Almost all boys have a dream and some of them turn into a Night Mare.  Not this one, read on.

Allan Stover, a native of Cleveland, OH was living in a bad neighborhood where gangs were a problem.  It would have been easy for a 14 year old to join them. This was not to be for Al.  However, he did enjoy playing hooky with others.  He says that God picked him up and put him on a different path from the one he was on. One of those moments, he believes, is when he decided to join the US Coast Guard in 1952. He was 14 years old.  “In my neighborhood, not a lot of guys finished school.  He said, “I figured maybe the military would be a way to escape.”

Al’s first plan was to join the Marines, but the day he played hooky from his eighth-grade class the recruiting office was closed. He knew of a family friend who had enlisted in the Coast Guard underage and, not wanting to skip a second day of school, he thought it would be a good alternative. Al has always been quick on his feet.

Now, with help from his sister who worked in a state office where they used the same typewriters that were used in the birth records office, altered his birth certificate to make him appear to be 17. He also forged his mother’s signature on a letter sent to her by the Coast Guard asking her permission for him to join. He threatened to join a gang in his Cleveland neighborhood if they tried to stop him. The day he was sworn in by the Coast Guard, an officer came over to ask him why he was there. “Oh, I thought you were here to see your older brother sworn in,” the officer said.

He was sent to boot camp in New Jersey and, though he was accepted into the Coast Guard, many people didn’t believe he was actually old enough to be there. (Can you imagine why?  “The other guys were curious,” he remembered. “I never told anyone the whole time I was in the service.” On his first ship, the Basswood, the rest of the crew members were hard on him, Stover said. His first job was to keep the crew’s bathroom clean. After a year on board the Basswood, Stover transferred to Guam in 1954, making a decision he lived to regret.

“The first morning after I arrived, I asked how I could get a transfer,” he said, describing Guam as a place that had nothing. The only way he could transfer was to volunteer to do isolation duties on an island, “But nobody would be that stupid,” the clerk at the personnel office told him. “Don’t underestimate me,” Stover replied.

By the time of his isolation duties, Stover said he looked older and nobody questioned his age anymore. Stover said his tour on Anguar, in the Palau group of the Caroline Islands, was not as bad as expected, and he lucked out on his return to the United States. He was able to get on the admiral’s plane and fly to the Philippines, Hong Kong, China and Japan, avoiding Guam altogether.

When he was 16, he reported to the Androscoggin, the flagship of the 7th Coast Guard District, and he was perceived differently by his peers. “Here I was, 16 years old, and all these guys said, ‘Boy, that guy’s been around,’” Stover said with a laugh. He was discharged at 18, with four years of service behind him.

“Definitely, it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” said Stover, who thinks he avoided death by joining the Coast Guard. “My life is much improved by going to the Coast Guard.” Just a few months after he was honorably discharged, one of his childhood friends was stabbed and killed during a fight. Stover believes if he hadn’t enlisted, he might have suffered the same fate.

In the 1990s Allan Stover founded the Veterans Underage Military Service,(VUMS) a national association with members in nearly all US States,  Puerto Rico, Italy, and Austraila. that aims to connect underage veterans. To date, it has more than 2,770 members a nd we keep finding more every month.