the baby company.

“Our wives had a much tougher job than we did,” Eric said.

That is partly why Greg’s wife Kristin decided to write a song for her extended family and put it online. She wanted to pay tribute to all the spouses left behind, too.

“Fighting at home or abroad, you are forced to rise above anything you thought was possible,” Kristin says.

Today, four of the Pruetts remain in the Idaho National Guard.

Greg, a sergeant, is the safety officer for an Army aviation facility. Eric is about to be promoted to major. Eren’s civilian technology job became a casualty of the government sequestration, but he still runs an arms training unit as a sergeant for the Guard. And Jeff, the youngest, is now a second lieutenant at Fort Rucker in Alabama, training to be an Apache helicopter pilot.

Evan, 32, who missed the birth of his first child while deployed, got out of the service. He’s a bartender now. And Emily, 28, is studying to be a radiology technician. Her husband, Mr. Curry, also 28, works for the Department of Energy.

“Evan and I are the black sheep of the family,” Emily said. “We both got out.”

And as for Tammy and Leon, they just celebrated their 26th wedding anniversary. Leon is now out of the Guard as well.

“He’s done being a weekend warrior,” Tammy said. “No itch to go back to war.”

The family has a broader message for the public. “Every soldier out there at some point, or their family, needs some help,” Eric said. “Sometimes everyone needs a shoulder to cry on, or how to deal with the kids that are having a hard time, or financial issues.”

Kristin Pruett’s song touches on this theme, too:

“Do you ever wonder about that family next door,” she sings. “Does it even cross your mind? She’s living in fear half the time that her husband will not make it home and she will be left all alone.”

Tammy admits to sometimes feeling guilty when she thinks about other families who have lost loved ones, while all eight of hers deployed and returned safely. “How do you answer that question for other families that haven’t been so lucky?” she asked.

Greg put it this way: “So much of America’s time and effort is focused on Hollywood stars, professional athletes and politicians. We too often forget that there are men and women across the world ready to lay down their lives for the cause of freedom. They don’t ask for much from their fellow citizens other than a prayer at night to almighty God for their safe return home.”

Alex Quade has worked in television for Fox News and CNN. She produced and directed a short documentary about Special Forces in Afghanistan, “Horse Soldiers of 9/11,” narrated by the actor Gary Sinise, that premiered at the G.I. Film Festival in Washington in 2012. “Chinook Down,” a video essay she did for At War, was awarded a national Edward R. Murrow Award from the Radio Television Digital News Association in 2013.

