15 Famous Veterans Who Served in the U.S. Military
Celebrity veterans, such as Elvis Presley and Adam Driver, have dutifully defended America as part of the armed forces.
Veterans Day offers the United States a chance to recognize the contributions of its former military members. Most veterans are everyday people, but over the years, celebrities have joined or been drafted into one of the six branches of the armed forces. Elvis Presley, Morgan Freeman, and Adam Driver are just some of America’s famous veterans.
The holiday itself dates back more than 100 years. When World War I ended on the “eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month” in 1918, it was immediately cemented as an essential day in history. A year later, on November 11, 1919, the first anniversary was celebrated as Armistice Day. “To us in America, the reflections of Armistice Day will be filled with solemn pride in the heroism of those who died in the country’s service and with gratitude for the victory,” President Woodrow Wilson said on that day.
The observance of Armistice Day became an annual tradition by 1926, but it wasn’t officially a national holiday until 1938. Then in 1954, President Dwight D. Eisenhower changed Armistice Day to Veterans Day—expanding the historical anniversary to be a date that honored all veterans, living and dead, who fought in any war.
This year, Veterans Day is Monday, November 11, 2024. Here, we salute 15 celebrities who served in the U.S. military, earning the respected title of veteran.
Harriet Tubman
Served in the Union Army from c. 1862 to 1865
While she’s better known for her role as the leader of the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman was also the first woman in American history to lead a military expedition as a spy for the Union during the Civil War.
After having successfully made more than a dozen trips from the South to North between 1850 and 1860, Tubman’s highly coveted skillset for clandestine operations was clear. Sometime around 1862, she started gathering intelligence and even built a spy ring.
One of the most challenging missions was helping Colonel James Montgomery free enslaved people from South Carolina plantations along the Combahee River. Despite the precariousness of the situation with the Confederates lurking nearby, the group freed 750 enslaved people. The American hero died decades later in 1913.
RELATED: Inside Harriet Tubman’s Life of Service After the Underground Railroad
Humphrey Bogart
Served in the Navy from 1918 to 1919
After being expelled from school, Humphrey Bogart joined the U.S. Navy to fight in World War I. He summed his time up as: “War was great stuff. Paris! French girls! Hot damn!... The war was a big joke. Death? What does death mean to a kid of 17?”
Records show that he was a strong sailor and ferried boats between the United States and Europe. After an incident where he missed a ship, he was forced into three days of solitary confinement. Still, he was honorably discharged in 1919 and later joined the Coast Guard Reserve. Bogart died in 1957.
Bea Arthur
Served in the Marine Corps from 1943 to 1945
Actor Bea Arthur, who died in 2009, will forever be remembered as Dorothy on the 1980s and ’90s sitcom The Golden Girls and as the title character in the 1970s show Maude. However, she was one of the first members of the Women’s Reserve, registering under the name Bernie Frankel.
According to a letter she wrote, it all happened on a whim: “I was supposed to start work yesterday, but heard last week that enlistments for women in the Marines were open, so [I] decided the only thing to do was to join.”
Arthur hadn’t yet turned 21, so she needed her parents’ permission to enlist. But on February 20, 1943, she became part of the Marine Corps, working both as a truck driver and a typist. Arthur was promoted from corporal to sergeant to staff sergeant while stationed in Virginia and North Carolina. Her honorable discharge in September 1945 was followed by her success on Broadway, where she earned a Tony Award, and her television fame.
Neil Armstrong
Served in the Navy from 1949 to 1960
As the first man to walk on the moon, Neil Armstrong long had a fascination with flight. Fittingly, that led him to get a pilot’s license as a teenager and then study aeronautical engineering at Purdue University, thanks to a scholarship from the U.S. Navy.
After training as a Navy pilot in 1949, Armstrong served in the Korean War. He flew 78 combat missions until 1952 and logged 2,600 hours in flight, including 1,100 in a jet aircraft. Although he was thrown from a F9F Panther jet early on, he also earned three air medals.
After his service, Armstrong was in the U.S. Naval Reserve for eight years until 1960. Two years later, he was chosen as an astronaut by NASA. The barrier-breaking veteran died in 2012.
RELATED: How Neil Armstrong Was Selected for the Apollo 11 Mission
Johnny Cash
Served in the Air Force from 1950 to 1954
Before Johnny Cash became a best-selling country singer, nicknamed the Man in Black, he was a member of the U.S. Air Force. Enlisting as John R. Cash just after the start of the Korean War, he trained at Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. He served as a radio intercept officer using high-speed Morse Code to eavesdrop on the Soviet Army radio while stationed Landsberg, West Germany.
