Trygve Hammer

Meet Trygve

I grew up in North Dakota and graduated from Velva High School. After graduation, I had no idea what I might want to study in college, and I had always felt the pull of military service, so I enlisted in the Navy out of high school and breezed through the Nuclear Power test. I was nominated by the Secretary of the Navy and appointed directly from the fleet to join the U.S. Naval Academy Class of 1990.

As graduation from the Naval Academy approached, I had the option of accepting a commission into either the U.S. Navy or the United States Marine Corps. I chose the Marine Corps for a number of reasons, but the primary one was the Marine Corps ethos of “Officers eat last.” No other idea had ever felt so right to me. In the Marine Corps, I served as a helicopter pilot, a forward air controller, a Military attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Rome, and as an instructor and company officer at the U.S. Naval Academy. I deployed to Iraq in 2003 as an infantry officer and forward air controller. In 2010, I retired from the Marine Corps Reserve as a major.

In my civilian life during that time, I worked as an airline pilot, a defense contractor, and a security consultant. After returning to North Dakota in 2016, I taught 7-12 grade science at a rural school, and worked as a roughneck on oil rigs in the Bakken, and as a freight rail conductor. Currently, I am working as a counselor for Job Corps in Minot, aiming to give young people a hand up in starting their lives.

I am running for Congress, because it is time to put government to work for all of us. It is time to end the grandstanding and culture-war intrusions into our most personal decisions as persons, parents, and patients. It is time to elect a pro-worker, pro-choice, and pro-democracy leader to represent North Dakota in the U.S. House of Representatives.