DEFERIET — In World War II, it was typical to know a family with all of its sons serving in the military. Today, it's a little more rare. But for the members of the Dingman family in Deferiet, the military is a part of all their lives.

Allen D., the father and the village's Fire Department chief, served in the Navy during Vietnam. He then became an officer in the Army and later was a company commander in the Army National Guard in Syracuse, associated with the 10th Mountain Division in the late 1980s.

Jane W., the mother and village mayor, is a physical therapist who has worked on Fort Drum with wounded soldiers from the 10th Mountain Division since 1991.

And their three sons — Lee A., Christopher D. and Ian T. — attended military academies and are serving in three branches of the armed forces.

Lee, 29, went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and was deployed to Iraq with the Army's 101st Airborne Division in 2003. Chris, 26, went to the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and is training in California to become a Marine Corps F-18 fighter pilot. Ian, 24, also went to Annapolis and just returned from a six-month deployment in the Persian Gulf as a Navy ordnance officer on the USS Cole.

Their training began early, when, at the ages of 4, 6 and 8, the boys carried out an ambush on their father's National Guard scout platoon and walked away with confirmed casualties. The boys, armed with cap guns and having set trip wires, surprised the platoon as the soldiers made their way back from training — a story that Mr. Dingman tells with a smile from ear to ear and a chuckle at the thought of it.

"We planned it out a week ahead of time," Mr. Dingman said. "Imagine, a scout platoon getting ambushed by the Dingman boys."

Lee and Ian said that if it wasn't for their parents and their commitment to the community they live in, the boys would not have developed the kind of conscience they all have.

"It was the way my dad and mom would act and how they would tell us how to act around others," Ian said. "It was the way we were brought up. Then joining the military, there were so many of the same characteristics in the way people act, and there wasn't a big difference between that and the way we were raised."

Lee, while understating his family's service, recognizes that it is not ordinary for all three sons to be serving in the military or to have gone to military academies.

"It isn't very common," said Lee, who is living in Johnson City, Tenn., and is about to be medically retired from the Army because of a back injury he suffered during his deployment. "I personally know two or three other families like ours."

But that doesn't mean that anyone in the family thinks it's unusual. In fact, they all view it as something quite unimpressive. Mr. and Mrs. Dingman said they raised their children with a sense of service and civic responsibility and it was just a natural fit for them to join the military.

"When the opportunity for their age, that was geared toward civil responsibility, came up, we got them involved," said Mrs. Dingman, who then gave a checklist of the things all three boys were involved in, including Boy Scouts, Boys State and athletics — especially lacrosse.

All three boys played lacrosse through high school, and according to their parents were offered hefty scholarships from top universities to play in college. The boys decided, despite the opportunities they were given without a military service commitment, to go to West Point and Annapolis.

For Mr. Dingman, it was never a surprise that his sons wanted to join the military, and he said he was prepared because he understood what they would experience. On the other hand, he said he doesn't to this day know how his wife juggles her job as a therapist on post with the knowledge that her sons might one day be on the receiving end of therapy.

"I look at the 24-year-olds and see their doubts that I don't know what I'm talking about. They all give me the same look," Mrs. Dingman said. "I tell them I have three sons in the service so I'm not some woman therapist telling them how to be an Army guy. I tell them that between my husband and my sons, I have 30 years of service."

Mrs. Dingman said she conducts her job as if every soldier she sees is her son and tries to give each one of them the kind of care and attention she would give to Lee, Chris and Ian.

Lee was injured at the end of his deployment to Iraq in 2003. But his parents said that the worst time was during the invasion, because they never knew where he was. He was conducting missions with special forces during the invasion and did not have any way of contacting his parents.

"I would be up all night watching the news because it was daybreak in Baghdad and I knew they did their missions overnight. I would wait to see the casualties," Mr. Dingman said. "I would see a helicopter crash and knew it wasn't him because of the approximate area it was in. But I knew it was someone else's son."

Mr. and Mrs. Dingman said that it's important for them to keep their children's service in perspective and to remember that other families, just a few miles from their own home, are going through the same thing.

"As a parent with children in the combat zone, everything else shrinks in significance," Mr. Dingman said.

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