Cash wrote in his autobiography that he was the first American to intercept reports of Joseph Stalin’s death in 1953. It was during his downtime in Germany that he started to write songs, including “Folsom Prison Blues,” and also started playing live music with an Air Force band called Landsberg Barbarians.
Working on radios in the military seemed fitting for Cash. “That was the big thing when I was growing up, singing on the radio,” he said. “The extent of my dream was to sing on the radio station in Memphis. Even when I got out of the Air Force in 1954, I came right back to Memphis and started knocking on doors at the radio station.”
Before his 2003 death, Cash also became a novelist. His first published work? A piece in the military paper Stars and Stripes.
Clint Eastwood
Served in the Army from 1951 to 1953
Clint Eastwood, 94, has held many titles in his life: actor, director, producer, Academy Award winner, city mayor, and military swim instructor. “I was drafted during the Korean War. None of us wanted to go,” he said. “It was only a couple of years after World War II had ended. We said, ‘A second? Didn’t we just get through with that?’”
He ended up being stationed fairly close to home in California’s Fort Ord, where he taught swimming. Despite not being in a war zone, Eastwood did face grave danger when he was on a plane that ran out of gas. He and the pilot jumped off into the Pacific Ocean and swam a mile to shore.
Morgan Freeman
Served in the Air Force from 1955 to 1959
Back in 1955, Morgan Freeman was offered a scholarship to Jackson State University. He turned it down and joined the Air Force instead. “I took to it immediately when I arrived there,” he told Interview. “I did three years, eight months, and 10 days in all, but it took me a year and a half to get disabused of my romantic notions about it."
Indeed, Freeman’s love at first sight took a turn. As he explained: “When I was getting close to being accepted for pilot training, I was allowed to get in a jet airplane. I sat there looking at all those switches and dials, and I got the distinct feeling that I was sitting in the nose of bomb. I realized my fantasies of flying and fighting were just that—fantasies. They had nothing to do with the reality of killing people. What I wanted was the movie version. So that was the end of the whole idea of doing anything other than acting for me.”
The 87-year-old is one of the most acclaimed actors of his generation, having won an Oscar and earning nominations for Emmys, Golden Globes, a Tony, and a Grammy.
Elvis Presley
Served in the Army from 1958 to 1960
In 1956, Elvis Presley had his first No. 1 song with “Heartbreak Hotel,” his first No. 1 self-titled album, and his first movie, Love Me Tender, which was a hit. The next year, he was drafted.
By March 1958, Presley was inducted into the Army. When his famous locks were shaved off, he commented: “Hair today, gone tomorrow.” The famous singer served in Friedberg, Germany, for about 18 months. It was there that he met Priscilla Beaulieu, who he later married in Las Vegas.
“I was in a funny position,” Elvis said in an interview with the Armed Forces Radio and Television. “People were expecting me to mess up, to goof up in one way or another. They thought I couldn’t take it and so forth, and I was determined to go to any limits to prove otherwise, not only to the people who were wondering, but to myself.”
But Presley, who died in 1977, ended up working his way up to sergeant, noting, “The Army teaches boys to think like men.”
RELATED: Inside Elvis Presley’s Army Service
John McCain
Served in the Navy from 1958 to 1981
Both his father and grandfather were four-star admirals, so it’s no surprise that John McCain was literally born on a naval base at Coco Solo Naval Air Station in the Panama Canal Zone. After growing up at various naval bases around the globe, the future U.S. senator graduated from the Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1958.
McCain volunteered for combat duty in the Vietnam War and was spared injury when his A-4 Skyhawk jet was shot accidentally by a USS Forrestal missile in July 1967. Three months later, his plane was shot again over Hanoi. With two broken arms and a broken leg, he was taken to prison camps and held for five and a half years because of his father’s status as a commander. There, he suffered tremendous torture as a victim of propaganda, becoming one of the most famous American prisoners of war.
“I fell in love with my country when I was a prisoner in someone else’s,” McCain, who died in 2018, said during his 2008 Republican presidential nomination speech. “I loved it for its decency, for its faith in the wisdom, justice, and goodness of its people. I loved it because it was not just a place but an idea, a cause worth fighting for. I was never the same again. I wasn’t my own man anymore; I was my country’s.”
Colin Powell
Served in the Army from 1958 to 1993
The United States’ first Black Secretary of State was also a retired four-star Army general. Colin Powell’s service began while he was studying geology at the City College of New York. He enrolled in the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) and quickly became a commander.
