Evening Republican, Volume 20, Number 170, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 July 1916 — National Guardsmen Must Serve For Three Years. [ARTICLE]

National Guardsmen Must Serve For Three Years.

Washington, D. C., July 15.—The status of all Indiana members of the national guard who are in the federal service has been made clear by an opinion handed to Senator Kern by the judge advocate-general of the army with respect to the case of a Portand, Ind., boy whose father had written to Senator Kern about his son. The judge advocate-general held: “Upon taking the oath prescribed, the son of Mr became bound for three years’ active service in the national guard, counting from the date of his original enlistment, and three years in the reserves. His present statuses that of a member of the national guard who has been called into the service as a part of the organized militia to meet the exigency for which the call is issued. He is not, therefore, ‘in the regular army,’ but is serving under the call into the service of the national guard to meet the emergency for which the call was made.” In his letter, the Portland father said he was under the impression that his son now was a member of the regular army, and that while he was willing to serve “as long as his services were needed in the Mexican trouble, he did not seem to know the effect of the oath he had taken.”