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It was as if Uncle Sam stepped into the Hurley living room, pointed a finger and declared: “I want you, you, you, you, you, you and you.”

Off to war went the seven Hurley brothers from Trinity, ages 19 to 36. All survived — two just barely — and returned home to live to old ages. Two are still alive: Ray, 85, and Ralph, 92.

On Veteran’s Day, this Wednesday, they can feel at ease knowing they did their duty. And they can be proud that few, if any, other American families sent so many to World War II.

Ray Hurley’s son, Greensboro lawyer Marshall Hurley, asked a friend, an Army colonel in Washington, to check records. The colonel said he could find nothing that indicated any other family had seven siblings in uniform at the same time.

From the family farm, Ralph went first, followed by Leonard, Colon, Lowell, Earl, Ray and Russell, each leaving from the Troy bus station.

Today, families with one son or daughter in Iraq or Afghanistan tremble until he or she returns. Jesse and Ornie Hurley had seven to fret over.

“It was tough on them,” says Ray Hurley, a resident of Friends Home at Guilford. “I could see the difference when I got back. My dad’s hair had gone from dark to gray.”

Because of a 1942 tragedy that killed five Sullivan brothers on a Navy ship, the military had a policy of keeping siblings apart. The Hurleys served in a variety of places, from Europe to India to the Aleutian Islands to Australia.

Ray Hurley recalls an eventful day in a small French village on the Normandy coast. It was July 4, 1944, and only his second day in combat. A shell from a big German gun almost tore off his arm. It opened a large hole in his chest and severed nerves in his arm.

A medic carried Ray to a field hospital, where a doctor commented that Ray would have died if it hadn’t been for his clean lungs, which withstood the impact of the blast. Ray thought it was ironic that he had never smoked but his father raised tobacco.

Ray feared his mangled arm would have to be amputated. He finally passed out from the intense pain. He opened his eyes two weeks later. His arm remained attached. His chest wound had been closed, and doctors still worked trying to repair nerve damage. New treatment techniques, new drugs and better doctors saved him.

“Penicillin,” Ray says of that era’s miracle drug. “I had buckets of it.”

He spent nearly 13 months hospitalized in Southampton, England. Today, he has difficulty with his arm and slight shortness of breath, but otherwise he feels fine and stays on the go.

Leonard, the other brother, was wounded twice. He was shot once in the rear end. Then, on his 25th birthday, on the last day of the European war, he was hit in the neck by a German sniper.

He suffered vocal cord damage but later regained the ability to speak.

Back home, the brothers got on with their lives, going into the ministry, grocery sales, nursing, fuel oil delivery and insurance. Ray graduated from Guilford College and later worked for Pilot Life Insurance Co.

Among friends, Ray rarely talked about the war. He wasn’t traumatized. He figured no one wanted to hear him because in all likelihood the man next to him in the grocery store line had experienced the same thing.

Like many draftees, the brothers hated going and wouldn’t have wanted to go again, but were immensely proud they did.

Oh, there is an eighth Hurley brother, William, who’s also still alive. He was too young for the war. But he wasn’t going to spend his life at family gatherings listening to his brothers swap military stories.

As soon as he was 18, he joined the Marines.

Contact Jim Schlosser at 601-9879 or beale1@clearwire.net