The spirit of service: Navy vet shares journey beyond the uniform

WORLAND — For Ryan Decker, Veterans Day is a day of tradition and remembrance. 

“A lot of people get this sideways,” Decker said, “There’s Veterans Day and there’s Memorial Day. Veterans Day is for people like me. Memorial Day is for the people that gave the ultimate sacrifice.”

Decker considers himself a late bloomer in terms of joining the service. He was 27 when he signed up for the Navy Reserves and already had a family and well-established career.

He joined the Naval Mobile Construction Battalion 17 out of Fort Carson, Colorado, and was later deployed to Al-Asad, Iraq. He spent more than a year there, from 2007 to 2008.

“My job was to supply parts for the convoys, for the equipment, for the forward operating bases we were building and other projects, too. And then I had just shy of $2 million in inventory that I was responsible for on base, for our battalion,” he said.

During his deployment Decker left his wife and three young children back home. 

“I was pretty fortunate, though. On our compound we had a communication shack where we had phones and we could call,” he said. “There would be blackout periods where they would shut all services off, including email.” 

Decker said the blackout periods could last anywhere from half an hour to all day.

Decker served from 2003 until he was honorably discharged in 2011. Since then, there is not a day that goes by where he doesn’t think about his service. He credits the experience with helping him deal with the harder aspects of life, stating “It can be rough at times, but they’re just teaching you to be tough.”

Decker is passionate about preserving service-related stories. 

“My wife, who is a teacher, has been doing interviews with veterans, and she actually puts books together with their stories. It’s important that we not let them fade away and they’re not forgotten,” he said.

 Decker said his wife enlists her students' help with the project, and they have interviewed World War II veterans, Vietnam veterans and many others.

In the past, nobody wanted to talk about their experience. 

“When you ask questions, ‘Hey, Grandma, what did Grandpa do? What was his job?’ They didn’t know anything. With my grandpa, I had to dig. I found what would be considered his DD- 214. And that guy had an amazing career. And you look at some of the stuff, and it’s like, ‘How could you guys not know about this?’ So anyways, that’s kind of what we’re doing is we’re trying to preserve some of that.”

Decker recommends that those who may be interested in joining the military do their research before seeking assistance from a recruiter, since it’s the recruiter’s job to get people to join.

“Each branch has something unique to offer. If you know vets, if you know somebody that’s been through it, talk to them, get their experiences,” Decker said. “If my son came to me today and said, ‘I want to join the military,’ we’d start discussing branches and we’d start discussing what career path he wanted, and then we’d go from there.”

Decker said he met and maintained friendships with people from all over the world during his time spent serving. 

“It’s a pretty diverse world, in the military. I was deployed with and am still friends to this day with a nephew of one of the original Code Talkers.”

He has been part of the American Legion Post 44 in Worland since 2017, after some friends convinced him to attend a meeting. 

“I came down and they voted me in as an officer,” he said. “So I’ve been there ever since.”

Decker encourages anyone interested in becoming a Legion member to check it out. He said the Legion is pretty good about using its Facebook page to highlight upcoming events.

“We have the flag burning ceremony at [1 p.m.] behind the Legion every Veterans Day. It’s a process that everybody should watch to see how the flags are properly retired and disposed of. On Memorial Day, a group of us will go out and put flags on the vets’ [graves] in the cemetery.” Decker says in addition to that, the Legion hosts football nights on Thursday and serves food. “Not all of these are closed off to the public,” he said. “Most of them, you’re invited. You can come down and see what it’s about.”

Even though Decker has been in the civilian work force for more than a decade now, his fellow troops are never far from his mind. 

He said one thing he really misses — something that civilian life lacks to a certain degree —  is the deep connection and camaraderie. 

“Don’t get me wrong, I have friends here, but it’s a different situation,” Deceker said. “Being a part of the Legion, the Legion friends understand. They were obviously military, too, and so that’s probably the closest to being in the military as you can get without being in the military at this point.”

This story was published on Nov. 6, 2025.