Alaska is the largest state in the U.S. by area, with the longest coastline in the nation and largest population of bald eagles. This Veterans Day, a more relevant fact may be that Alaska also has the highest percentage of military veterans of any state — 8% of the population.

Wrangell has the eighth-highest population of veterans by percentage among the 30 Alaska communities surveyed, according to data highlighted by the Alaska Economic Trends magazine from the state Department of Labor.

The town boasts a 9.3% veterans population, the highest percentage at the farthest distance from a military installation in the state and 4.3 percentage points above the population of military veterans in the country as a whole.

The Department of Labor statistics are from U.S. Census bureau reports 2019-2023.

“It’s quiet. It’s peaceful. You can go into your backyard and shoot a gun if you want to. It’s a tight-knit community where most people have each other’s back,” said National Guard veteran Liz Roundtree. “That’s why we came here.”

Roundtree joined the California National Guard at 17, wanting to follow in her father’s footsteps. When she found out that the Navy wouldn’t let her into a submarine, she said she walked over to the Army recruiting office instead. 

Starting off in human resources, she switched to the military police in 2007 when a high school friend begged her to come to Iraq when he got deployed.

“So I did, and then they separated us. They sent him to a completely different base, three hours away,” she said. “And we didn’t see each other the whole time we were in Iraq.”

After spending nine months overseas, Roundtree moved to Georgia and remained a military police officer, transitioning to the Georgia National Guard. There she met her future husband, a fellow military police officer, even if she didn’t know it at first. “He said I was a raging b-word, and I wanted nothing to do with him.”

But in February 2010, Roundtree and future husband Drew ended up in a Humvee together for hours one drill weekend and got to know each other.

Overall, she spent 12 years in the Guard before leaving to spend more time with her kids. 

In 2017, while living in Connecticut, her husband was offered a job with the Transportation Security Administration at the Wrangell airport.

“I had a list of conditions. I told him, ‘I ain’t moving again unless it meets this list of conditions,’ and it checked every box on my list,” she said. “So, we packed up the girls … and moved all the way here to Alaska.”

According to the data, a third of the veterans in Alaska are between the ages of 35 and 54, with potential working years ahead of them. Drew Roundtree, 41, still works as a TSA agent in Wrangell, and Liz Roundtree, 40, is the office and liquor store manager at Wrangell IGA.

“I love my job. My boss is the best boss I’ve ever had in my entire life,” she said. “For somebody with PTSD and anxiety and stress, this community is very safe and makes it so that I don’t have to stress or worry or look over my shoulder.”

Not all veterans in Alaska are transplants. Wrangell Police Officer Matt Nore served 20 years in the Alaska National Guard. His military service sent him twice to Iraq, once to Cuba and a final deployment to Kuwait. “I grew up here, so that’s why I wanted to move back.”

Nore, now 43, also joined the Guard at 17, while still attending Wrangell High School. An Army recruiter had come to the school and explained that anyone who joined could attend basic training in between their junior and senior years. 

“I was like, wow, I could go to basic training now,” said Nore. “I always played with GI Joes and watched GI Joe, and I was always kind of like ‘that’s what I’m gonna go do.’” 

With the support of his parents, he went to basic training and returned home in August 2001. He turned 18 that Sept. 29. In between those dates, two hijacked airplanes were flown into skyscrapers in a city on the other side of the country, killing more than 2,700 people.

“I remember on September 11th, my parents woke me up,” Nore said. “They’re like, ‘The planes hit the World Trade Center,’ and I’m like, ‘What’s the World Trade Center?’ Because I had no idea.”

He said it took time for the gravity of that day to set in. He graduated and went to college as planned, and that was when the National Guard units started to be activated for war.

On his second deployment Nore ran into other soldiers from Wrangell.

“There was Nick Howell,” he said. “And then Zach Taylor was my gunner there, so that’s kind of neat.”

At the airport, he said Taylor’s mom asked him to take care of her son. “So that was kind of rough.”

Over the deployment, he said they had some close calls, were shot at, blown up and had a series of near misses. But multiple times traffic or paperwork issues at checkpoints saved them from being blown up and delivered them home safely, he said.

During his third deployment, where he did security at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Nore developed a blood clot in his leg and had to be airlifted to a hospital in Texas. He was able to remain in the military because they didn’t know what caused it and he had a full recovery. When the clot returned in Kuwait, he said he was given a plane ticket and some blood thinners and told to go home.

“I like my experiences. I got to do a lot of cool things in the military, and looking back at it now, the war, that was 12 months out of 20,” said Nore. “Got to jump out of airplanes. I got to rappel and do all these cool things.”

Now though, he said he’s happy to be home with his daughters.