Charles Hemingway

Lieutenant Colonel Charles W. Hemingway is a native of Little Rock, Arkansas. After competing as a three-year letterman on the Razorback track team and participating in Army ROTC, he graduated with the class of 1968 and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in Military Intelligence. He stayed at the University as a graduate assistant, earning a master’s degree in 1971.

Chuck Hemingway entered active duty in April 1971 and retired 23 years later, having served the Nation around the world during the Cold War and earning the Legion of Merit upon retirement. His initial assignment was as an intelligence officer with the XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where he earned his senior parachutist wings. In 1974, the Army selected him for the highly competitive legal education program, and he returned to the University to attend law school, from which he graduated and passed the bar in 1977.

Over the next 17 years, Chuck held increasingly important assignments worldwide as an Army lawyer. Initially, he served as a prosecutor, defense counsel, and a command counsel, where he practiced environmental and labor law. In 1983, he joined the faculty of the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s School, where he taught environmental law and legal assistance. In 1986, the Army selected him to attend graduate school in law at the University of Virginia, where he earned a master’s degree with a specialization in labor law. In 1987, he joined the staff of the judge advocate general of the U.S. Army, Europe, where he became the labor law counselor for Europe and established policy for that 210,000-soldier command. From 1990 until his retirement, he served as the chief of labor law in the Office of The Judge Advocate General of the Army in Washington, D.C. During Operation Desert Storm, he served on a DOD-level interdepartmental task force that established national policy for the employment of essential civilians on the battlefield.

In retirement, after practicing law for several years, Chuck dedicated himself to the plight of the homeless and disadvantaged Veterans in his home community of Bend, Oregon. He earned a master’s in counseling at Oregon State, his third, and served as an addiction counselor and as the executive director of Central Oregon Veterans Outreach, which, among other services, operated a camp for unhoused Veterans. In a groundbreaking effort after the death of a Veteran in one of the camps, he established a mobile medical outreach program operated from vans to serve Veterans and other homeless persons. In this effort, to ensure its continued viability in the face of medical liability, he wrote legislation and successfully lobbied the Oregon Legislature to grant immunity to medical providers who served the mobile medical outreach.

In the wake of the COVID pandemic, Chuck noticed that elderly homeless women were hit particularly hard. He worked with the State of Oregon to raise the funds to establish a 20-unit managed camp to help house these women. By December 2023, this latest initiative was up and running successfully.

He has received the Human Rights Award from the Oregon Counseling Association, and his organizations have received national awards from the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans and the Organizational Award of Merit from the Oregon Coalition on Housing and Homelessness. Chuck and his wife Martha continue to live in Bend and support their community and its Veterans.