By Jill Fennema –

Loren Vander Top received his draft number notice while he was a senior in college. He was studying agricultural education at the University of Minnesota. He graduated that spring and in the fall began teaching vocational ag at Chokio-Alberta School, a consolidated high school in Alberta, Minn. 

A few months later, he received his draft notice and was granted a deferment until June 1971. To the best of his knowledge, he was the last person drafted in Murray County. It was shortly after he was drafted that President Richard Nixon went to the all-volunteer army. This was also when it was decided that no one who was drafted would have to go overseas. 

Loren went to Ft. Lewis, Washington, for his basic training. After graduating from basic training he was sent to Ft. Gordon, Georgia, for military police training. Being in the military police was just his assignment, not something he signed up to do. “I just went along with the flow and did what I was supposed to do,” he said.

Four months later, after graduating from police school, he was sent to Ft. Bliss, Texas. He was assigned to the military police there as a 95-Bravo, which meant he was a policeman on the road, not in a prison. The base he worked at, McGregor Range Base Camp, was about 25 miles outside of El Paso, Texas. During the day, there would be about 3,000 people on the base.

But at night, the population would shrink to about 500 because most of the military personnel on the base lived in El Paso. 

Loren’s work involved patrolling traffic on the base, restoring order when there was an occasional fight at the NCO Club, checking to make sure guards were at their posts during their guard duty, and a host of other regular police work. If there was a theft reported, he would have to write up the initial report for the investigators. There was also patrol work in the area of the base, which sometimes led them to find illegal aliens trying to sneak into the country. 

His schedule during this time was not ideal. He would work three days of the day shift, followed by three days of the evening shift, and then three days of the night shift. After that cycle he would get three days off. That type of schedule makes it difficult to have a normal life or normal sleep schedule. 

During basic training, Loren trained with an M16 like all the other new recruits. But his police work required him to carry a .45 Colt pistol. Once in a while he would be required to be a payroll guard. Back then, the military paid in cash, so they would guard the payroll officer who would have a briefcase of cash. This also included a short helicopter ride from Ft. Bliss to McGregor Range Base Camp. 

In June of 1972, a year after his service began, Loren married Alanna De Vries.  They had both grown up in the Chandler area and had started dating while he was teaching at the Chokio Alberta school. Not long after they were married, Loren had the opportunity to take on a new job with the police. 

He was transferred to the military police investigative office and worked as a clerk there for about six months.  The hours were much better: 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m., Monday through Friday. This job was to take incoming calls, and take down the details for where crimes were committed. There were seven investigators in that office and he became friends with those men.

“It didn’t seem like the military then,” Loren said, “It was good working conditions and I had bosses that treated me like an employee. The sergeant in charge was a good man to work for. If you did your job, he treated you fairly. By the time he left his active duty, he was earning $345 a month, which was significantly more than his starting wage as an E1, at $95 a month.

After his two years of active duty, Loren started farming east of Edgerton. He was still assigned to a reserve unit out of St. Louis, but he never went to a single meeting and no one cared. After four years of that, he receive his honorable discharge papers in the mail.

When he and Alanna came back to the Edgerton area, they ran a dairy farm for 23 years. However, milking 25 cows was not large enough to sustain a farm in the modern farm economy, so rather than reinvent their farm, Loren decided to get full time work off the farm.