Savannah’s Butler spouse and children among the elite Navy SEALs – Amusement & Lifestyle – Savannah Morning Information

Rick Magliano

Frank and Harry Butler are two of five members of the extended Butler family who have served or are lively obligation SEALs, an acronym that stands for Sea Air and Land teams. In simple fact, film producers may possibly want to get note of the probability of a experience-fantastic film about the Butler five. It would be a extraordinary tale of cousins, brothers and sons, specially Harry, Frank, Pat, Jeff and Sam.

Harry and Frank, who are cousins, were being the first of the Butler bunch to join the Navy and turn out to be SEALs.

“Frank was on SEAL Crew 1 and I was on SEAL Group 2,” Harry explained, including that, with each other, Teams 1 and 2 only experienced a total of 243 adult men when the cousins served all through the early 1970s.

Harry graduated from Savannah Superior College in 1967 and from Savannah Technological University in 1969. He then enlisted in the Navy. Frank graduated from Benedictine Military Faculty in 1967 and acknowledged a Navy ROTC scholarship to Georgia Tech. The other Butler SEALs are: Frank’s brother, Pat Frank’s son, Jeff and Frank’s nephew Sam. Pat graduated in 1981 from Benedictine Armed forces University and 1985 from the Naval Academy, then on to Naval Specific Warfare. Jeff and Sam are not from Savannah.

While retired as SEALs, both equally Harry and Frank keep on being proud of their achievements while serving in the Navy. Frank is the recipient of quite a few awards for his contributions to battlefield trauma care and has been nicknamed “The Father of Fashionable Battlefield Medicine.” Furthermore, a road to an Iraqi healthcare facility is named Frank Butler Boulevard to honor his do the job.

When persons inquire Harry what customers of the elite commando squad do when they are dispatched for a secret mission, he minces no words and phrases with his reply:

“There are tons of definitely negative men and women in this entire world (who) would like absolutely nothing more than to torture and kill you, your relatives and loved kinds,” he tells folks. “Navy SEALs hunt them down and get rid of them just before they get a prospect to lead to you any ache and suffering.”

Other former SEALs, like Harry’s cousin and native Savannahian Dr. Frank Butler, of Pensacola, Florida, echoed remarks designed by a previous commander of the device that achieved the recent hostage rescue in Africa.

“(The commander) explained ‘It’s an amazing honor to occur to work each individual working day and be in the business of our country’s heroes.”’

Frank was the oldest of 6 children – a few boys and three ladies – who all were being reared in Savannah. The boys all became career Navy officers and the girls are registered nurses.

At to start with, Frank’s dream was to fly F-14s for the Navy but that changed when he observed his first SEAL demonstration.

“(It) consisted of a group of SEALs jumping out of a helicopter into the drinking water across the bay from exactly where all of us midshipmen had been seated,” he recalled. “Right after that, there was a speaker who was delivering a temporary introduction to the SEAL groups and what they do, when out of the blue there was a huge series of explosions from across the bay.”

The SEAL swimmers silently established a sequence of demolition costs and swam away, creating pretty an effect on Frank.

Immediately after four years in the SEALs, Frank entered the Health-related Higher education of Ga in which he specialized in ophthalmology. He accomplished an internship at Navy Medical center in Jacksonville, Florida, and went by way of Navy Undersea Health care Officer education and was assigned to the Navy Experimental Diving Unit.

“I worked there for 5 decades as a Diving Health-related Study Officer and then remaining to do an ophthalmology residency at the Countrywide Naval Clinical Center in Bethesda,” Frank mentioned.

Frank and his wife, Debbie, have lived in Pensacola for 31 years but adore Savannah and visit as generally as they can, he explained. His father was president of the spouse and children-owned John G. Butler making supply enterprise and later became director of the Savannah Housing Authority. Tybee Island’s Butler Avenue is named for his good-grandfather, John G. Butler, who became the very first mayor of Tybee in 1887.

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