A year after he was sent to South Vietnam, he was wounded by a booby trap on the Vietnamese-Laotian border in 1963. He was given a Purple Heart and later a Bronze Star.
Powell returned to Vietnam in 1968 and was hurt in a helicopter crash but managed to rescue others along the way out of the inferno, which earned him the Soldier’s Medal. He also went on a tour of duty in Korea in 1973. Altogether, the Legion of Merit holder collected 11 military decorations before his 2021 death.
By 1982, he became the national security advisor under President Ronald Reagan, and in 1989, George H. W. Bush appointed him chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military position in the Department of Defense. “All work is honorable,” he wrote in his book My American Journey. “Always do your best because someone is watching.”
Ice-T
Served in the Army from 1979 to 1983
Living in the tough streets of South Central Los Angeles, Ice-T needed help financially, so he turned to the Army. “When I had my daughter I was like, man, I’m going to go to jail, I got to do something, and I went to an enlistment office,” he said. “Next thing you know, I’m in the military, four years infantry.”
While he was deployed as a squad leader at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, Ice-T was able to buy musical equipment, including a mixer, turntables, and speakers, that helped him start his rap career. Now 66 years old, Ice-T is also a familiar face from Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
Tammy Duckworth
Served in the National Guard from 1992 to 2014
U.S. Senator Tammy Duckworth, 56, is used to breaking barriers. She was the first disabled female veteran elected to the House of Representatives and the Senate—and the second Asian American senator ever.
Born in Bangkok, she grew up in Asia before settling in Hawaii. While earning her doctorate degree at Northern Illinois University, she joined the ROTC with the Illinois Army National Guard and was trained as a Blackhawk pilot.
Duckworth was deployed to Iraq in 2004. After her helicopter was hit by a grenade, she lost both her legs and partial motion in her right arm. The Purple Heart recipient later became assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs under President Barack Obama.
“I was hurt in service for my country. I was proud to go,” she told The Washington Post. “It was my duty as a soldier to go. And I would go tomorrow.”
Adam Driver
Served in the Marines from 2002 to 2004
Before he became an Oscar-nominated actor, 40-year-old Adam Driver served in the Marine Corps. Motivated to enlist after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Driver joined the Marines at just 18 years old.
“They kind of got me with their whole, ‘We don’t give you signing bonuses. We’re the hardest branch of the armed forces. You’re not going to get all this cushy s–– that the Navy or the Army gives you. It’s going to be hard,’” he said.
Driver served for more than two years before he fractured his sternum in a mountain biking accident and was medically discharged in 2004.
Pete Buttigieg
Served in the Navy from 2009 to 2017
In addition to being the first openly gay U.S. Transportation Secretary, Pete Buttigieg is a veteran. He was inspired to enlist after volunteering for Barack Obama’s first presidential campaign and served as an intelligence officer in the Navy Reserves for several years.
Continuing to pursue a career in politics, he was elected mayor of South Bend, Indiana, in 2012. Nearing the end of his first term in office, Buttigieg was deployed to Afghanistan for seven months, where he worked as an armed driver and took part in the counterterrorism unit known as the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell (ATFC).
“There had to be at least two people with rifles in the vehicle, and I was one of those in my unit who was rifle qualified,” he said of his time in Afghanistan. “It often fell to me to make sure that the vehicle was either being driven or was being guarded properly.” Now 42, Buttigieg was awarded the Joint Service Commendation Medal for his service in the ATFC.
Zach Bryan
Served in the Navy from 2013 to 2021
Hailing from a family of veterans, Zach Bryan enlisted in the Navy at age 17 and worked as an aviation ordnanceman. Stationed in Washington and Florida, Bryan was responsible for assembling, repairing, and loading weapons. He also did tours of duty abroad in Bahrain and Djibouti.
“It’s all I lived, slept, and ate for eight years, it’s all I knew since I was basically a snot-nosed child,” he said of his service in 2021. “It made a man out of me, truly.”
In his down time, he wrote and recorded country songs, posting clips on social media. In 2021, Bryan was honorably discharged to pursue his music career, which almost immediately took off. The 28-year-old’s biggest hits include “I Remember Everything” and “Something in the Orange.”
Catherine Caruso joined the Biography.com staff in August 2024, having previously worked as a freelance journalist for several years. She is a graduate of Syracuse University, where she studied English literature. When she’s not working on a new story, you can find her reading, hitting the gym, or watching too much TV.
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