Biography
Montgomery J. Granger
Montgomery J. Granger is a three-time mobilized U.S. Army
Reserve Major (Ret.), who was called into his Reserve Center in
Uniondale (Long Island), New York, on 9/11, in response to the
attacks on the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers, the Pentagon, and
Flight 93, which crashed at Shanksville, Pennsylvania. He answered
his country’s call to duty next in January 2002 for a mission to help
run the military detention facility at the U.S. Naval Station at Guantanamo
Bay, Cuba. He was called up again just six months after
returning from duty at Gitmo, but this time remained stateside at the
U.S. Army Reserve Training Center at Fort Dix, New Jersey. After
nearly six months at Fort Dix, MAJ Granger returned to civilian life
for about a year when he was involuntarily transferred to another
Reserve Army unit that was deploying to Iraq in the fall of 2004.
Major Granger served 14 months of active duty on his third deployment
and served in Baghdad, Abu Ghraib, Camp Bucca, and Ashraf,
Iraq, as Medical Service officer for military detention facility operations.
He is married and is the father of five children, and lives on
Long Island, New York. He is also the author of “Theodore,” a personal
narrative published in the 2006 Random House wartime anthology
“Operation Homecoming: Iraq, Afghanistan and the Home Front
in the Words of U.S. Troops and Their Families,” where he wrote
about his fear and anxiety over having left his family in 2002, and
especially two-day-old Theodore, and what reaction there was upon
his return. Operation Homecoming was sponsored in part by the
National Endowment for the Arts, and edited by Andrew Carroll, editor
of the New York Times bestselling book, War Letters.
Granger was born in Illinois, raised and schooled in Rubidoux,
California, and attended undergraduate school at the University of
Alabama in Tuscaloosa where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree
in education. He earned a master’s degree in curriculum and teaching
from Teachers College—Columbia University, where he met his wife.
He also attended the State University of New York at Stony Brook,
where he earned professional credits to obtain a New York State
School District Administrators’ license. He is an accomplished coach
and teacher of health and physical education, having taught in Alabama,
California, New York City, and Long Island, before becoming a
director of Health, Physical Education and Athletics. He was most
recently Director of Health, Physical Education and Athletics, and
then District Administrator for Operations for the Comsewogue
school district in Port Jefferson Station, N.Y., and is now a Director of
Health, Physical Education and Athletics, and Director of Facilities
for and east end school district in Long Island.
Granger is the author of many writings and musing as yet unpublished,
but hopefully soon to be shared with a waiting world.