Laura Doss of Jacksonville is feeling a lot of emotion these days, largely due to her recent election as head of the Illinois Amvets Department.

“This position is an important position and I'm so excited,” Doss said after taking a few days to get used to the idea that her fellow AMVETs from across the state had elected her to their top leadership post for the coming year. “But this is not a Laura Doss thing. Laura Doss is a small-town girl.”

Having to juggle numerous media interview requests was a bit overwhelming, she said. And then there's the car – with her name on the door – that belongs to her as commander.

“I'm starting to feel a little better,” Doss said. “It's not about me, it's about the office. I'm so incredibly proud to have been elected. But this isn't an 'Ooh, Laura Doss.' That's how I rationalize it. It's about leadership.”

Now the national face of Amvets, Doss is more used to being “the person doing the dishes in the back,” she says, pointing out that it is a job that needs to be done.

It is quite possible that she was given office in the state by doing the necessary work.

Doss, a U.S. Army veteran, joined the military in December 1989 before graduating from high school.

“There are three ways to serve in the Army,” she said. “Active duty, reserve duty and your state's National Guard. I have served in all three forms of the Army.”

She enlisted in the reserves while still in high school in Ohio and became a cargo specialist handling 10,000-pound rough terrain forklifts, she said.

After Desert Shield/Desert Storm, her unit shrank from 293 to 93 members and she changed jobs. Her mother told friends her daughter was Rosie the Riveter, Doss said of her new role as an aircraft structural mechanic, repairing rotor blades and sheet metal on helicopters.

Doss transferred from the Army Reserve to the Ohio National Guard. And that's where she met her future husband, Matt. They married in March 1993. He was on active duty, so Doss transferred to active duty and they spent three years in Germany, she said.

After that, Doss settled in Jacksonville and transferred to the nearest flight unit in Peoria. Then she transferred to a military police unit in Springfield. She was still in school and on the verge of a promotion to staff sergeant when she left the Army in 2003 with the rank of sergeant, she said.

Doss has since graduated from MacMurray College as well—officially a graduate of the class of 2003, but an honorary member of the class of 2002 after September 11, 2001, thwarted her original plans to graduate. She has an associate's degree in criminal justice and a bachelor's degree in history with minors in political science and humanities.

“I wanted to be a history teacher,” she said, “but it just didn’t work out.”

Instead, she worked for the state and then for MacMurray for 13 years until the college closed in spring 2020. Since 2020, she has served as a student financial services advisor at Illinois College.

“I work where God wants me to work,” she said.

Doss is a life member of Amvets Post 100 in Jacksonville and a member of Julian Wells American Legion Post 442 in Winchester. In 2021, he was approached by Post 100 Commander Jim Duncan, himself a former state commander.

“You're a good person, you're full of energy, I really believe you have a lot to offer the state,” Doss recalled Duncan saying to her.

She wasn't entirely convinced, reminding Duncan that she has a husband, four grown children – Mike, Maggie, Sarah and Steven – and a full-time job. Nevertheless, Doss was eventually persuaded to run for state provost and become the successor.

“I said, 'If I get elected, great, I'll see if I like it,'” she said. “'If I don't get elected, I've done what you asked me to do either way.'”

Doss liked the organization's different perspective so much that as Provost Marshal, she was offered the opportunity to run for the position of Second Vice Commandant for Programs.

Last year she was the first deputy head of membership administration.

“Once I got a taste of it … I knew I wanted to work toward it,” Doss said of his position as state commander. “It's very humbling. It's a very rewarding feeling when you run for office and you get elected. … The Department of Illinois has put its trust in me. It's humbling. People see that value and you want to do it right, do it with pride.”

Duncan has no doubt that Doss will achieve these goals.

“I've known Laura Doss for many years,” he said. “Her whole family, as far as that goes. She's a driven woman who is very, very meticulous. When she sees a problem, she sticks with it until there's nothing left for her to stick with.”

At the Jacksonville location, Doss served as first vice commander and used her time to clean up the membership lists.

“Amvets has been around for 80 years,” Duncan said. “She's really embraced it and has had some really good successes. We've become something of a role model for the rest of the country.”

Even if this initially meant a certain loss of status.

Post 100 was one of the state's largest by membership list, partly because of faulty software that somehow kept returning members to the lists after they had been deleted as deceased, Doss said.

Doss was able to use her history degree and her interest in genealogical research – “which I really enjoy doing” – to clean up the lists and prevent deceased members from resurfacing, she says.

Last year, it did this at the state level for members without special status, that is, those who do not hold a specific position but still want to support the organization's causes, Doss said.

Her original goal was to get the entire state's membership rolls in order, but she quickly concluded that the 3,103 non-voting members – some of whom had already died – were all she could handle in a year.

“I really enjoyed reading their obituaries and learning more about their life stories,” she said of the results of her efforts.

While she is still getting used to her new role, Doss is also trying to decide what her goal will be for the coming year.

“I want it to be realistic,” she said. “I want to know if I can do it yet. That bothers me a little bit because I know I have something to work towards. … I feel like I want to do a lot of things, but I don't know how to fit it all in yet.”

She also knows that she will be traveling a lot in the future, as she hopes to visit as many of the 50+ active Amvets sites in Illinois as possible during her tenure.

“We go bow to stern,” she said. “I try to hit as many of those posts as possible because I think it's important.”

Doss can't wait to get started.

“I'm excited to see my contributions and see what makes them unique and what commonalities there are – what makes us similar and what makes us different. I look forward to seeing those things.”

Duncan believes in what Doss has to offer.

“She started marching with us in the color guard many years ago,” Duncan said. “She's one of the guys.”

Doss, whose family has been in the military for several generations, says she doesn't remember exactly when she first got involved with Amvets. “Like most good organizations, you slowly get sucked into it and you don't even know how you got there,” she says. But she officially joined when she was with the National Guard's maintenance unit based in Springfield.

“It feels like I've always had something to do with the post,” she said. “First, I marched in the city's combined flag guard” with “a really great group of guys” and fellow veteran Alice Towers.

Representing female veterans was and continues to be important to her, as is representing all veterans in the state, she said.

Veterans organizations, whether Amvets, American Legion or Veterans of Foreign Wars, all advocate for veterans' interests in different ways, she said.

“I'm one person, but through my membership in Amvets and the American Legion, that person has two voices,” she said. “… It's more voices for advocacy.”

As state commander, Doss's Amvets voice grew exponentially louder.

Duncan is curious to hear what this voice has to say.

“She's a great woman,” Duncan said. “I like her very much. She's going to do a great, great job.”