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Credit: Photo courtesy of Ted Durand
Ted Durand, a unit computing manager at
Rutgers Business School in Newark,
receives a good conduct medal in 1998
from a commanding officer at the Naval
Weapons Station in New Jersey. Durand
served in the Navy from 1994 to 1999.
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Since he was a young boy growing up in Nutley, Ted Durand has always had a passion for public service – and taking things apart.
“Every year, the police officers and firefighters would come to school and give a safety presentation,” says Durand, a unit computing manager at Rutgers Business School in Newark. “I admired them for their service to the community and I knew then a profession in public service would suit me.”
He also was fascinated with machines’ inner workings. “I would tear open my dad’s new VCR and crack open the Nintendo,” he says. “But I had to refrain from that activity since it was hurting my parents’ pockets.”
In his junior year of high school, Durand and one of his best friends enlisted in the U.S. Navy. After graduating, Durand served from 1994 to 1999, mostly aboard the USS Enterprise, the first nuclear aircraft carrier built by the United States. He received an honorable discharge after a car accident left him with a dislocated hip. “The lifestyle of a sailor is pretty demanding,” he says. “All naval vessels have awfully steep stairs and hard steel decks. You must be in tip-top condition to handle the physical demands of the job.”
The Navy enabled Durand to see different parts of the country – in the form of his shipmates from across America – and other countries, from Spain to Greece to Bahrain.
“Visiting other countries opened my eyes to amazing cultures around the world. Whether it was watching generations of families walking to church in Spain or families holding hands while shopping outdoors in the United Arab Emirates, those firsthand accounts are priceless,” says Durand, who was born in New York City and raised in Newark and Nutley. His parents are both from Peru.
On the Enterprise, Durand worked deep in the ship’s bowels, maintaining navigation systems, alarms and sensors, and administering the ship’s secure telephone lines and internal communications system. In 1996, the ship was deployed to enforce no-fly zones over Bosnia-Herzegovina and Iraq. Aside from launching sorties nearly 24 hours a day, his ship ran numerous drills to sharpen their reaction to chemical, biological or radiological attacks.
“It was unbelievably hot in the Gulf but our morale was high,” Durand says. When he hears accounts from the present Iraq War, Durand empathizes with service members. “It’s easier on a carrier, but for the troops in the desert, it’s a tough environment. The heat is excruciating over there.”
After his car accident, Durand was assigned to the Naval Weapons Station in southern New Jersey, where he trained as a junior LAN (local area network) administrator. “That’s where my passion for IT really took off,” Durand says.
After he left the Navy, he went to technical training school and then applied for his job at Rutgers-Newark in 2001. Public service still calls Durand, however, and he has not ruled out his original dream of becoming a police officer. “I want to combine law enforcement with IT, maybe as a civilian working on high-tech crimes,” he says.
Each Veterans Day, Durand pulls out photos from his military service and shares them with his daughter Alexis, now 9 years old. “I always had a sense of service to my community and later my country, since this is the country that gave my parents the opportunity to become successful,” he says. “If I was 17 again, I would enlist in a heartbeat.”
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